More damn snow!

March 12, 2014 • 5:17 am

I’m not one to complain much about the weather, but the prolonged snow is starting to get me down (how do people in Alaska survive?). After a deceptive warm spell, it snowed again in Chicago last night, and heavily. And now the wind is howling like a banshee, making it seem much colder.

Here are a few “selfies” and other photos taken on my walk to work:

At least these streets will be plowed quickly. Unlike weenie cities like Washington D.C., we know how to deal with snow:

photo 2

I wear my moth-eaten balaclava (purchased decades ago for Himalayan treks) about once a year, but today the wind mandated that I don it:

photo 3

Ominously, the newspaper box looked like a skull:

photo 2

But there are compensating virtues of snow; one is the landscaped pond outside my building, frosted in white:

photo 5

Sadly, there are no compensating virtues for our feline friends:

Snow impedenceh/t: Mary

71 thoughts on “More damn snow!”

  2. I remember winter fatigue in Chicago in March. Now I suffer heat fatigue in Texas even before September.

    1. I much prefer too hot to too cold. You never need to shovel the heat off sidewalks and roads. Maybe an alligator occasionally…

  4. Happily, your snowfall stayed south of us. Milwaukee is fresh-show-free this morning! But we do have icy sidewalks from the re-freeze.

    I’m ready for Spring.

    1. Give me winter over summer any day. I miss Tromsø with its dark winter & light but not hot summer…

    1. And in Michigan!

      Lake-effect snow on this side of Lake MI–so quit complaining, Chicagoans! 😉

      1. I get it from Lake Ontario & Lake Huron, depending which way I’m driving. It sucks. I can’t escape. But I like the Great Lakes.

    2. And in Ontario too. No place left to shovel the snow from the driveway.
      Of course, there’s always one neighbour to proclaim, “This ain’t so bad. Just one last kick at the cat!” (Yes, he said CAT!)

  6. Send your snow to London PLEASE!!!!

    Sunny & warm here after a year with no winter… 🙁

  7. It’s not so much that we’re close to record snowfall in Chicago, but this year we haven’t had a break. Usually there are a few warm days mixed in and we get a few weeks without snow. This year we haven’t been snow free since December.

  10. It was a slippery drive to work. I had to get gas & some guy in a huge diesel pick up truck gunned it more than once which caused his back end to fish tail. I looked over at another guy filling up a similar sized truck & we just shook our heads. I half expected to see him in the ditch on the highway.

      1. Happily, no one was on the roads when I drove home. They either went home early or didn’t drive in (happily, it being March Break helps). I was glad because I started developing a cold this afternoon & had a huge headache which made me grumpy.

        1. Hope you’re feeling a bit better today, Diana. The weather’s been beastly these last two days. I heard the local highways have been horrible. Big accident yesterday w/ two dead (Wed.) 🙁 Wish everyone would slow down, stay home or take transit.

          Had to refill the feeders as all the fallen seeds got buried and the doves and bunnies had nothing to eat. Shortly after that, whaddaya know?! A young hawk showed up and nabbed a sparrow! Damn. I was too slow with my ghetto camera (half dead battery too), and I missed the shot where s/he was spread out on the snow with the birdie in its talons.

          1. Those hawks are quick! It’s more knowing they’re around and trying to get a picture but if the birds aren’t acting strangely, it means they don’t know the hawk is there and typically if the birds don’t know, the humans don’t know. They are small and fast!

            My face hurts less today. I’m glad I didn’t drive into work because I heard roads were still bad.

          2. Yes, it took all of 10 minutes between the time I first espied Hawkie in the fence doing its reconnoitering, then it moved to atop the weeping white pine. (Got boring pics of that before the battery croaked and had to be recharged.). Then it swooped down really close to the house at table height, must have perched on the plinth running around the house, and maybe picked up the bird behind a cedar tree. I was dashing for the camera again, and missed when it took flight across the yard with bird in hand and momentarily rested in the snow before disappearing. I really should have stayed with it the whole time, but I had a lot to get done.

            Good thing you’re taking it easy today. The roads are really bad in Waterloo… no streetplows out yet!

  12. Yeah, where’s global warming when you need it?

    Have you built a snowman? With that much snow, you be able make a snow Australopithecus, a snow Homo sapien and all the links between.

      1. And the American West and Southwest.

        We didn’t get winter here in Arizona, not even what normally passes for winter here. It’s been what the rest of the world would call lovely summer weather for the past month or so. Which is, of course, lovely…but we’re looking at highs at least in the upper 80s by the end of the week, and I’m not going to be surprised if it cracks the century mark before the end of the month.

        A really, really heavy snowfall lasting a week or more would be most welcome here right now — should do wonders to help alleviate the drought.

        …not that there’s even the remotest theoretical chance that that would happen….

        b&

        1. New Mexico, although coldish, basically skipped winter. We are so totally screwed. We had to water trees in bloody February! I would not be entirely surpassed if the entire southwest turned to ashes this summer.

          1. Um. You’re right. Hadn’t thought that far ahead.

            We didn’t get enough rain for a decent wildflower season, but we did get enough to sprout enough brush…which is going to turn brown all too soon since we’re not going to get any more rain until at least August…which is going to fuel any fires that get started…and then, because we don’t know how to manage forests and they’re all horribly overgrown, the fires will get into the crowns and kill the whole forest instead of just clearing out the underbrush and the dead stuff.

            Damn.

            Well, at least we have nobody to blame but ourselves….

            b&

        2. Well, in Houston we had winter a couple of times. One morning it was so cold we even had to crape ice of the windshield. The schools and many business had to close because there might have been ice on the roads. It actually got below freezing (32 Fahrenheit) on two different nights. (not consecutive)

      1. I flew over the southern CA mountains in early February. Now, it was nice to have a brief break from the MN weather, but the view of the CA mountains was scary: NO SNOW. I mean not a single snowpatch.

        I remember hiking in the San Bernadino mountains in JUNE and being stopped by snow (it took a LOT of snow to stop me, I was a climber in those days) at less than 10,000 feet.

        Maybe the recent (week or two ago) storms they had in SoCal has changed that; but it’s bad there (as well as in AZ and NM).

  13. Maple sap started to run in Eastern Ont yesterday….. today,shut down completely.
    No joy for several days, according to the forecast.

    2. I heard about that from a woman shopping at the produce store in Ontario. She belongs to a club that goes out to collect maple syrup. I never knew there was a club for that!

        1. Thanks! We’re in SW Ontario and the woman called it a club, but it might be something informal. Do people just show up for this sort of thing? We’ve been to festivals where we got to observe the tapping of trees and sample the fruits of the folks’ labours, but never did the tapping ourselves. I like the delicate sweetness of the sap.

      2. I have a friend who wants to tap her trees. It’s a lot of work I think though – doesn’t it take forever and bunches of trees to get anything & then you have to process it with however gross way they sweeten it?

        1. It’s already sweet. 🙂

          It’s just so dilute you have to reduce it forever by boiling.

          1. …which gives ample time to throw in a bunch of frankfurters into the roiling, golden syrup-to-be. 🙂

            And that is the most fashionable balaclava I have ever seen — such stylish height it has. 🙂

          11. The Canadians in Israel should start one up. 🙂 I have a Canadian-Israeli friend from BC who I met when she was here in Ontario for school. She moved to Israel probably almost 20 years ago now. I’m sure there a few Canadians over there who would appreciate a Tim Hortons.

          12. A Starbucks opened here in Israel and failed. The coffee just wasn’t good enough.

  16. We in Canada’s most westerly province tend to gloat from time to time about our warmer winters than the rest of the country. Fact is it has been a very normal winter, in fact the driving ranges are all open again (golf that is)

    1. And when the rest of Canada calls Ontario, “snow wimps”, we always point the finger to put west and say BC are the snow wimps.

      1. No snow wimps in Whistler! My son talks about snow up to his shoulders in the mountains, and no complaints.

        This is the first winter in decades I’ve caught myself whining in Ontario. Yesterday was sooo nice with no boots or jacket…and now it looks just like Jerry’s Chicago pics.

        1. I was in a bad mood for no apparent reason yesterday & I blame the cloudy weather.

      2. All flatlanders (mid-westerners) who call people who live in the hilly west “snow wimps” should be required to drive at least one snowy winter in the west, and then compare experiences. An inch or two of snow in an area where the elevation can go from sea level to 450+ feet in about 1/2 mile, or so, is a lot more challenging than driving in 6-10 inches of an area with little elevation change.

        Best examples can be found by typing “Riding a bike in Seattle hills” in Google, and then clicking videos. I used to have nightmares (literally) about losing the brakes on my bike riding from Phinney Ridge on NW 65th Street down to 3rd Ave NW, a relatively short distance, but incredibly steep. Look at Google Maps to see rapid elevation change.

        Geography makes a difference, and Seattle and Vancouver have wildly different topography than Chicago and Toronto.

  17. Mr. Coyne

    The balaclava’d gunman chic look may be all the rage but it doesn’t really suite you.
    May I suggest Hawaiian shirt instead?
    Perhaps on a Hawaiian beach?

    Yesterday it was 70 degrees here in my yard on the west coast of Canada. First decent day we’ve had in three months. I was getting ready to buy one of those old fashioned sun lamps for indoor suntanning at home, I was getting so tired of rain. The rain doesn’t look near as pretty as the snow, but as they say, at least I don’t have to shovel it.

    I was looking to find somewhere else to live, somewhere with less rain and warmer when I read that the city I live in has the mildest weather in all of North America except for Miami.

    I guess the grass is always greener.

  18. I got to the University of Chicago in the summer, and it was so hot several people died. They were so afraid of the crime that they wouldn’t open their windows and were too poor to have air conditioning. Then came winter, which killed a few more people. I was glad to get back home to Israel.

    1. Yeah, the American midwest: Frickin’ cold in winter, frickin’ hot and humid in summer. Why would anyone live here?! 🙂

      (Lest anyone challenge the hot part: Summer of 2012, I left home for work at 5:30 am on tow mornings when it was 84°F and 100% humidity (fog). It was like walking out on a very hot summer afternoon. Ugh.

      And this winter, we had VERY FEW overnight lows that were above 0°F. We recently celebrated the first day without below-0 temps in something like 5 weeks. Ugh.

      1. Yeah, first time I took my son to the tropics, he was worried about the weather. I told him, “you’ve been through Michigan summers every year of your life; you won’t even notice a difference…”

  19. I have heard that there are places where people have to change the type of tires on their cars twice each year because of winter weather, but I choose to regard this as merely a fictional horror story.

    1. Really! I wouldn’t venture into a liquor store or a convenience store wearing it; you could get shot.

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