Category Archives: weather

Ankle Biter, Face Biter

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We did have a snow day after all today. This meant I had more flexibility in my schedule than I had planned, so I went for a run mid-morning. The snow had let up, but started again after I left the house. It was slippery but things started off well.

Gravel Road, Easy Running

Gravel Road, Easy Running

I ran down Leavensworth Road. Two cars (two!) passed me before I got to the section that is not plowed. Then it got interesting. I was doing that thing that dogs do when they come outside and don’t know about snow, picking their feet up high and looking ridiculous. I had to step high.

End of the Plowing

End of the Plowing

I have run in snow before and usually I find it fun, but we got a crust of ice, a thin one but a crust, between layers of snow. It cut my ankles. I took it for a while, tried to be tough, then realized that this was silly. Why hurt myself while getting wet in the falling snow?

Running in the Snow

Running in the Snow

So I turned back and ran down O’Neil Road, plowed the length of it. That was fine, except by then the snow had turned to sleet. It slapped me in the cheeks, except the little grains were so tiny it felt like it was biting me rather than slapping me. I took that for a while too but turned back again. By now I was laughing out loud–for real–the situation was so absurd. Why do I do this? I asked myself. Oh yeah, it’s fun.

Back Home

Back Home

It was snow falling again by the time I returned home. I appreciated the warm fire all the more when I got inside. Of course, I had to shovel a bit before I went in. That made me laugh as well. Ah, snow. How can I help but laugh?

Snow Day Tomorrow?

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I have been watching the weather closely today.  Supposedly we are getting a big storm.  It will start snowing some time tonight.  It was forecast to have started snowing by 4:00.  Didn’t happen.  Now the National Weather Service says it will start by 7:00.  That is right about now.  All the predictions say we are looking at half a foot of snow.  I hope so.

Problem is, I am scheduled to work at a high school tomorrow.  If we get a snow day, or even a delay, I need to reschedule.  That won’t be simple.  Every day the rest of this month is booked for me.  So I have the classic dilemma.  On one hand, lots of snow means poor driving which means (potentially) no school tomorrow which, as noted, will be a pain the snowplow.  On the other hand, it could be a snow day.  I mean, no school.  How great is that?

OK, the down side of the snow day thing and the excitement of no school is that I still have to work.  I have plenty to do and I will need to do it, even if I take a break to sled with the children for a bit.  But still, no school.  Sleeping in a little.  Making a snowman.  Hot chocolate after getting cold and frosty.  That is plain old good stuff.

I look forward to waking up and seeing what we’ve got.  I will be checking my school’s web site first thing.  My curiosity will keep me from sleeping in after all.  I’ll crank up the fire and sip an espresso drink and get down to work while my wife takes the children outside.  Or, if the storm fizzles, I will head to school.  I suppose that wouldn’t be so bad.

But we might have a snow day.  Yeah baby.

Colder than…

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When it gets this cold I am not quite sure how to end that phrase.  Colder than what?  An Antarctic winter?  Dry ice?  Titan‘s atmosphere?  If it were warmer today I could say it felt colder than that day in December…

We all waited for the bus together this morning.  We wore snow pants and down jackets and scarves.  Also, it was windy.  And did I mention it was five degrees?  Frostbitten cheeks were in the works.  We didn’t linger.

As I write this, 8:00 pm, the temperature is 3 degrees.  Maybe we will hit the zero mark.  It could be in the 50’s later this week.  Warmer than…

Whatever.

Snow Making Things Slippery

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My wife asked more than a few times this morning, “Where’s the snow?”  We had looked together more than a few times yesterday at the forecast to see what might come our way.  Supposedly at least a dusting of snow last night and a couple of inches today.  We woke this morning to bare ground.  She was disappointed.

On my morning run, at a reasonable hour, the sun long up, it started to snow.  It made for a festive trot.  My wife left after me.  She got the good solid snowfall on her run.  Lucky her.

We skied again today, bundled the children and headed back up to Bolton Valley.  We used our skies to do some sliding for fun.  Then we headed home and kept the XTerra in four-wheel drive most of the way.  It was greasy.  The road down the hill is steep and gets slick when it snows like it did today–cold and quick.  A couple of cars couldn’t make it up.  All-season radials don’t account for the greasy road up to Bolton Valley.

Just getting through Richmond was slow going, but we made it home fine.  Apparently, driving got much worse.  Too bad that couldn’t happen at about 6:30 tomorrow morning.  No snow day tomorrow.  The wind picked up after we got home.  My son wanted to play outside but didn’t last all that long.  He loves the cold but even he said it was getting too cold with the wind.

Tonight the wind is howling.  The temperature will get to the single digits.  Cold.  No early run for me tomorrow.  Maybe Tuesday.  I can’t see the snow but I know it is out there.  If we are lucky, the rain won’t take it all away, or more snow will fall in the next couple weeks.  I like the look of fresh snow.  The world, as many poets have pointed out, looks new with fresh snow.

So we got our snow, at least enough for today.  The big storm is what I’m after, but I will take this for December.  One thing I can say about a day like today–It ain’t summer.

First Ski Day

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Brian Jenkins Burlington Free Press

Brian Jenkins Burlington Free Press

Today was opening day at Bolton Valley so we headed up there for some early skiing.  We had a blast.  We took only a few runs (the kids are still getting their ski legs on) but got the feel of it.  I even got a few turns in on my own while sliding down the trails with my daughter.  I had my first spill as I tried to take a small jump ( I landed it but ate white with my first turn).

We stayed warm enough and the place was not as packed as we thought it might be.  I had the impression that there were just as many people there as on opening day last year but somehow things ran more smoothly.  Everything just seemed to flow a little better.  We got our passes in just a few minutes, didn’t have to wait in line for the lift, found a place to park, even found a spot to put on our boots with no problem.

Once we had fun on the slopes we headed around the corner.  We lived up there for over a decade and we wanted to check out our old house.  We designed and built it one summer and fall, and it was an odd feeling to leave it.  It turns out that the new owners added a couple of touches we had wanted to add ourselves but did not–a large front porch and a small roof over the front door.  It looks great.  It looks better on the outside than it ever did when we lived there.

It was a great place to live and both of us felt we could be happy up there still.  Winter up there meant we were in the place to be.  We always had snow on Christmas, but we couldn’t have much of a garden.  One can’t have everything, but it sure was nice to put on boots and walk up the hill and take a few runs, all without driving.  Ah, but how about that popcorn we grew this summer?

Tomorrow we will likely head up there again, get the itch scratched for the weekend.  We will have to load the car and drive up there like everyone else.  For now, that’s what we’ve got.  Yesterday I was outside while my son stomped around on the frozen garden.  I started mentally planning what we might grow next summer.  Some days I ski.  Some days I pull weeds.  That isn’t easy to do all in one place.  As for tomorrow, I may spend some time thinking about gardening, but one should ski while the snow is on the mountain.

Stars, Sunrise, Headlamp

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I rose early yesterday morning to run. This time of year it can be hard to do that. My wife had to leave by 7:00, which meant I had to get up, change quietly in the dark, stretch, run, and then be back in time to be in charge of the children before she split. Problem is, the sun doesn’t rise until about 7:30 these days.

It was, as you might guess, dark when I got up. I planned ahead, as I tend to do when I want to run early, by laying things out the night before. Changing and stretching and donning the reflector vest wasn’t too much of a chore. It was about 29 degrees outside, so I added gloves and a hat to my outfit.

It was dark but I had my headlamp. It is an LED headlamp and I have had it for a year or so. The thing is a winner. It is bright, easy to turn on and off with gloves and the batteries last forever. In fact, despite hundreds of hours of use, the batteries were the original ones. That, it turned out, was a mistake.

The stars were at their brightest. It was just before the sky got light but after many artificial lights had been turned off. Plus, the moon was down. So the stars stretched across the sky, the constellations chasing each other in their endless evening game. I was, although I have seen this many times, stunned. I do not see the night sky enough. Some people almost never see it. It makes me feel small in the scope of the universe, yet it also makes me feel a part of that universe. It isn’t a bad way to start the day.

As I ran in the dark, the sky gradually grew brighter. I ran without a light most of the time. In fact, what blinded me most to seeing my way was light. There are two street lamps on my route and both of them make it difficult to see, since they ruin my night vision and create a black hole on the far side of their glow. i wish they were not there. I can imagine why they were installed, as they are both next to barns. I don’t know why we need to burn electricity for them all night these days, however. It seems like that isn’t necessary. I sure wouldn’t want to be trying to get to sleep in one of the houses beneath them.

It was early enough that I actually passed no cars. That is rare. Typically I turn on my light so cars can see me better. I turned it on at a couple of key points to make sure that anyone out with an unleashed dog might see me, but not for cars. I also turned it on when I passed the street lamps. It did not, however, help me much.

The light produced by my headlamp was pretty much doodly squat. Twice I thought it was off and discovered it was on when I put my hand up to the bulb. The batteries, AAA, a year old and well-used, were at their end. That is pretty amazing if you ask me. Heck, even if you don’t ask me it is pretty amazing. Imagine if we switched our home light bulbs to LED bulbs. Forget those twisty fluorescent jobbers. LEDs would last even longer and use even less energy. One of these days they will be cheap enough.

As I got close to home the glow in the east was gathering. It was still dark but not as dark. The sunrise was not far off. I have not been running early lately. I finally am ready, physically, to get back to it. It isn’t easy. This is, after all, the darkest time of the year. But I will do it. If I want to run enough, I don’t have another time that will work.

Tomorrow I will go out early, but not as early as yesterday. I may just see the sunrise, and the early glow on the brown fields. On the other hand, I might just get rained on. Either way, I will get in some miles and feel good about it. And it will be a safer run now that I have a new set of batteries in my headlamp.

Sky Show

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I wish I had a good image of it, but I was not in a position to take photos. Plus, I didn’t have a camera. I had been hearing for a couple of days how tonight would provide a good show if things worked out right. Jupiter, Venus and the crescent moon are in conjunction, which really means they are all close together.

I drove home from South Burlington and heard this again on Vermont Public Radio‘s Eye on the Night Sky. I looked and was disappointed to see clouds covering the entire sky, at least from my narrow viewpoint. But once I was in Shelburne and my view was broader, I looked up again.

The clouds had one hole in them and right in that hole was what I was seeking. The skinny moon hung there with two bright planets accompanying it to the right, like ushers. It lasted for a few minutes before the clouds starting moving back in, and the show was over. It was quite a sight.

Three Things

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I recently discovered a Vermont blog that has some appeal to me. The View From the Last House in America claims to offer up “one life, lived in Vermont, and oddments.” Sounds good to me. That actually sounds about like what I’ve got here. Two posts on the site caught my attention.

One was called Who Cares What You Think? This seems a reasonable question to me. If you are going to write something that any random monkey can find, at least entertain the monkey. It is the question for anyone who cares to blog. I would love it if someone thought what I put down here interesting and worth musing over. Heck, I need affirmation as much as the next guy. But it ought to be interesting and not just pretend to be interesting. So that is my renewed challenge: to avoid proffering up tripe.

The second thing that I found interesting was a post about Seven Random Things. I like this idea. I was reading recently in Orion magazine an essay called Notes From a Very Small Island by Erik Reese. He talks about Nietzsche’s call for “an end of philosophy” and how we should really embrace art, especially poetry. He expounds on what this means to himself and I was struck by this sentence:

The true poem captures not just what is seen, but the experience of seeing. Poetry, we might say, is the aura thrown around an ordinary object to show that, in fact, it isn’t ordinary at all.

This captures well what I love about poetry. My favorite poems are about standing in line or shoveling snow or drinking beer on a porch. This idea of writing about seven random things really gets at the idea of poetry or, if one carries it back around, to philosophy. The question, if one takes on this challenge, is this: Can you find meaning in those objects and then share it in a way that has meaning to the reader? I like the idea. I’ll try it at some point.

And the third thing is this: it is snowing. The snow and rain and sleet and freezing rain (we may get all of them) might fall all night. Snow day tomorrow? I have mixed feelings about it. One one hand I get as excited as I did when I was ten when I think about school being canceled and a bonus day at home. On the other hand, it is a big old hassle to make up my meetings with students when school is closed. I don’t want to have to add a day, but I also would love to sit and watch the weather and drink some foamy coffee drink in my pajamas.

If tomorrow comes in with gray and slush and I don’t need to drive, then I will take on the seven random things challenge in the morning. If we have rain and school, then it will have to wait. In any case, even if you made it this far in this post you may still be wondering, enough to not at all consider reading the next one, Who Cares What You Think?

About the Weather

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We are planning to take a trip down to Connecticut to visit my parents and other sundry relatives this week.  You know, celebrate the national holiday about the mythic sharing of the harvest between the native people who managed to survive the plague brought by Europeans and a group of those Europeans seeking freedom of religion.  I hope we get good driving weather.

I think about the weather a lot, and I especially think about it during the transition seasons such as November.  This morning as I drove home after dropping off my son at his, as my wife referred to it last night in our daughter’s parent teacher conference, “foo foo la la” preschool, I heard on Vermont Public Radio that the weather forecast might be “complex” today but it was pretty nasty 58 years ago.

Apparently, they had a big storm back in 1950.  The Great Appalachian Storm brought snow and high winds to a huge area of the northeast.  Burlington had sustained 72 mile per hour winds with gusts up to 100 miles per hour.  Hello hurricane, although it was technically an extratropical cyclone.  It had more of an effect on other states, including New York, but damage was extensive in Vermont.  It was one of the biggest storms of the century.

It was pretty mild today.  I ate my rapidly cooling lunch as I walked out to meet my daughter off the bus for her half day of school today.  It was a little windy and the spitting rain was misting my glasses.  I even grumbled about it for a moment, until I realized that I did not want to be an ass.  What is a cool lunch when it means being on time to meet my kid?  I had no blizzard to contend with.

We should have fine weather for driving this week.  Rain continues to drip out of the clouds at the moment.  We might get more of that.  My car’s wipers, although brand new, seem to be–how to put this eruditely?–sucky?  They will get us through.  I’m not going out to buy new ones at this point.  Too lazy.

I will keep an eye on the weather for now and when we get there for the ride home.  It won’t be long before we are thinking about snow days.  We talked about the possibility that school might be closed today if the weather turned just right.  Soon soon

The Pilgrims and their native hosts had a mild first Thanksgiving although, to be fair, it was in October back then.  It looks like this one will be pretty mild as well.  We will have no century marking storm, which is good.  If we are going to have a big storm, let’s hope it happens during the middle of a week of school.  That way we go out and play when school gets canceled.

What’s Up, Winter?

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It was so in the twenties today.  And windier than a room full of bean eaters.  Except it was a cold wind.  It was like way too January.  What happened to Thanksgiving?  We haven’t gotten there yet and it feels like Christmas is long past.

My grandmother used to talk about ice skating on Thanksgiving when she was a kid.  Granted that was in the 1920’s, not exactly a long time ago in geologic time, but most people alive today were not around then.  It is pretty much never that cold at Thanksgiving here in Vermont.  And she lived in Connecticut.  Is this a freak year?  Or are we on the way to another “mini ice age?”

I have been reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower.  He mentions how the first winter that the Pilgrims spent in North America was relatively mild, even though most of the winters they would experience in their new home would be much colder than they are now.  And they didn’t have central heating.  Or, really, enough food.

What do I have to complain about?  Winter seems to be here already, but we wood stacked and beans in the pantry.  Plus popcorn ready for melted butter.  The only corn the Pilgrims had was what they stole during their first week ashore.  And that weren’t for popping.

The ground is frozen.  Up the road someone plowed the field today.  I’m not sure what that is about.  Frozen chunks of earth are splayed in a line up once and back.  I’m no farmer, clearly.  I just want to get the strawberries mulched, but they are now covered in snow.

We are headed down to Connecticut for Thanksgiving.  Maybe we will get a chance to go ice skating.  Or maybe we will have to be content to hang out inside, with central heating, enjoying a fine meal and, later, maybe lounging on the couch relaxing and listening to the wind.