FWIS3

We have a bitter cold haze that is producing some very unique sun dogs this morning. This picture doesn't do them justice. It doesn't show the extent of the rainbow you can see. I don't know if it was the haze, the cold (-10), or the fore-and-background, but my camera was zooming in and out of focus, so I did the best I could. I didn't want to stay out long! But I do like the shape of the Sun it produced.

The photo may not do them justice but those are cool sun dogs.

Yeah they are.

Planet X!

A little snow and sleet over the weekend. Then temps plummeted to the single digits. Nice and sunny today. Up close to 60 by the weekend.

We're at record cold again, negative double digits lows.
We have a really nice field of snow, but we were gone all day Saturday and Sunday was just too darn cold to play outside.
Next weekend should be great, right? We're getting up near freezing?
Well, another storm is due. We'll either get a lot of snow again, or RAIN!
Yay, rain on top of a foot of snow. Nice and crusty......
It's been a crap year for winter enjoyment.

No snow....no snow.....no snow......
A little snow, but too cold.....
Nice temperature but oops, it melted already....
snow/cold/snow/cold/snow/cold.....
snow snow snow MELT!

All we have is salt. We get an inch and we burn it off with 400 tons of salt. All the roads are grey, all the cars are grey. After a couple of days, the salt has aresolized and we're all driving around in a salty grey cloud. And now we all have high blood pressure.

We are sub-20F this week again for my walk into work. I just went to get coffee and it was in the 20s and it felt reasonably warm!

It's funny, we've been at this temperature a few times already this season, but the second the calendar says March I'm no longer as patient with it. Supposed to finally get above freezing this weekend and at least get there during the day, so that will be nice.

It says it's no 33 outside, partly sunny. I was just out and it felt warm. Another morning rush snowstorm supposed to hit tomorrow. But they're backing off on that after alarming us about it for a week. Temps supposed to rocket into the 50's again, after being at 5 this week. And rain a good part of the weekend.

I think our cold is finally leaving us. I see no single digits in the 10 day forecast for the first time since July, it seems!

But another storm's a-comin. I've lost track, but I think we've had at least a half dozen dumps of 4-6", one of them up to 8". This one is bound to top all of those, perhaps up to a foot. I'm glad it's coming over the weekend. And hey, I can go out and play!

Enjoy!

The sun came out yesterday and I was cheering it on "Melt that ice! Melt that ice! Go, sun!". There are a lot of people in the city beginning to suffer damage from ice dams.

We have a couple of trees that need tending, including the 140 foot ponderosa in the front, but also an old aspen in the back that seems to be failing. We've decided to take the aspen out before it takes out the power lines and damages the roof. So my wife gathered estimates and yesterday informed me and our neighbor that it was scheduled for a couple of weeks from now. Only thing is though, the Subaru BRZ is sitting under the aspen and is almost buried in snow. Because it's on the shady side, I doubt I'll be able to move it in two weeks. Sure, I could shovel out the snow but there's literally no place for the snow to go.

geonuc wrote:The sun came out yesterday and I was cheering it on "Melt that ice! Melt that ice! Go, sun!". There are a lot of people in the city beginning to suffer damage from ice dams.

We have a couple of trees that need tending, including the 140 foot ponderosa in the front, but also an old aspen in the back that seems to be failing. We've decided to take the aspen out before it takes out the power lines and damages the roof. So my wife gathered estimates and yesterday informed me and our neighbor that it was scheduled for a couple of weeks from now. Only thing is though, the Subaru BRZ is sitting under the aspen and is almost buried in snow. Because it's on the shady side, I doubt I'll be able to move it in two weeks. Sure, I could shovel out the snow but there's literally no place for the snow to go.

Flamethrower?

Oh, ice dams. They are horrible in MN this year. Our backyard neighbor is a victim.

I'll share a story about them that you can just ignore if you want. For almost 10 years we'd been in our house, there was no one living behind us. The owners had lived in a house in a different city, and for some uknown reason kept this one. But they were never around didn't keep it up. (We called them the Boo Radleys.) They would let their lawn grow until the city put up a notice that it was too long, and someone would come cut it. They let bush overgrow on the property line. Then they cut a lot of it down, but not all of it, so it was still a mess and we could see straight through to their house. Ugh. (eventually we got a fence.) The front of the house looked horrible, with peeling paint and a horrible garage door. Every couple years they would come to do some improvements--painting the house, roofing, installing AC, fixing the deck. We'd think they were getting ready to sell. But nope.

It finally went on the market this fall! I talked to a neighbor across the street who attended an open house. She said the inside was horribly kept up. The ownders ended up lowering the price. The sold sign was up, then down, then the whole sign was down. Weird things continued. Despite lights on all night long, sometimes blue lights over the holiday season, it did not look like anyone moved in. Sometimes there were cars in the driveway, and a dumpster showed up. I actually wasn't sure if anyone had bought it, or the original owners were doing more work to get it back on the market.

I found out from their neighbors that a couple with a toddler had bought it, but the were still living in another city for work reasons. This was in December. I don't really know what the status is now, as I haven't been able to get myself around to that part of the neighborhood in two months. But the lights still remain on most nights.

And back to the ice dams....it appears the new owners are keeping the place up as well as the old ones, because they've had them for weeks and have done nothing about them.

That's a weird house. Maybe vampires?

We don't have a problem with ice dams so far. No gutters and the eaves are fairly wide, so the ice that's built up is nowhere near threatening the wall.

I think our rainy season is winding down. I don't think we set any records locally but the snowpack got a huge boost this year. We probably could use 10 years of higher than average rain just to do undo all the damage the droughts did the last few years. Meanwhile, our high today will be a chilly 52 degrees according to Weather.com.

And for the last 3 weekends, I have been hoping it dries out enough so I can mow the tiny patch in front of the house that pretends to be a lawn.

Saturday the temps rose to near 50. I walked out onto the grass to fill the feeders and put some corn down for the deer. I also flirted with maybe picking up a few of the 5 million downed sticks. But since the ground had now thawed a bit, it was like walking on wet newspaper on top of jello. Every step was slimy and muddy. I got off it quickly. Then it started to rain, then it poured all night. My yard will never dry out. I had to pump another 500 gallons of water out of my mother in law's basement. There is standing water everywhere.

We were due for a foot of snow Saturday into Sunday, but it rained for the first few hours so we only got about 5". More rain is coming this week, so we're preparing for flooding. Personally we don't have to worry much. Our neighborhood and main roads we drive on aren't threatened. And our house is at a high point so uur basement doesn't flood. But pumps will be sumpin' around MN this week!

We finally got out to do some good snow building. I always wanted to do something out of the Calvin and Hobbes Snowman House or Horrors.

My sump pump has been cycling every 45-60 seconds for the last week.

I've always wanted to do a Calvin and Hobbs theme too. But I lost my assistant.

Got above freezing for the first time in forever this weekend, and we're above there now. Gonna be in the 50s on Thursday! All the snow is melting fast, after being around for months (we really didn't have many breaks from it on the ground this year), so I'm stuck between admiring the green and trying to avoid all the trash and grime that appears on the sidewalks once all the snow piles melt.

Really looking forward to walking home in daylight now that we've had daylight savings time too! Always feels so surreal the first few weeks to have an abundance of sunshine.

77 yesterday with thunderstorms, brief torrential rain, and a possible tornado sighting a few miles south of me.
Currently 40 with snow showers predicted tonight.

We got a thin coat of snow here last night. Spring tomorrow? Hah, not in Canada!

Maybe it's time to move a little south (though not sure it's THAT much different in Boston). It's funny, I don't really mind the cold or anything but I do notice that spring is slower to start here than anywhere else I've lived, and that is a tad annoying.

Rommie wrote:We got a thin coat of snow here last night. Spring tomorrow? Hah, not in Canada!

Maybe it's time to move a little south (though not sure it's THAT much different in Boston). It's funny, I don't really mind the cold or anything but I do notice that spring is slower to start here than anywhere else I've lived, and that is a tad annoying.

We won't have any green on our trees until late April/early May. It's so ugly once the snow has melted, but everything is still brown.

Brown and grey. No chance of a full Moon sighting this morning. It's supposed to rain for the next 24 hours. Just when the ground with possibly, maybe, just about ready to, think about sort of getting ready to dry out. Nope.