Cold Weather Archives

February 2, 2014

There WILL Be a July

I’m sitting here in Florida where the temperature is 77.4 degrees (the heat index drops it to 71 degrees), listening through the wonders of the Internet to police calls 1,100 miles away in Southeast Missouri. It sounds like an afternoon and evening of slip, slip, sliding away. The poor guys running the plows and salt trucks are getting Super Bowl updates on their two-way radios, but I don’t think they are overly happy being out there. The radio traffic overall has dropped off. that’s a good sign that those with sense aren’t venturing onto the roads.

Anyway, here’s a photo that might give you hope that another warm July 21 day will come again just like it did in 1967. Of course, that diver’s granddaughter won’t be able to duplicate that dive because Capaha Park Pool is nothing but a memory now. (Click on the photo to make it larger.)

I must have gotten a special waiver on the rule that “if you climb up the ladder to the high dive, there’s only one way down – off the board.” Maybe it’s because I knew one of the lifeguards.

November 26, 2013

Athens Winter Storm Video

If you’ve been following my travel saga on Facebook, you’ve heard me worrying about the weather. Well, the winter storm caught up with me in Athens, Ohio, Tuesday.

Temperatures hovered just above the freezing mark all day, so I got to splash around in cold, miserable rain that was trying to make up its mind. When I sat down to dinner, it was raining with an occasional flake mixed in. Just as I started to get up, I pulled up the weather ap on my tablet. It was clear from looking at the amateur weather stations that the line of 32-degree temps had just hit us.

I called Wife Lila to tell her that huge flakes of the catch-em-on-your-tongue variety were falling from sky.

“Take pictures,” she said

“Take pictures,” she said. “That’s cool.”

“You don’t understand,” I tried to explain to someone in Florida, “the SNOW is cool to look at, but the air it’s riding in is COLD.”

“Take pictures anyway,” was her response. “Shoot video.”

“Yes, Dear,” was my response (as it should have been the first time she asked. I’ve been away from home so long my reaction time has gotten slow).

The video is pretty neat

OK, I’m glad she made me do it. The picture at the top of the page is a screen grab from the 37-second video. That’s why it’s not as sharp as if I had taken it with my Nikon still camera.

November 14, 2013

Looking Down Broadway

I had a few minutes to kill Wednesday night, so I took a cruise down Broadway to look at the river. When I found out there was a big difference between my nice, warm car and the wind whistling down behind the floodwall, I retreated.

To keep the venture from being a total waste, I popped off a couple of frames looking west on Broadway from between Water Street and Main. This Florida boy has been spoiled by the long warm spell SE Missouri has been enjoying. Another few minutes and I’d have been as blue as the sky.

Here is a collection of Broadway stories I’ve done over the past few years.

October 26, 2013October 27, 2013

Halloween Comes to Me

When you turn into your motel and see something like this in the parking space next to you, you have to wonder if maybe you made a bad turn somewhere.

The young folks (I hope they are folks, since they are in rooms around and above me) were headed to the 39th annual Halloween party sponsored by the city of Athens and Ohio University.

I had just come from covering my first OU football game since since 1970. It wasn’t the 57 degrees and sunny promised. It was in the 40s, cloudy and with a brisk wind. I warned the gal in the blue costume that her skin would match her clothes if she stayed out very long.

It’s a wild party

The Halloween (and many other block party events) have the reputation for degenerating into public displays of drunken debauchery, sometimes ending up with cars being overturned and fires being started.

I was looking forward to covering my first Athens riot since the university closed in 1970 two weeks after four students were gunned down by the National Guard at Kent State.

The only problem was that it was cold, I was tired and parking spaces were non-existent.

So, when one of the kids asked if I would take their photo with one of their cameras. I honored the request, then decided I’d rather have Halloween come to me instead of me chasing it.

I’m officially old.