Please allow me to interject my feelings about Mother Nature

It seems like California has always been boom or bust when it comes to winter storms. Which is why it's not really practical to have 40 million people living in a place that's either an actual desert or hot and dry most of the summer.

The winters of 1973, 1974 and 1975 seemed to be continuously cold and wet when we first moved to the Bay Area. It never rained hard but it drizzled nearly every single day of my freshman and sophomore years in high school. I had a permanent dirty stripe up the back of my winter jacket from the mud kicked up from the 10-speed tires, and that adobe clay would collect in the brakes and gears. If you didn't wash it off immediately, it'd dry and cake on like concrete. (Now I know why the first settlers to Contra Costa built brick houses out of that stuff.)

 

Weekend forecast for my corner of the Ozarks is a high of 18, low of 0, wind chill in the -10 to -15 range. Y'all we aren't equipped for that shit down here.

Even worse, no snow. Just "freezing fog."

 

We've had it for 3 days straight up here. Won't see anything approaching 20 degrees here for the next 5-6 days. Wind chills in the -15 to -20 range.
Freezing fog is not to be trifled with whatsoever. Of course, the rocket scientists that inhabit my little corner of earth think that just because it is slick outside, the 4 wheel drive works perfectly.
MORONS.
Some of the people up here can't drive when it's 80 and sunny outside. Put a layer of krap on the road, and it turns into chaos.

 

The ground has been wet around here since before Christmas. It rains or snows every 3-4 days, and the sun is non existent.
My yard is a mess, and just walking across the grass you mire up to your ankles.

 

We won't see the grass in our yard here in Massachusetts until Easter.

 

It’s getting so cold here that I’m thinking about gathering an angry mob and storming the National Weather Service.

 

And here I am complaining my classroom is 59 degrees when I walked in this morning...

 

It's gonna be cold as a cold well digger's ass here in flyoverville. The next seven days' forecasted highs: 16, 16, 10, 9, 5 (fucking FIVE), 10, 19.

We have a couple of inches of snow on the ground, but we haven't had more than a Mordecai handful of snows where I had to shovel in the last five or six years. And nothing like the 24-30 inches we had in, maybe, March 2013. It was more than four feet high at the end of the driveway because they plowed the other side of the street. It took me four hours to clear it all so we could get out. The day before, while it was still pounding down, I locked in the hubs, took out my Toyota 4x4 and tooled around town. Almost no cars on the road, and the interstate was eerily empty. It was wonderful, but I paid for it the next day.

Edit: That 5 is now a 3. Fuck.

 

Beautiful morning in Microville. Sunny, 40 degrees. We've had a pretty mild, dry winter in the PNW and if not for the Covid it would be considered a great winter. Might snow on Thursday.

A PNW winter can be dreary but I sure don't miss the lake effect snows of my native WNY, or the mind-numbing -30s of my 20s in North Nowhere.

 

I hate HATE the winter.
But the thing is, if it's going to be cold, at least snow.
Here in the sticks, it's dreadfully dry.
This shit of cold just to be cold sucks.
Just throw 6-8 inches of snow on top so there's some redeeming quality out of it.

In the words of Rogers Hornsby..."People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do.
I stare out the window and wait for spring."