Extremely interesting weather

  • I thought for a minute that our weather had made the Drudge Report: “Fierce Win­ter Storm Sweeps Across Mid­west.” But then it turned out to be talk­ing about Arkansas, Michi­gan, west­ern New York and Colorado.

    That’s the Mid­west?

    Well, that’s what you get for liv­ing in a vaguely defined but easy-to-say region. If I were on the East or West Coast, or in the Pacific North­west or Deep South, I don’t think I’d be look­ing up weather reports and find­ing out about Nebraska. But “The Mid­west” seems to be com­prised in jour­nal­ists’ minds of the left­over bin of states. I’m sur­prised we didn’t get New Mex­ico thrown in to the mix.

    Well, here where the win­ter wheat has been planted and the Black Angus cat­tle have started calv­ing, we don’t have this storm going on, but the tem­per­a­tures have turned nasty. Hav­ing been lulled into a false sense of secu­rity by a ridicu­lously mild win­ter, we don’t know whether to be relieved or not when Weather.com says that the local tem­per­a­ture is 9 degrees Fahren­heit, but “feels like –6.”

    It’ll make the robins and squir­rels go back wher­ever they should be in mid-February instead of cavort­ing about inde­cently as if it were April or May. (A scan­dal!) It’ll make the snow geese stop switch­ing direc­tions. (“It’s win­ter. It’s not win­ter. Dadgum it!”) It’ll make me think of hav­ing soup for every meal. It’ll make lit­tle ameni­ties like the seat-warmer in my car seem like a pro­found blessing.

    The storm story ended up by saying:

    As the cold front moved through Wis­con­sin on Thurs­day, the state got a mix of rain, sleet, snow, light­ning, thun­der and high winds gust­ing 50 mph. Scores of motorists ended up in ditches, and Green Bay had over a foot of snow.

    “It was a great sys­tem,” said Steve Davis, of the National Weather Ser­vice in Sul­li­van. “For mete­o­rol­o­gists, these are extremely interesting.”

    Okay, that’s just nut­ti­ness. We need to all know what it looks like when nature wants us dead. But when it doesn’t suc­ceed and the house is warm and the dog is asleep with her head on Greg’s leg, I think it’s okay to find it all “extremely inter­est­ing” as well.
    Clem pastel drawing


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