Frankenstorm

About this time last year we were looking at this map:

We ended up losing power for 'only' two days - we had friends who lost power for over a week!

Today we have this:

Here's hoping they're scaremongering, but knowledgeable people are taking it very seriously! I'm sure if we wanted to buy a generator we're too late already, but I'm heading out now to gas the car up, get some cash and do some (non-perishable) food shopping. 

My Easter Egg

Moe, over at Badgers With Knives, was giving a chocolate Easter egg  away recently and I won. It arrived last week. The kids were very excited by the customs sticker:

Moe's note said she doubted it would arrive in one piece, but she was sure that wouldn't affect the flavor. I agree 100% - in fact, I figured that would just make it easier to share with the kids.  Then I noticed that the box had crumbs of chocolate on the outside, and a suspiciously greasy spot on the side . . .

I hadn't really put two and two together, but the weather last week was insanely warm for March. It hit 80˚F  (26.7˚C) the day the egg arrived and the chocolate egg was sitting in my (black) mailbox (in the sun) for at least four hours before I got home. The result:

A puddle of chocolate at the bottom of the box :-(

I put the whole box in the fridge for a couple of hours and it ended up being perfectly edible, even though it didn't look anything like an Easter egg anymore. For some reason, the texture was rather like an Aero bar. I happen to like Aero bars, so that was fine. Anyway, the egg is no more. All gone :-) It was yummy - thanks Moe!

Snowstorm shopping

I still haven't figured out why every time there's a big snowstorm, this happens in the supermarket:

We joke about all the people who are going to make French toast because bread, milk and eggs seem to sell well before a storm, but chips and salsa?

Oh, and for Mother Hen, who has never seen a pumpkin covered in snow, here's a snowman with a pumpkin for a head!

Happy snow-olleen!

WOW - they really weren't kidding when they predicted widespread power outages! We got about 12 inches of heavy wet snow. The branches in the first photo aren't usually that low - they were weighed down by the snow. (Everything below the word Trick  would normally not be there!)

Note the tree that's lying down on the left in the photo above - here it is again a few hours later:

We got off pretty lightly. The power was only out for 49 hours - there are thousands of homes that still don't have their power back yet - and the temperature in the house only dipped to 52˚F. We have city water rather than a well, so we did not lose our water too. We have a camping stove so we had hot food and drink. We have a chainsaw, so we did not have to wait for the city to come and remove the trees that had fallen and blocked the end of our road. About the only thing we don't have that would have been nice is smartphones. The reporting on the radio was useless in terms of letting us know what the situation was in the wider world and some internet access would have been nice!

I spent most of Sunday hand sewing DS's Halloween costume that I had been planning on finishing on the sewing machine. Then tonight we found out that trick-or-treating is postponed until next Saturday! In many neighborhoods it would not have been safe to go out trick-or-treating tonight because there are still downed powerlines. Even where there aren't, there are tree branches down all over the place. Most people seem to have cleared their driveways, but not necessarily the sidewalk.

It certainly has been a memorable Halloween!

Happy Snow-tober

Never mind a White Christmas - we're having a White Halloween this year! We're used to snow in the northeastern USA, but not this much this early!

With so many leaves still on the trees, this heavy wet snow is going to bring a lot of trees and therefore power lines down. At least it's the weekend, so we don't have to use a school 'snow day' so early in the year!

Rain, more rain, and . . .

People have been whining here about how it's been raining all week. The lawn has grown several inches longer than DH likes it to get, but it hasn't been dry enough to mow. The weeds have been sprouting like crazy, and the rabbits haven't been eating fast enough. (Well, except for the pansies DD planted - unfortunately, they've been rather enjoying those!) So when I got home this evening, and not only had the rain stopped but the sun was out, I decided I'd take advantage of the break in the rain and get some weeding done while DH mowed the lawn. I didn't get as much done as I'd planned though. Not only have the lawn and the weeds been growing, but the mosquitoes have been growing too, and it wasn't long before I decided I'd given quite enough blood for tonight thank you very much and I scurried back indoors.

I decided to check the weather forecast for the rest of the weekend, and now I'm thinking maybe, just maybe, there'll be no point in finishing the weeding. But then again, you know how inaccurate weather forecasts can be! :-D

Working up a sweat in the cold

As it's MLK Day, there is no school today. I was determined not to have the children stay inside watching TV all day (as they would if I gave them the choice of what to do) so we headed off to one of the local schools that has a great hill for sledding. DD spent 2 hours there yesterday with her Girl Scout troop. We got there a little later than I had planned, but that's OK as it was a holiday after all. We were very surprised to find few other people there - some of the time the hill looked like this:

This photo makes the hill look less steep than it really is. Plus, the section on the left that you see DD climbing was well packed down from the weekend's sledding, so it was icy and very fast.

I had (for once) planned ahead and brought a flask of hot chocolate and some snacks, so we had those after an hour. At that point I took the outer layer of my winter coat off as I was just too hot. The kids and I all worked up quite a sweat trekking up the hill, and even standing around in the sunshine at the bottom of the hill was quite pleasant so long as you weren't sitting on the snow. It wasn't until we were on our way home that I noticed what the temperature was on this glorious, too nice to stay inside, day: 17˚F (that's minus 8˚C!) You see, the cold is just fine if you're doing the right things and are appropriately dressed for it!

A bit parky

A few days ago Sarah was commenting that it was a bit parky in Oklahoma. I was feeling quite happy that it was warmer here up north. Not any more. It was -10 degrees Fahrenheit at 9 a.m. this morning. Brrrr! And just look at the forecast for the next week - ooh, look, it's going to be much warmer on Tuesday :-)

In Fahrenheit

In Celsius

I'm very glad I don't live somewhere that gets REALLY cold in the winter - the kind of place where you have to plug an engine block heater in to make sure your car's engine will start in the morning!

P.S. Did you notice the inconsistency in those screen shots -  the temp. was minus 10, but the weather forecast was still for a low for the day of 17. My maths is bad, but isn't that a 27 degree difference? Quite an error margin!

A little bit of snow

Americans who live in the snow belt always laugh when the UK grinds to a halt because of an inch or so of snow. I was ready to do the same thing this week, but then I saw this satellite photo of the UK today:


There are a few places where you can still see green - part of Anglesey, and on the south coast in Devon - but not many! I grew up on the Wirral and we rarely if ever got any snow there, though we could often see it on the Welsh hills. It looks just as white as the rest of the UK today! I have no doubt that they really don't have enough ploughs, sanders and gritters to deal with this, even it is only a few inches.

My old secondary school is closed and will not open again until next Monday at the earliest. I don't EVER remember school being closed for bad weather when I was a kid, though my primary school closed once for a day because the boiler broke and there was no heat. I was intrigued to see this on the high school website though:


It looks as though they are trying to avoid the issue of having to make up the snow days by asking kids to login from home and complete work that's been assigned. (VLE = Virtual Learning Environment) I've never seen that done over here. Boy, I wish we could have done that last year when we had 9 snow days and ended up losing 3 days from our April vacation so that we could still complete 180 days of school as required by the end of June. (State schools in the UK have to put in 190 days I believe.) We have a VLE (Moodle) in my district, but relatively few teachers use it, and some of the towns in the district still only have dial-up internet access so it's not practical to require kids to use it anyway!

Only a few miles away from my hometown, the independent school my father used to work at also closed yesterday and today (in common with all Wirral, North Wales, Wrexham schools and most Cheshire schools) but will be open tomorrow:

The school will be open for all pupils on Friday 8 January.

Notes for parents
The car parks will still be very icy and potentially hazardous, especially after an overnight frost, so extreme care will be needed; please do not stay on site any longer than it takes to drop your children off. Staff will be on hand in the car parks to assist. For safety reasons and because of extremely limited parking, we are not allowing sixth formers to drive to school.

Buses should be running as normal tomorrow, though buses will not be driving through the villages and so will drop pupils off on the way home on the main roads at the points where they were picked up in the morning.

I guess it's a good thing schools all seem to have websites nowadays to make these announcements! Here in New England, snow days and delayed starts because of bad weather are so common that most schools districts now have automated calling systems in addition to posting cancellations and delays on local radio and TV. I remember once driving most of my 60+ mile commute to work before hearing on the radio that school was cancelled for the day. At that point we didn't have an automatic calling system, and where I lived I couldn't get the TV or radio stations that the school posted its cancellations on. Where I lived the weather was fine so I set out for work! After that, I learned to log on to the school email system or website every morning in the winter just in case!

Tornado alert

Brit Gal Sarah is used to severe weather in her part of the US as she lives in 'tornado alley', but (even after 24 years here!) it still surprises me that here in New England we also have occasional tornado watches! They can even, though fortunately very rarely, turn into tornado warnings - meaning that rather than the weather conditions simply being propitious for a tornado, one has actually been sighted. The forecast for this afternoon included a thunderstorm watch but has just been upgraded to a tornado watch through until 9 p.m. tonight. Ah well, no trip to the park this afternoon!

Blue Sky

After far more rainy days than usual this summer, it was a delight to see a blue sky with no clouds at all in it!

Scary pumpkins

DD commented as we walked out of the house today, "Mom, the pumpkins are looking really scary today."
Scary? Today, but not yesterday? In broad daylight? I didn't understand at first, but that's because I wasn't looking at the pumpkins . . . when I did, I saw what she meant.

They were beginning to go mouldy:


And one was beginning to ooze and collapse - those horizontal wrinkles weren't there yesterday:

Apparently it's not been cold enough recently - with unseasonably warm temperatures over the last week (in the 60s at times during the day), the pumpkins were beginning to rot already. Given what I paid for them and what a short time they lasted, the ceramic pumpkins I've seen on sale are beginning to look like an excellent bargain in comparison. Of course, the ceramic ones wouldn't be as much fun to prepare each year . . .

Spring - season of rising steam

The only flowers in bloom around here are the cut daffodils on my kitchen table that were imported from Ireland, but nonetheless it is feeling like spring at last. I see sap buckets on maple trees, and steam rising from sugar houses on my commute to work, and DS and I had breakfast at a sugar house this morning. I'm thinking we may do it again next weekend - hoping DD will have learned from her experience this morning and will get herself ready on time to come with us! (There's no point in turning up at a sugar house too late, as you just end up having to wait forever for a table.) DS requested a trip to a different sugar house as there is one that has a small collection of farm animals that the kids can visit. I think the pancakes at this morning's location were bigger though!





More signs of spring: The potholes are still getting bigger, and the DPW is finally getting started on roadwork projects that were abandoned for the winter (but not, of course, the potholes.) The kids played outside in glorious sunshine this afternoon, even riding their bikes for a while. Admittedly, after an hour they were ready to come in, but we got outside and away from the television! The clocks changed last night, and this afternoon I finally got all the paperwork ready for the accountant to do our taxes. Yay! Spring is truly almost here!

Will somebody please find . . .

the Snow Queen and get rid of her? It's looking much too much like Narnia before the thaw around here!

This photo was taken last Saturday. It didn't come out as well as I'd hoped - the yellow dot is a lamp post.



This one was taken at 3:30 this afternoon.


I stopped to buy milk on the way home this afternoon. (Not because it was snowing, but because we really needed some. Honest!) The clerk at the store's commentary on the weather was: "What happened to the rain we were supposed to get today? I've had enough of all this snow. I'm SO ready to mow the lawn!"

Oh, no, not that much snow!

There is snow forecast for Thursday across the UK. The BBC website posted the following recommendation for drivers:

Carry warm clothing, food, water, boots, de-icer, torch and spade in your car
Plan your journey before leaving home
Check the weather forecast
Check your route for delays

How much snow is forecast? Apparently 2 centimeters is expected in the south, with "up to 5cm of snow in some areas" of northeast England and eastern Scotland. Temperatures will 'struggle' to reach 2 or 3 degrees Celsius. Hmm, let's see, we had about 10 centimeters yesterday and the town didn't even think it was worth plowing our street! Temperatures here tomorrow are supposed to reach a high of 14 degrees Fahrenheit (that's minus 10 Celsius), but it will feel more like 0 Fahrenheit (minus 18 Celsius) because of the windchill. Recess (playtime) at school will be indoors I'm sure.

I have driven in the UK when there has been that much/little snow and I have to say the BBC is right - there is often chaos on the roads. The roads are untreated and drivers don't have enough experience of driving in the snow. And then of course, it could always be the 'wrong kind' of snow for the snow ploughs ;-) The kind of snow is more significant than I ever realised when I was living in the UK. We had the 'right kind' of snow here this week - it was excellent for making snow men! On the other hand, it was also the wrong kind of snow as it was heavy to shovel - however I was lucky enough not to have to experience that as my darling DH took care of it all!

What it looked like here yesterday afternoon:


Thinking of converting temperatures, I just made Dear Daughter go through her homework adding in an F after all the degrees symbols. Her math/science homework was about temperatures and only 'degrees' was specified when it should have been 'degrees Fahrenheit'. I explained to her why it mattered to be specific about the unit of measurement. OK, so she's only in elementary school, but surely it's not too early to think precisely and scientifically?