Tag Archives: weather

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.

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.

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.

Cold Lately

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It has been below freezing for a few days now.  Cold.  The wind chill was eleven degrees yesterday afternoon.  It has been chilly waiting for the bus.  We have it down so we do not have to wait long, but still, the wind cuts through the cotton pants.

i have been wearing my down jacket and it has been a good move.  The first day I wore it I forgot that wearing it while driving feels good for a short time but then I roast.  Luckily it is easy to slide off at a stop light.

Snow still clings to the ground from a couple of days ago.  The temperature will likely stay in the twenties until next week.  Even then it will get, at least as predicted, just above freezing.

I busted out my boots the other day.  The mud boots have been great for kicking around and walking as far as the end of the driveway in the rain, but they have no insulation.  Too cold for the toes.  The warm boots are the winner in that contest.

I never got to mulching the garden with the leaves that fell from the silver maple.  It may still be possible but at this point it may be moot.  I do need to toss something on top of the strawberries before the ground freezes too deeply.  Soon.

Our compost pile is starting to freeze at the edges.  It was still warm in the middle when I added to it tonight but soon it will freeze through.  I will add to it all winter but the freeze thaw cycle will do more to break things down than any bacteria.  At least until spring.

The wood stove is humming now.  I need to pull more wood in for tomorrow.  And it is dark early.  Winter is basically here.  I was remembering with my son how it was just a few months ago when we felt too hot in shorts and bare feet.  He fell asleep smiling about that.  Soon he will be smiling about sledding and tunneling through snow.

As long as the cold keeps up.  And at least for the next week, I expect it will.

First Troublesome Snow

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White Out

White Out

We woke this morning to snow on the ground.  It fell in squalls as we readied for the day.  It was snowing when we walked out to meet the bus.  It was snowing when I took my son to school.  It snowed so hard and so fast, in fact, that not only was it difficult to see but it was difficult to drive.

Halfway through our ten-mile drive, we had to turn around.  First, we stopped because everyone one else had stopped.  Then everyone else turned around.  We were at the steep hill and, having slipped a few times, and having seen others slip, I thought it would be prudent to follow the crowd.

I am glad we did.  Cars were sliding all over the place.  It was treacherous.  I watched a few near accidents as we took the long way.  We were late but unsmashed.  Eventually, after leaving him to learn about stars, I stopped driving and got some work done.

It snowed throughout the day, sometimes quite heavily.  It was what my daughter called “a kind of small blizzard” when the bus dropped her off in the afternoon.  As it got dark she went outside with her mother and brother to sled on the thin snow that had gathered on the hill.  It wasn’t much but they managed to slide down anyway.

Drivers will be more cautious now.  Road crews will get out faster.  The first blast of snow seems to always get everyone in gear for winter driving.  That first blast was today.  It was beautiful all day.  I look forward to more.

Snow on the Ground

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Last night snow fell and the sunrise seeping through the gray clouds let us see an inch of snow stuck to the trees, the grass, the road, the roof, everything.  I rose early and ran in the dark.  The darkness seemed brighter for the fresh snow, wet from fall’s warmer air and unfrozen ground.  Fall and winter have begun their discussion over who gets to spend the night.  We need to get our snow stakes planted, so the snow plow driver knows where to aim, before the ground gets too hard.

I drove to Montpelier today and was stunned repeatedly my the morning’s beauty.  I feel that way a lot, but this was a doozer.  I passed through the Winooski River Valley that cuts through the ridge of the Green Mountains and felt small with the beauty of this world looking so new.  The first true snow of fall has a clarity to it.  Leaves still cling to branches and green still dresses the ground.  The cover of snow says winter is on the way and let’s celebrate with an art show.  The snow on the mountains is the show’s highlight.

I went to a workshop this morning where we discussed the power of stories.  One element of this was the identification of “significant events” in our lives.  I have had some that would qualify for sure–running fifty miles, climbing Mount Shasta, kayaking whitewater, having children.  But I also listed rising in the morning, and my children’s laughter, and weather.

Like saving energy in a home, where there often isn’t one change that will make a huge impact, but where many small changes will add up, those small everyday moments add up to significant events.  I think about the weather each day, and not just to see what to wear or what my commute will be like.  I watch the sun rise, or admire the late day light on the hills, or feel the wind on my cheeks.  I find power in these moments daily, and their sum adds to more than any one event in my life.

Today’s snow was money in the wonder bank.  After I got home, after my elation that I got to see the wet snow still clinging to the trees rather than slumped to the ground as I had expected, my children wanted to bust out the sleds.  It wasn’t the slickest sledding, with grass patched through the white across the hill, but they had a blast.  They laughed a lot and so, of course, did I.

Who knows what things will look like in the morning?  I love that I cannot know until there is enough light to see it.  Sure, I can look at the weather forecast, but it won’t tell me if the last of the goldenrod will still carry snow, or if the maple will have shed its leaves in the night, or if the crescent moon will peak out from the line of low clouds.  For that, I have to wait.

Pie and Kites and Rain

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So we had this fall/harvest/Halloween shindig this afternoon and it was a blast. I spent about four hours in the kitchen making soup and pie. The soup was pretty easy and relatively quick. The pie took a while but I managed to make two of them, apple of course.

The first pie was a recipe from a cookbook (or most of a recipe). It has cheddar cheese right in the crust and the usual truckload of butter, a dash of cinnamon, vanilla, sugar. I used mostly Macintosh apples but I also added a bit of Honey Crisp, since we had a few of those hanging around the house. It turned out well, as it has for me in the past.

I made the second apple pie with a crust recipe my mother gave me years ago. That crust contains vinegar. The pie was all Macs this time but I spiced it differently, with a little cinnamon but also with cardamom. It, as well, turned out to be a winner.

I made both crusts by hand, literally. Instead of using the food processor shortcut, as I often do, I worked the dough with my fingers. This makes a far better crust, even better than using one of those pastry cutter jobbers. These crusts, while different, were flaky and tasty. They held up but could be peeled apart. They were crispy and sweet. That worked for me.

Once the soup and pies were consumed and the children were rounded up and the conversations ended and the gang took off, I did what any party host does. I cleaned. But then my son suggested we go fly kites, so I dropped the sponge and headed outside.

The wind was blowing from the southeast and it was strong. We got a couple of kites in the air for a little while, but the wind was fickle. We had a few nosedives. Plus, it started to rain. As the rain fell harder and harder, the wind petered out more and more. I brought the kites inside to dry and we called it good. I hung them in the mudroom. One of them has a long tail, maybe fifteen feet, so I had to drape it over multiple hooks.

Now, after dark, the children tucked into bed, the rain falls hard. They fear the power failing. Before bed they asked if it would go out. What could I say but what I always say? “I don’t know,” I told them. They fell asleep anyway. They sleep to the sound of rain and wind. And I think about having another piece of pie.

Walking to the Mailbox

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It was a good moment to share.  The clouds were steel gray, surrounded by a pink sky.  They stood out, high contrast, as the sun slowly dropped.  The leaves are close to their peak fall foliage and the low light perked them up further.

I walked with my daughter.  We watched a jet, silent from our driveway so far below, head toward the moon.  The plane was glowing as the sun hit it directly.  It seemed to be on a collision course with the bright half of the earth’s satellite.  Luckily, the jet passed just beneath it.

We gloried in the beauty of it all.  We laughed as we spun around.  My daughter jumped the puddles from the day’s showers.  The wind blew the smell of fermenting leaves and the sound of crickets over the field.  We spun and laughed until I was dizzy and fell on the damp grass.

The world was right.  I was content.  It was a fine way to end a fall day.