And over to Holly with the weather

[cosmolinguist]

I know davmoo likes to brag about the strange and variable weather there in Indiana. So I'm writing this just for him.

In Baker's Square yesterday afternoon, Mom happened to overhear a lady at another table fretting about tornadoes. (My family often doesn't talk much; eavesdropping at restaurants is common.) Mom and Dad snickered. This is hardly tornado season. Tornadoes are expected in the spring.

Finished with our meal, we got in the car to head home and heard that there was actually a tornado watch for south-central Minnesota—Blue Earth, Freeborn, Waseca, Faribult ... in other words, right around our house. So for dessert, it seems my parents had to eat their words concerning the crazy little old lady.

WCCO (on which my dad was listening to all eleventy billion hours of the Gophers postgame show) also told us that, more importantly, the Cities had a wind advisory starting at midnight! (Every time he'd listed off the counties in the tornado warning, he made a point to say "Now, this does not include the Twin Cities." As if that's what really mattered, and as if those people weren't bright enough to know what county they lived in.)

We escaped the tornado watch unscathed, but the winds blew hard all night long, and there was a nice little thunderstorm. I haven't been around many thunderstorms lately, so I enjoyed hearing the thunder in the distance as the rain pelted the roof.

Those winds, though, sounded as if they should be accompanying a blizzard. Which, I guess, if the temperatures dropped a bit more, they would have been. My dad loves blizzards when he can sit in the house, read the paper, drink something hot, listen to the wind howl, and know that he doesn't have to go outside.

They're predicting snow flurries by Tuesday. I hope they come. I'm not usually one to welcome winter, but this sixty- and seventy-degree stuff is kinda freaky. I don't like to think about what's happened to cause it, and how likely it is now that the old people are actually right: we don't have winters like we used to.

There's a picture of my mom, my brother and me, sitting on a snow drift that goes up to the roof of our house. My brother's about a year old in the picture, which would mean it's twenty years old now.

For several years my dad's been putting sticks with blue reflectors on them along the sides of our driveway, so you know where the road is even when it's covered with snow. Last year, he says, he didn't even need them; we never got that much snow.

Comments

[emyjo.livejournal.com]

You know what's weird? Just last night (or, more precisely, very early this morning) as I was coming home I was thinking about global warming.

I, too, have pictures from my childhood with snow drifts reaching the top of the garage, where I was able to climb onto the roof of the garage with almost zero effort. Or the one where just plain snow - no drifts at all - was, once a path had been dug through by the blower, taller than my sitting Old English Sheepdog.

Last winter I think we got over a foot at one point. I think.

I always get a bit panicked when it's nearly Christmas and there's no snow on the ground. When I was a kid, I never would've believed that there might not be snow on the ground in mid-December, because I always had to wear boots to go trick or treating. Isn't it scary to think that in only twenty years the weather has changed so extremely that I've gone from boots in October to panic in mid-December?