Yesterday Offspring #1 flew home, or part way home, as the entire island of Newfoundland experienced winter all at once, and pretty much decided to shut down for the weekend.
(Paul Daly took these for CTV News, and I found them on a Google image search, and hope it is okay to use them. They are great photos of downtown St John’s and houses on the Battery below Signal Hill.)
But when I went to have a peek at the interwebz to look for images of the Rock which cannot be reached, I discovered that Ontario was meant to be bracing for another winter storm with power outages.
2 – 3 centimetres of precipitation? What me worry?
Well an indeterminate “mix of wintry precipitation this evening will become mostly freezing rain overnight”, followed by a day with a high of 4° C and a low of -19° C.
I know it is the height of banality [I think I used this exact phrase in the same circumstances, but hey, if the verbal shoe fits, it fits] to discuss the weather, but this is an Ottawa specialty, coating the world in a sheet of ice two inches thick. A light dusting of snow to camouflage this trick of old man winter, and the bone setters start cracking their knuckles.
Our first winter living here found me extremely pregnant, with said eldest, who was reluctant to enter this exciting world. And on New Year’s Eve, one of my least favourite holidays, when I was the size of the Hindenburg and sober as a judge, my first and foremost dog, Bucky
went missing, just before midnight. I simply could not leave the house – it was a skating rink from the drive all the way to the border. [We Canadians know it never snows in the U.S.]
A search party was sent out but returned Buckyless. And then around 1 a.m., a very greasy and skulky dog appeared, absolutely redolent of Chinese food. The bitch, and I use the term in its technical sense, had remembered the route to a Chinese restaurant that was across an intersection six lanes wide, with a median in the middle. She had been there once, just before Christmas. To this day I wonder if she crossed with the light, both ways. [Once when she was being returned to our house in Toronto by a kind stranger in his work van, she ate his lunch as he was at our door, making sure it was the right address. I really admired that one.]
Then there was the ice storm in 1998 or so, when one of my close relatives was without power for a week, and came to live with us. Where 5 people had shared one bathroom without problem, 6 people could have come to blows, had they been able to approach one another closely enough. In fact, the whole house might have come to thar’ she blows, if someone had sparked a match at the wrong moment.
So I take my brush with prepping seriously, to be serious for a moment. You should be able to get by for a week or so, without having to hit a store. We do live in a harsh climate and preparation and flexibility are both essential. Parts of Toronto were without power for about a week over Christmas. I would have been hard pressed to cook a turkey in the backyard in -26°C over the Coleman stove, but we practiced once at Thanksgiving, camping in the most inclement weather. I still remember pathos on the first night, three adults huddled over a tiny aluminum disposable bbq, wrapped in tarps, desperately keeping a flame going.
Didn’t have to cook the turkey, though, as one of those three adults was a chef who went back to work the next day, cooked an entire turkey feast at work and brought it back up in the trunk of his car, still warm. What a sight that was when he popped the trunk – trays of steaming warm turkey and potatoes, gravy, veggies. Barely got it on the table before it was gone.
But back to my banal subject, what looks like snow is currently falling, and I feel I am getting punished for complaining the other day about the paucity of words to distinguish between kinds of “wintery precipitation”, as the weather forecast so lamely forecast. So let me bring you a new and improved forecast: we will be experiencing a period of snice and snain, followed by a week of slice and sheet. Especially sheet.
But have a lovely Sunday, unless you have made other plans.
gonna be around 65 here today and the plan is to don some shorts etc. and grill some fresh rockfish(striped bass) with my fine brother/friend. i’m also gonna flip the bird to all of the gods that need to move along and find a new carcass with some meat left on it…f-off as it were. my man Van is looking a little
ish here and i’m good with that. love to all.
Here it comes. Ouch. Down to -25F (-32C) tonight, plus wind. Packers play in The Ice Bowl Redux today at Lambeau. Whichever teams gets the least frostbite, wins. Put on a fire and bust out some poetry.
And…Good Morning!
yo, EO, i’m rootin for the Pack and i have a high level disdain for the harbough’s even though i can’t pinpoint why…hey maybe a rog will score a date if they win 😛
Packers 27, SF 9.
Dude says, “da Bears!” 🙂
did you know that…
http://www.googolplexian.com/
i think i’m going stir crazy. 🙂
Stir Crazy is a phrase that dates to 1908 according to the Oxford English Dictionary[1] and the online Etymology Dictionary. Used among inmates in prison, it referred to a prisoner who became mentally unbalanced because of prolonged incarceration. The term “stir crazy” is based upon the slang stir (1851) to mean prison.[citation needed] It is now used to refer to anyone who becomes restless or anxious from feeling trapped and even somewhat claustrophobic in an environment, usually a confined space, perceived to be more static and unengaging than can any longer continue to hold interest, meaning, and value to and for them.
more here…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stir_crazy_%28condition%29
OK, one more and i’ll shut up. EO your poem reminded me of this character…
extreme hokeyness is called for. it’s too damn cold to go to the liquor store.
sonova beach.
for my beloved Packers, for at least giving me hope…
Well, this is a big fizzle. It’s only -14F (-25C) here. Another weather pattern over-hyped and over-named? Say it ain’t so. 🙄
We seem to be getting the promised weather. It is raining, about 4 degrees C, and the walk and sidewalk are completely covered in about 3 inches of clear ice. My eldest is enjoying Halifax, the university in St John’s is closed until Wednesday, and I am about to put on my yaktrax and have a go at it.
Sorry to hear about the funk. It has been strong here too, and very tough to pull out of and post. But I am seriously determined to live to a happy and ripe old age, one way or another and I will not let stress do me in.
But I must express my opinion here, and it relates to hyperobjects too. I do not believe that the weather is more volatile than in the past. We simply do not have the information to prove it, and there have been ice ages and tropical forests in the same zone. That we are poisoning our water and land, absolutely, but climate warming to climate change tends to reflect more an endless seeking of the end of times that all cultures have tended to suffer from. It is the same thinking that made the end of the financial mess seem imminent. Fin de siecle. Y2K. Global freezing in the 70’s. Overpopulation. Aids, Sars. When you are already in a funk, everything seems disastrous and about to fail. But it doesn’t happen. Mostly.
Btw, our cars are both misbehaving, we are down to one, and there is ‘debate’ about what to do with the other one. Hubby is already off to work as offspring #3 had to be at class by 8 a.m., so I am trapped in an ice palace with an octogenarian, incontinent, alzheimers mum, an Aussie who hasn’t been walked, and a pain that just won’t go away. Stir crazy and I are good friends. I even have some of the nervous pacing down. Trying to turn it into an obsession with clean, and am going to throw the Christmas tree onto the front lawn before I chop ice.
And good morning. Oh and as to stats, they actually are remarkably consistent, and there has never been a day when no one had a look, so I am content to soldier on, and it kind of takes the pressure off, since one of my main goals was to force my hand and write more, and a small, forgiving audience is the best! Although Dude Stacker seems to have a better vocabulary than me … paroxysm indeed!
We’re still dropping, down to -18, so maybe they’ll get it close to the mark after all. I still think they way overhype all kinds of weather these days. It’s a CYA thing, so as not to get blamed, and also just for drama/ratings. Seems like everything is the “storm of the century” these past few years.
In other news, gold is showing a pulse and getting some folks excited. The 200 Day is still up north at 1346, so as far as I’m concerned it’s all just statistical noise until then. I won’t even talk about silver or miners anymore, since I view them as simply leveraged bets on gold. For gamblers only. Sorry if that hurts anybody’s feelings.
I refuse to get excited about gold – it will need to do a quadruple lutz in a sequinned unitard while singing Amazing Grace before I started over-balancing the canoe again.
Wow – I just came inside about half an hour ago and it was about 1 degree C and now it is already -3. I did clear the front walk, but that was all and I couldn’t get the rubber mat out at the bottom of the stairs. Thought I would get another chance and have left a shovel wedged underneath it, perhaps a permanent ice sculpture and liability ’till spring!
And I agree about over-hyping. Not just the weather, either. Constant state of panic if you watch CNN. But what about the dust bowl? Or asteroids? Or Mount Vesuvius? The mini-ice age in the dark ages, or the warm period at the beginning of the millennium?
Lots of traumatic things have actually happened. Usually too slowly to notice, but the cooling and warming they are talking about here would have felt radical at times if you lived for 50 years or more. Winters getting ever longer, etc.
Medieval Warm Period (Europe) — Summary
Was there really a Medieval Warm Period in Europe? To cut to the end of the story, there certainly was. But let’s take a little time in getting there and review some of the evidence for that contention.
Based on analyses of subfossil wood samples from the Khibiny mountains on the Kola Peninsula of Russia, Hiller et al. (2001) were able to reconstruct a 1500-year history of alpine tree-line elevation. This record indicates that between AD 1000 and 1300, the tree-line there was located at least 100 to 140 meters above its current location. The researchers state that this fact implies a mean summer temperature that was “at least 0.8°C higher than today.”
Moving from land to water, in a study of a well-dated sediment core from the Bornholm Basin in the southwestern Baltic Sea, Andren et al. (2000) found evidence for a period of high primary production at approximately AD 1050. Many of the diatoms of that period were warm water species that the scientists say “cannot be found in the present Baltic Sea.” This balmy period, they report, “corresponds to the time when the Vikings succeeded in colonizing Iceland and Greenland.” The warmth ended rather abruptly, however, at about AD 1200, when they note there was “a major decrease in warm water taxa in the diatom assemblage and an increase in cold water taxa,” which latter diatoms are characteristic of what they call the Recent Baltic Sea Stage that prevails to this day.
In another marine study, Voronina et al. (2001) analyzed dinoflagellate cyst assemblages in two sediment cores retrieved from the southeastern Barents Sea, one spanning a period of 8300 years and one spanning a period of 4400 years. The longer of the two cores indicated a warm interval from about 8000 to 3000 years before present, followed by cooling pulses coincident with lowered salinity and extended ice cover in the vicinity of 5000, 3500 and 2500 years ago. The shorter core additionally revealed cooling pulses at tentative dates of 1400, 300 and 100 years before present. For the bulk of the past 4400 years, however, ice cover lasted only two to three months per year, as opposed to the modern mean of 4.3 months per year. In addition, August temperatures ranged between 6 and 8°C, significantly warmer than the present mean of 4.6°C….
i need to make clear what i believe about global warming or climate change – what ever the theory is called these days. we do not know if mankind has caused it, or whether it is part of a natural cycle, but the climate seems to be changing. i suspect that the truth lies in between the extreme views on either side of the debate – since i’m a realist, and also good at statistical math! a human life time is what it is – short. when the weather patterns change enough for older farmers i know to comment on, change strategies for, then i have to believe something is really afoot. no pun intended, but farmers tend to be the people i know most grounded in reality when talking about “Mother Earth”. in summary, i have a problem with people who deny anything is different. it is. longer term changes fall under climate, shorter ones, the weather. that, in my opinion, should be the crux of the debate.
the other misunderstood principle is that if the earth is warming, and it appears to be, it will be uneven. heat is energy. when you add energy to a stable system, it is destabilized. that is what i meant to explain using the spinning top analogy. it helps to understand the dynamics of a system in equilibrium. have you ever tried to respin an already spinning top?
one last bit of logic! the longer a series of data, the fewer new outliers over time. what i mean in simple terms is that after a few hundred years of temperature records in some places, the number of new all time records should continually be dropping off. well, in many places they are not. that means that the data is trending.
the fact that high and low records are often both trending higher in the same place means that the weather is becoming more volatile! should this continue, the consequences won’t be easy to ignore.
an example of what happens when energy is added to the atmosphere is the increase in power of storms – other data besides temperature, like barometric pressure, are easily quantifiable. the lower the pressure, the stronger the hurricane or tornado for example. a review of entropy and enthalpy helps to understand this also. energy always flows from highest to lowest density. (also why free energy devices are bunk) a storms potential is in its pressure gradient. evidence supports the view that storms are becoming more powerful.
i hope i explained my thinking in a way that fosters debate, not politicized hysterics! yup, unfortunately once an issue has been politicized, all logic goes out the window. but i am not talking about you fine and intelligent folks here at all. but i have read plenty of ignorant stuff elsewhere on the web this weekend because of this record cold outbreak.
that was my longest post in a month or more. sorry about that. i just wanted to clarify my thoughts.
it was -15F when i got up, and it is -17 now. but it has been -17 (-27C) for the last four hours, so at least we are probably done trending. 🙂
allow me to present the Triple Lindy!
Well, here we are at the oxymoronically warmest part of the day and it’s -12. Balmy weather. (Sounds better when I hear that phrase from my wife.)
I remember a few weather tales from my Dad, but basically all I know is what I have experienced personally; 11 inches of rain, 16 inches of snow, 42 below and 106 above plus a 50-60 mph wind. And that experience is .0000325 % of the human species’ time on earth, which species has been around for .0005% of the age of this third rock from the sun.
In short, I find said species’ anthropocentricism remarkably impudent.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=saigon&sm=1
Probably off topic, but I found this an interesting read today:
This is your brain on religion: Uncovering the science of belief
do we ever stay on topic here? a post about religion though? this will be the true test. 🙂
i’m making apple turnovers. i’d take pictures, but they look just like the pasties i made a while back.
back on topic… weather update -13F -25C
It’s not a straight up attack on religion at all. More along the lines of good reasons why evolution has largely selected for believers. A concept, I’ll concede, that might be so self conflicted that it might drive some folks over the edge. 😎
Tuneage. Time honored bluegrass motif of death and murder. Nobody does it better than Ralph Stanley. And a bonus, I always had the hots for Patty Loveless.
i read the article EO. i have no problems at all with anyone’s beliefs. let me have mine, you can have yours. it comes down to that that Golden Rule concept again. to me spirituality/religion is a personal matter. i found this at Darryl Schoon’s website today, and i like it enough to post it here…
Oh yeah, me too. I always said she wouldn’t be “loveless” if I was around. Love those closeups.
Now I have been infected by a song. It seems relevant here in that it ties together most themes from yesterday and today. First is weather(1)- since it was too cold to go outside and play, I thought Sat was a good time to introduce 3 1/2 y. o. grandson to one of his Daddy’s favorite movies Old Yeller (gold, 2) which has a hydrophobic ruminant(3) and culminates in a mad dog(4). I pray(5) you’ll understand.
Just the clip alone makes me weepy. The movie itself turns me into a puddle. I can’t watch it.
Waiting for the kitchen sink cold water pipe to thaw, we left the cabinet doors open under the sink, but no drip and we succumbed to trickster Loki and his cold breath. First, had to find the kerosene heater in the pole barn, done. Next, find the blue “Jerry” can of extra kerosene, failed. Some still in heater, hope enough. While outside, eyes watering, bent over, tears falling on glasses, instant freeze, can’t see, take glasses off, try to put in pocket, can’t undo pocket button with glove, take glove off, dog runs off with it, hand frozen. Hah! I laugh at the cold! More glogg!
Still waiting…I debated whether to post this, don’t want this to seem like a Facebook experience, but what the heck- I already mentioned the little guy, it’s art(?) that DP might appreciate and he, too, has a song stuck in his head, which follows. Btw, he knows almost all the words, even those about “the jeans with a tear that her Momma didn’t fix”.
Shoot, forgot to resize