Category Archives: Weather +Climate

Politics, Sport, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

Out into Winter Solstice Eve

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Winter Solstice Eve                                      Full Winter Solstice Moon

Ode has the meeting tonight, a meeting brushed with snow that left 100 inches of powder in the Rockies.  Jon skied in knee deep powder on Saturday.  I’ll drive in 4-6 inches, not as remarkable, but, consider that we have roads and driveways added to temperature that will keep all this snow with us most likely until March.  Kate says there is a truck-type, looks like a dump truck, filled with bobcats or skip-loaders.  It melts the snow then pushes it out into holding ponds.  Makes sense to somebody, I guess.

This is a leave the red car at home driving event.  Until the driveway’s been plowed and grit laid down tomorrow morning I’m not moving that little front-drive car anywhere.  Though I will have to take it out for a meeting in Minneapolis at 11:30, lunch at Matt’s, home of the juicy lucy.  A juicy lucy, for those of you not familiar with it, is a cheeseburger with the cheese inside two burger patties.  It comes with a coupon for two visits to the cardiologist of your choice.

The dogs can go in the orchard for the winter.  I opened it this morning since there is nothing for them to dig out except bunny rabbits and mice.  That they can do to their heart’s content.

The Vikings game tonight will make travel near the U really, really bad.  Even though I’m off football now, I can see the irony in a cold-weather team playing their first game outside since the metropolitan stadium closed, exactly 50 years ago tonight.  Not only that, an untried Southern rookie will start the game tonight.  Hey, it doesn’t get a weirder than that.

Aging, Art and Culture, Commentary on the news, Health, US History, Weather +Climate

The Civil War

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Samhain                                                 Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

The NYT has started a series focusing on the civil war, looking back 150 years ago.   Lincoln has just been elected and the country has an internal division not matched again until, perhaps, the 1960’s, the War’s one hundredth anniversary.  The Civil War fascinates me and I’ve visited several battlefields, as I’ve said here before.  I’ve been especially interested in the war’s execution, why did the North win and the South lose?  What have been the subsequent ramifications?  Did Lincoln’s execution, which put Andrew Johnson in the Presidency, set back the integration of African-Americans into American society by a century or more?  What did we learn?  I look forward to a several year focus on the war, raising these questions anew.

A quiet physical.  Saw Tom Byfield there, apparently we share a doctor.  Tom, Davis that is, collects pueblo pottery and has a couple on loan to the MIA.  I didn’t recognize his description, but I’m gonna check’em out.  This time, the first time in a long time, I had no particular concerns to raise.    He found nothing new or remarkable.   The labs will come in, of course, and we’ll see then, but for now, I’m feeling good.

When I drove in today, each exit off Highway 94, starting at Broadway, then 4th street and finally Hennepin/Lyndale had cars backed up onto the freeway.  I took Hennepin/Lyndale thinking there must a traffic jam in the city because of the snow.  Nope.  A peculiar situation, one of those imponderables that happens here when we get lots of snow and very cold weather.  People drive strange.

On the news sheet:  4 bodies in NYC, dumped along a Long Island freeway, might mean a serial killer.  Motorcycle thief steals $1.5 in Bellagio chips, rides away.  So, is it news stories ripped from the television cop dramas or the other way around?

Aging, Health, Weather +Climate

Snow

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Samhain                                                  Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

The Winter Solstice comes in a week.  The longest night.  I’ll be there, remembering the triple Goddess, Bridgit, burning a candle and honoring the deep inside of us all.

Yesterday I used the Himalaya’s as a metaphor for parking lot snow.  According to the newspaper this morning I shot too low.  We have all new mountain ranges going up in parking lots and city streets throughout the metro and they’ll be there a long, long time.  This is not a good thing for city budgets.  Snow plowing is expensive.

Looking at snow mountains and threading my way through snowy city streets I have to take this body to its test.  Bye.

Dogs, News of the Strange, Sport, Weather +Climate

Ukraine to open Chernobyl area to tourists in 2011. No. Really.

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Samhain                                                  Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

Kate woke me up, wiggling my ankle.  There’s no dog food.  Oh.  I’m not at my best just after I get up, but in this case I had to throw on some clothes and step outside, to the back of the truck and hoist a bag of dog food, 40#, carry it back inside, slit it open and pour the next week and a half’s worth of food for Vega and Rigel into the bin.  It was a sharp surprise, the difference between the bed and the outdoors.  It was -12 out there.  Geez.

The headline on the sports page this morning was great:  Roof Da!  I’ve not seen anyone take up my many worlds hypothesis as an explanation, but it might be that the cosmologists and theoretical physicists haven’t seen my facebook post yet.

These are the times that try men’s snowblowers (Women’s, too, for that matter.)

OK.  Here’s a headline I never expected to see:

Ukraine to open Chernobyl area to tourists in 2011

This takes adventure tourism to a new place.  You’ll glow.  You’ll shine.  You’ll see your inner self.

–

Commentary on the news, Weather +Climate

A Brane Teaser?

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Samhain                                         Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

You may go now, the storm has ended.  Well, maybe.  The MIA, noted for never closing, closed yesterday and today.  The metrodome collapsed.  See.  We told you.  Zyggi Wilf and family.  I threw thigh high snow off our front sidewalk and trimmed down a waist high drift on our deck so the dogs could get out and come back.  Roughly a foot fell, always hard to measure.

A local meterologist developed the gold standard for measuring snow depth.  He puts a hard rubber mat on the ground, lets the snow fall on it, then pushes a yardstick through the snow.  Check where the top of the snow meets the yard stick.  Voila!  No kidding.

Snowapocalypse.  Snowmaggedon.  Snowmygod.  Local weather weenies tried to raise this to mega-event standards, but it just doesn’t get there.  Yes, we’re a major metro area and a foot to a foot and a half (south) makes the metro pretty miserable for travelers, but our snow totals are no record breakers.

We do have a difference from a lot of other snowy locations.  When our snow comes in winters like this one, it cools the air above it and remains on the ground until spring.  That means accumulating snow fall becomes a challenge with parking lot snow mountains rising up like retail Himalayas and city streets sometimes going from two-sided parking to one-sided.  It begins to get interesting then.

Is there a collapse vortex near this location?  Perhaps a quantum field breaking through into what we conceive of as the one and only true reality?  I mean, it’s a brane teaser I know, but it could be.  Think of the many worlds hypothesis favored by string theorists.  Why do I ask?  Well. This next picture, taken less than half a mile from the site of the dome collapse tells the story.

Bees, Garden, permaculture, Weather +Climate

Snow. Deep.

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Samhain                                       Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

The orchard has at least two feet of snow.  The currant bushes have snow near the top of their branches.  The blueberry beds have almost disappeared.  The garlic lies now beneath a couple of feet of snow cover in the vegetable garden, as do the strawberries and the asparagus.  The bees have huddled up in their balls, all three colonies, rubbing against each other, creating warmth, keeping the colony at 93 degrees, maintaining body heat for the cold blooded individuals, the whole acting as a warm-blooded animal, using their mutual metabolisms to fend off the cold.  There are, too, all the bulbs, the ones planted this fall and those planted in years past, resting now, waiting for the signals, still months away, that will send them seeking sun and warmth.

Out the window shown in the pictures below I often see chickadees and sparrows scurrying from one warren of shrubs to another.  A rabbit or two come by at some point in the winter, as the chipmunks did earlier in the fall.  A squirrel dug a burrow in the snow near the end of November, coming and going several times.  I have not heard the great gray the last two nights, perhaps she’s out hunting in other places.

This is a Minnesota winter, the kind most of us here know well.  I’m glad to see it.

Aging, Family, Our Land and Home, Weather +Climate

Going to the Mailbox

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Samhain                                                          Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

The storm seems to have slowed down a bit, winds have decreased as has the snow.  It looks we got around a foot, but I can tell you that many of the drifts exceed that.

First, my insulating vest over my sweatshirt.  Then the wind pants over my sweats.  Down coat.  Mad bomber hat with rabbit fur flaps secured under my chin.  Scarf around exposed neck.  Insulated socks pressed into Sorels.  I was ready to get the mail and the newspaper.  Successful.   Minnesota, a state where getting to the mailbox from the house can be a challenge worth dressing up for.

After that adventure, I strapped on my snow shoes and headed out to Ruth and Gabe’s playhouse to retrieve the little giant ladder system still standing out there.  I waited until a historic snow storm to grab it just to test my true mettle. I’d say it was thin aluminum.

The damn ladder system is heavy and clumsy.  Walking in snow shoes is not an elegant dance in the best of situations, but navigating around small shrubs without snagging and trying to thread my way between an electric fence and a snow-drift narrowed passage up onto our deck, all the while dragging a ladder–priceless.

The ladder went in the garage to melt off its snow and be ready for Adam Lindquist, the improbably named Chinese lighting specialist from Lights on Broadway, who is coming out on Wednesday to install our new fixtures.  Huffing and puffing I sat down to drink some hot chocolate Kate made.  Decided to give myself 20 minutes of aerobic workout since I also shoveled the deck some.

Just finished my other 30 minutes on the treadmill.  Now I can settle down and enjoy the storm.  Tomorrow, more Latin.

Weather +Climate

An Insider’s View

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Samhain                                                  Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

We are in the midst of a storm that will be remembered, one like Halloween, 1991 and Armistice Day, 1941.  The snow and the wind have continued or intensified since I remarked last night that the snow had begun.

Below are a series of photographs taken out of my study window facing north, some looking out over one of our boulder walls.  The last two are from today.

6702010-10-26_0477

October 26th, 2010

6702010-11-14_04742

November 14th

6702010-12-01_0471

December 1st

6702010-12-11_0488 December 11th

6702010-12-11_0494 December 11th, northeast

Aging, Friends, Great Work, Politics, Weather +Climate

Restored Wonder

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Samhain                                             Waning Thanksgiving Moon

“The one common experience of all humanity is the challenge of problems.” – R. Buckminster Fuller

Once again, awake.  I know why this time.  Over stimulation.  The interview process at the Sierra Club has my head cranking over time, weighing this aspect and that, noodling out the implications, going over what ifs.  I’m familiar with this kind of insomnia, it happened a lot when I worked for the Presbytery, particularly when I had several projects in the air all at the same time, which was the norm rather than the exception.  Leaves my jaw a bit achy, not so good with my still healing wisdom teeth extraction.

This is my (now mild) neurosis at work, continuing to work over nuances, much like the front tires on the Celica last night, trying, trying, trying, but gaining no traction, spinning in place, unable to move forward and accomplishing nothing moving backward.

Added to the interviews, of course, was the commute home last night and my sling-shot derby trying to use momentum to move my car up the slope of our driveway.  Last night after I closed out my blog for the evening, our neighbor, Pam Perlick, called and offered a berth in her garage so our plow guy could work unobstructed.  A kind and thoughtful offer which I accepted.  That meant putting back on jeans, boots, parka, hat and gloves, taking my Berea College whisk broom out and sweeping two new inches off the car before moving it to safe haven.

The night was dark and cold, the snow swept up and swirled as it fell.  Once outside, as is often true, I found the storm exhilarating, especially since Pam’s gesture meant the Celica would not interfere with the snow removal.  I could embrace the cold and the falling snow for what it was, rather than for the problems it brought into my life.

Based on NOAA weather spotter’s it appears we got another 5 inches of snow.  Which would square with my guess.   Snow shapes itself to the objects on which it lands, often in unusual, even bizarre shapes.   I’ll put out some photographs today, once it becomes light.

These kind of storms and the deep cold of January define the north for me.  They’re why I’m here and why I love this state so much, so I’m happy my neighbor restored my wonder.  Thanks, Pam.

Great Work, Politics, Weather +Climate

Parked Outside. At Home.

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Samhain                                       Waning Thanksgiving Moon

Yee Ow!  Into the Sierra Club for the final interview round.  Snow began coming down.  The interviews were good, and the after processing was good, but the snow continued to fall. When I googled MNDOT for road conditions, all roads were red leading home.  So.  I went over to the Merry Lanes and hung around while the Sierra Club staff engaged in team building by knocking (some) pins down.  It was fun, but I didn’t get me home.  Finally, around 5:40 I decided to come home anyhow.  It took me over an hour–a ride that took me 30 minutes just this morning–never going higher 30 mph and mostly 20 mph.

Then, to sink the knife in deeper, the great unsolved problem of our homeplace confronted me, again.  That is, a sloped ascent packed with snow.  I tried for another half an hour to drive up and into the garage stall, but even with the help of the granite grit, I finally gave up, too tired from the day and the commute.  So the Celica sits about half up the driveway, a task for tomorrow.  Sigh.

Once Kate retires I plan to drive the truck (4 wheel drive) in instances like this.  No problem crawling up the hill then.

Latin went well this morning.  Decided to stay on a weekly schedule for now.