It was time to wake up. I checked the weather on my phone. Cloudy with a chance of meatballs. No precipitation predicted. I checked Twitter. The online A2 Snooze tweeted something like, “Winter Storm Watch for The Planet Ann Arbor!” Say what? I clicked through to the article, which was yammering away about the potential for 1-1/2 inches of accumulation.

Folks, 1-1/2 inches of snow does not make a winter storm. What it *does* do is create havoc on our busy freeways. Why? Because people think, “Oh, this is nothing, so I can go 70 [80 [90]] like I always do.” Not so much. But winter storm? Not.

Anyway, it seems as though winter storm #saturn will miss us and a couple hours later, the online A2 Snooze posted another article recanting the winter storm watch. Time will tell if we get any of #saturn or not but I’m betting not.

Then, they posted a *third* article, this one reporting that last month was the second snowiest February on record for The Planet. This surprised me at first. I think we have had *one* storm with more than a few inches. It’s total was something like seven inches and that was pretty wet and slushy. Nevertheless, I think that statistic might be right. We may not have had large accumulations but we had day after day after day of snow “showers” or snow “flurries”. Whatever. That kind of stuff is what causes the black ice conditions we have been struggling with, pedestrians and drivers alike and I don’t even want to think about what it must be like to commute via beeceeclette under those conditions.

Was there more snow back in the “old days”? You know the ones, when every family had a mom and a dad and ate a nice home-cooked meal at the dinner table every night and the skies were not cloudy all day, except that somehow we had to walk to school through 10 feet of snow or whatever, going uphill both ways… I don’t know. We have cold snowy winters. We have cold dry winters. We have sorta average winters like this one was.

When I was a kid *most* winters were very snowy. But then, I lived in Sault Ste. Siberia. It is in the northern reaches of the midsection of the country in the midst of the Great Lakes, which act like big snow-making machines in the winter. Lake effect snow? Yes. That’s my little brother and I standing at the top of a big snowbank up in Siberia in, well, you can read it, 1963. Up in the Yooperland, this was normal when I was a kid. We did plenty of shoveling but there were also sidewalk plows that came around. Between those and the street plows, we ended up with big snowbanks that we could traverse to school on!

Even then, winters varied. I remember once during what we called a “January thaw”, schlepping up to ski at Searchmont in the rain. Fortunately, Searchmont had enough snow left that we didn’t break our necks on ice. On the other hand, I remember looking out the window of my parents’ bedroom on the second floor of our crappy old bungalow one bright, sun-shiney day in mid-April, looking at the huge amount of snow drooping over the eaves and wondering if spring would ever come.

I am not qualified to talk about weather or climate or global warming. I will say that I am glad that the Yooperland was having a warm, dry winter *last* year when I had to be up there as The Commander was preparing her exit.

P.S. Thanks to Dogmomster for dredging up the photo.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 5th, 2013 at 6:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.