And then rain

No images this post, which is too bad because there was some really impressive snow fall. The kind that's big and fluffy enough to show up without a flash and dark background.  By the time I was out of class and could have taken pictures it had shifted to rain.  That's not good.

Snow when it's cold as Hell can be annoying, but it's not much of a problem.  Beyond shoveling.  (Note that after the blizzard I had to shovel pretty much to midnight to do the bare minimum.)  The worst is wet snow because its heavy and sticky.  Dry snow, the kind of snow you get when it's really damned cold, you can just shake off.

Rain is evil.  Not in the summer when it's warm, that's fine and sometimes divine, but when it's cold as Hell well then...  Rain is hypothermia.  Rain is ice.  Rain is so much weight being placed on tree branches that they snap.  Rain is power outages.  Rain can take light fluffy snow that's already fallen and make it into heavy back-breaking shoe-grabbing progress-slowing ick.  Rain = not good when it's cold.

And so, today, it rains.

Forget about the global average temperature for a while and let me tell you about southern Maine.  Coastal southern Maine.  The greater Portland area if you want to get specific.  (For those unfamiliar with the terminology, the greater Portland area is an area greater than Portland, not the greater part of Portland.)

We used to have seasons here.  If you've been reading every post this will be familiar.  Toward the end of the year it got cold.  Then there might or might not be a minor January thaw, then (whether or not there was a thaw) it got damn cold.  Until it got warm and that was spring.  There was a similarly recognizable summer.  And after that a recognizable fall.

The weather has always been unstable, but the seasons not so much.  There were freak days when it might snow in summer or be hot in winter, but the reason they were freak days was that they deviated from the well established pattern of the seasons making sense.  Plus, they tended to come few and years between.

We just had, according to the news, the biggest blizzard in my lifetime.  My lifetime and then some.  Two days later it's warm enough for rain.  There are no seasons here any more.  If there's a two day blizzard you can expect that it'll be cold for two days.  Otherwise not so much a two day blizzard.  But beyond something like that, the present is no predictor of the future.  Cold today doesn't mean "Probably about as cold tomorrow;" warm today doesn't mean, "Probably about as warm tomorrow."  "Feels like [pick a season]," doesn't tell you anything about what time of year it actually is.

It didn't used to be that way.

But it has been my entire adult life, more so every year.

Right here, right now, the climate has changed.  One can and probably should fear what will happen as it continues to do so, but for those who deny that climate change is a thing.  It's in my lifetime, and I'm not that old.

I need science to tell me that this isn't an isolated incident; I need science to tell me that this extends beyond my portion of southern coastal Maine.  I don't need science to tell me that the climate here has fucking well changed.  I need only pay attention to the way things are now and remember how they were then.  I can also compare notes with people who were adults then, to make sure that I'm not just making my childhood out to be idyllic.  (First off it wasn't, much of it downright sucked.  Second, no I'm not.  People who were adults at the time remember when we had seasons.  Plus you can still see the shift taking place more or less every year, always in the same direction.)

Right here, where I have lived for longer than I can remember, where my family has lived for generations, the climate has changed and is continuing to do so.  God only knows what this is doing to crops that need to keep cold the winter through lest they try to bloom early only and die with the next frost.

Blizzard over.  Now there's rain.  I'm damn glad I'll be getting a ride home today.

Blizzard over.  Now there's rain.  I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to work that way.

(Image post) Blizzard over, shoveling not so much.

The plan, such as there was one, didn't have me writing this post after midnight.

Originally I was just going to stay inside all day, then I was reminded that there were plans for tomorrow so the plan was altered more or less, to "Wait until the damn wind stops, then shovel."  Based on photos I took the wind stopped round about 8:18.

Or at least that's when I finally got to work.  Picture without flash because I had to take it through the window in the storm door.  Getting the door opened involved shoving it through the snow I was taking a picture of.

More or less the same shot just with the door opened, one step forward, and with flash:

I think this looks pretty, also you can see one of my shovels:

And I was surprised to discover that the second shovel is actually visible here, it's not the wooden handle.  Here's a hint, to find it I had to rake through the snow until I hit something:

Ok, so some pictures taken, it was time to start working, and here's a bit of a problem.  The only real way to properly express tedium is with tedium.  So prepare for a lot of images.

In the beginning it looked like this:

Work work work and it goes to looking like this:

More work more work more work and it looks like this:

(Remember that that's looking down on the part that remains to be shoveled, which makes it look smaller than it is.  You definitely cannot access the street without crawling through a snowbank at this point.)

At this point I had the idea of turning around and taking a picture pointed back at the house:

And then opted for the same direction when I did break through:

Points of interest are the second shovel, no longer covered in snow, and the lack of a driveway.

If you're wondering why the snow all got shoveled to one side (picture right) it's because the wind never really died down all that much and throwing it in the opposite direction was an untenable plan.

Another thing to remember, when it's cold as hell and you're taking flash pictures, hold your breath.  Otherwise this might happen:

That is not an alien cloud being trying to make contact and establish peaceful relations with earth people, that's what it looks like when I breathe out and it's fucking cold.  Without flash you might be able to get -

Mother fucker a plow just came by.

Without flash you might be able to get a semi-decent picture while exhaling, but with flash you'll definitely pick up your breath.

Ok, so, driveway.

And the plow came by again, probably making it so I'll have to shovel out again.  When it went by once there was a slim chance it was using the street for transportation, but the second time makes it clear it was actually plowing.  Given which side it did first, most of the snow plowed would have ended up on my side of the street.

Anyway, driveway:

(note how level the snow on the picture's left is/)

If you think you can see through the shovel, you're not imagining things, it's just broken.

Still the best shovel I have.

Also note that the ideal of a built in lens cap is great and all, but it tends to stick when it's cold.  That's the strange dark spot on the bottom right.

Remember the level snow that I told you to note?  This is a view from the street of what became of it, and that pile will get higher as I haven't even broken through to the street, much less cleared the driveway, yet.

Still work to do.

And...

Done with the driveway:

Is that a car I see?

Yup that's a car.  Still needs the snow around it cleared, but before we get to that:

This snow drift has Godzilla spikes.  Ok, maybe not Godzilla, but that sort of spike on the ridge of its back, clearly juvenile in form, but left alone soon it will be snowzilla.

For the record, I left it alone.  It wasn't in my way.

Also before we get to the cleared around car, have a side view of the giant pile of snow:

Car cleared out around:

Giant pile of snow, front view:

My house:

The path up the front:

From a lower angle:

The only tools I used:

(the two shovels, the one in back I use to break up ice which wasn't necessary today)

Remember that shot I said looked pretty at the beginning?

Here is it after being cleared, not so pretty but much more walkable:

And finally to bring us full circle, this is what the front path looks like if you're facing out:

And that was a lot of fucking shoveling.

-

[Added]

I forgot to say why the shoveling isn't over.  Do you see my side walk, the one that runs the entire length f the property from one neighbor to the other, in any of the pictures?  I don't either.

The Blizzard, this morning, (Images)

Ok, so this is what it looked like when I got up this morning:

View out the side window of my living room, the screen obstructs somewhat, but that's two cars that are half covered (front half in both cases, even though they're pointed in opposite directions) in snow:

This is my front steps:

(Those lines are where snow must have fallen through the gaps between the boards in my porch.)

This is my back yard and fence:

What it looks like right now (image post)

So I'm actually about to go to bed, and a bit late especially given how early I traditionally wake up (whether I want to or not) and how much sleep I've missed lately.

But then it occurred to me to take a blizzard shot or two.  Snow traditionally shows up when you have a dark background and flash.  At night everything is a dark background (pay no attention to the streetlight in front of my house) and I have a flash.

So I gave it a shot.  And the lens cover thing didn't want to open because it's too damn cold:

So I manually opened it and got this nice shot of the house across the street:

And these are my front steps:

And for anyone wondering, it's much worse than it looks in the pictures.

But I made it home alive

So I left for my appointment in the middle of writing the previous post.  Got rides in and back which is useful both for the purposes of not freezing and for time.

Anyway, blizzard successfully navigated.  Prescriptions gotten and filled.  Appointment had.

Good stuff all around.

When I came out of the pharmacy my sister was on the phone with my dad.  My dad being the one giving me a ride.  My sister wanted my dad to tell me that there would be disks shooting up into the sky and laser beams coming down out of it.

That's my sisters way of saying that the expected flooding may dislodge manhole covers* and thunder-snow is a definite possibility.

Thunder-snow was once described by Lewis Black thus: They don't even have weather that strange in the Bible.

And, of course, the worst is yet to come.  Everything so far has been prelude.

Though the wind has definitely picked up.

-

 *Generally giant metal disks, round so that they might not fall into the manhole the way square and rectangular ones sometimes do, though not always, as evidenced by the one that I once fell into that happened to be square/rectangular.  Sidewalk manholes tend to retain the square shape deemed unsafe elsewhere.  Don't ask me why.  I can guess, but do not know for sure.

Why are there only blizzards when I have to walk between cities for an appointment? (Now with images.)

Relatively straightforward question.

The seasons, such as they are, have ceased to exist.  When I was younger it used to get cold sometime near the end of the year, there was an occasional January thaw but barely worth speaking of by present standards, and then it got damn cold.  Until such time as it got warm, and that was spring.  At which point, with less than once in a blue moon exceptions, it stayed warm until it got cold near the end of the year.  Now not so much.

The old overused cliche was, "If you don't like the weather in Maine, "Wait ten minutes and it'll change," and that could be a fairly good, if over generalized, description of the weather.  Now it seems a similar thing could be said of seasons.  Don't like the season?  Wait till tomorrow.  Odds are good it'll be a different one.

I remember when we put a new roof on the garage.  As I recall the job took five days.  In the first four we had what would be considered, weatherwise, one typical day for each season.  Don't remember what happened on the fifth.  I do remember that the summer like day was hot as Hell, and the winter like day was cold as Hell.  If you're wondering how one can say, "Hot as Hell," for extremely hot and, "Cold as Hell," for extremely cold, read some Dante the "Hot as" refers to the hottest portions (which are damned, literally and otherwise, hot), the "Cold as" refers to the coldest ones (which are damned, again literally and otherwise, cold), and the existence of the two leads me to speculate that there must be a temperate zone somewhere in between where Hell actually has a relatively nice climate.

Anyway, this is our second blizzard of the winter, and the first one that's more of a BLIZZARD! than a blizzard, and like the first it just happens to fall on a day when I have to walk between towns to get to an appointment   The good news is that this time I have a way to contact the person to see if it is cancelled and thus, if it is, will not have to walk in and wait around in the cold for a while to see if the other person will show.

[Added]
And as a side note, the six inches of snow falling right now is not a part of the blizzard, it's from a different storm that wasn't expected to hit here.

[Added, again]
These are the views out my two living-room windows of the, "This is the snow that was so insignificant we never mentioned it until it started falling, the blizzard comes later."

(As always getting close to the screen makes for interesting patterns.

(Next one taken from greater distance utilizing zoom.)