…but don’t trust it.
I have every confidence it’s coming. There’s some potent cold air up in those hills.
Mostly we’re just kind of nothing today. I want to go back to bed, and may for a while. I haven’t got two functioning brain cells. I fear if I did anything I’d screw it up.
Everyone in the UK is wondering what this winter is going to be like. The last two years have been quite bad by our standards. Last December in particular was nasty because the snow never got a chance to thaw and began to pile up.
But it’s anyone’s guess for this year. Going by history it may well be another bad winter. It goes in cycles and we were due two or three (maybe four) bad winters. Given how everything else has been this year it’d pretty much put the tin hat on it. We don’t ‘do’ snow very well here – by the time we’ve got the hang of it it goes away for a decade :-/
Curiously enough, most Americans’ idea of Christmas is founded in Dickens and in a lot of images of England as a cold, snowy country.
In point of fact, it was—at the time when the big colonial push put a lot of English settlers over on the eastern seaboard. It was the tail end of the Little Ice Age, (responsible for Geo. Washington’s bad winter at Valley Forge) and for some real bitter snowfalls on the east coast.
The weather since has gotten warmer in England and in here, but every American Christmas tries to imitate the Little Ice Age Christmases of legend, as some sort of idyllic time when there was a lot of food and wassailing and good times: in point of fact, for the early colonists in those bad winters on the frontiers of, say Kentucky and Tennessee (where it could be pretty primitive, compared, say, to Virginia, which was more civilized), remembering a warm pot of porridge in a warm house with real woodwork and no gaps in the walls was probably pretty nostalgic.
Not to mention that the Little Ice Age caused famines in northern Europe because the growing season was circumscribed by late thaws and early freezes and was too short for useful yields of high energy crops such as grains.
Or Winter in Tudor times:
When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp’d, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
To-whit! To-who! — a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
When all aloud the wind doe blow,
And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian’s nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
To-whit! To-who! — a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
— Shakespeare, song from Love’s Labour’s Lost
crossing my fingers this is going to be a mild one. November has been unusually warm so far …
It warmed up here today, too! They keep saying we’ll have snow, then not, then yes, then rain, then snow, then rain and snow . . . now they say freezing drizzle in the morning and light snow afterwards. WINTER! ACK!
Crazy weather – 68 degrees and high winds today are delivering cold temperatures tomorrow. The wooly buggers have thick coats, but I haven’t seen much squirrel activity under the oak tree. Mother Nature is already fickle, and global climate change gives her PMS.