I love the weather channels. Hair farmers and dime-store Kardashians waving their arms over an imaginary map, talking about WINTER STORM FABIAN or WINTER SEMI-BLIZZARD OSAMA or WINTER ARCTIC DEATHSTORM INGA. The least you could do is explain what the hell I’m suppose to expect on Monday on that forecast there. Is the weather going to be serrated on Monday? Will I be expected to swim laps in some sort of frozen pool? Is frozen angel hair pasta going to be made available to me? What are those squiggly weather lines? Should I make out a will, and make out with my wife one last time on Sunday night?
I got up this morning and it was fifteen below zero, car wouldn’t start, because the car is smarter than a person, and we were still shoveling a foot of “partly cloudy” from the day before. I didn’t really mind, exactly, because I didn’t move to Uppastump Maine expecting palm trees and grass skirts on the babes, but there is one aspect about it that rankled. Listen to me, you weather idiots. It’s not the winter. It won’t be winter for four days or so. The average nighttime temperature here in December is fourteen degrees Fahrenheit. That makes last night thirty bleeping degrees below normal. Thirty degrees is a lot, don’t you think?
I can take thirty degrees below normal. But if you call it winter one more time, I’m coming to look for you, and not with opera glasses, either.
[You can listen to, and purchase if you like (just 99 cents), my sons’ Generic Christmas Song here:]
12 Responses
Report back on Monday, and let us know what the scattered bacon weather is like. How do you dress for that?
Use caution working outdoors in that high humidity. High humidity is brutal.
They're meteorologists, not astronomers. Meteorological winter starts December 1, it's just astronomical winter that starts December 21 or 22. Gotta expect it to be cold this time of year.
Whoah, waita minute there, big feller. I used to be a welder. I know all about metallurgical winter.
If you want to hang here, you've got to do better than that.
I thought metaphysical winter wasn't real?
What do I know, I live in Dallas, where one lousy ice storm shuts the entire metroplex down for a week, and sends the collective populace into end of times hysterics. I think the Maine term for us would be "wimps".
-benjaminthomas
What do I know, I live in Dallas, where one lousy ice storm shuts the entire metroplex down for a week, and sends the collective populace into end of times hysterics. I think the Maine term for us would be "wimps".
-benjaminthomas
Look at it this way: the TV news coverage during a TX ice storm is so over the top that an unaltered tape of it would make a good comedy skit for Saturday Night Live.
Come to think of it, the efforts of TX TV weathermen to elicit interest in the summer also are amusing. You could mail in a TX summer weather forecast: High of 95-103,low of 77, no rain. So the TV weathermen will get all excited and say something like "There's been a cloud sighted 100 miles from here. Might be rain coming." Yeah, right.
While I can't say that I am a fan of 100 degree TX summers, TX winters are great. Rather like a NE November, with a touch of October.
Eek.
In re TX weather, one thing that most non-Texans aren't hip to is the dreaded Blue Norther, which treats the populace to the phenomenon of temperature drops on the order of 40 degrees in 40 minutes. That'll wake you up.
When I lived out in the Panhandle in the 1970 or so, I woke up one morning to snow going sideways and every pilot light in the place blown out, and icicles on my tender bits. The old-timers would say "Ain't nothin between here and the North Pole but a bobwire fence. And some dern fool left the gate open."
Texas ain't for sissies, but you can have my share of Maine in the winter. California'll do just dandy, thanks.
Grass skirts are SO passe' – so 70's like. Gum up the whole works you know.
Nah, wutchewgotsthere is big fur rap weather – ummchakaumckaaummmmm.
Spent two winters in Nort Dakotah; got out afore the o-fishul start of #3. (Winter starts around mid-October.) Found my LLBean double thick wool mittens and thick leather overmitts twarn't enough to keep me hands warm. Don't regret being there, and don't regret leaving.
'twas NH rather than Maine but close enough for a bit of "now THAT is winterish" storytelling. We had two carloads of us heading up to the Mt. Washington area for some skiing, February IIRC, and decided to try a "shortcut" over some local roads rather than stay on the interstate.
It wasn't long before we spotted the "Frost Heaves" warning signs and in about the time it took for someone to murmer, "what are frost heaves?" we were discovering exactly what they are. I had three passengers in my Jeep – and boyI was GLAD I was in a Jeep rather than some ordinary ol' sedan. My Better-Two-Thirds was frightened into silence (and she is thoroughly unaccustomed to silence). In short order one young lady in the back seat was laughing nearly hysterically and the other was sobbing.
Naturally I did all I could to enjoy the situation.
All y'all are gonna be up a (frozen) creek when the next Ice Age starts – any time now, according to the Geological Calendar. My advice: go set fire to a pile of truck tires in hopes of generating enough CO2 to jump start this Global Warming thing.
Ya see, Sip, whatcha got is a 'metaturdical' storm. Proper wordage and all, a big ol' sh*t storm. Glad to help.