Snow Archives

January 25, 2013

Waking Up to Snow

The world was white when I looked out my Athens hotel room window this morning. I didn’t see the official reading, but I’m going to guess we got less than half an inch. It was a very dry snow. You can click on the photos to make them larger.

Van was covered

My van had an impressive covering of snow in the parking lot. The desk clerk and I explained to Friend Jan how to use a credit card to clean the ice off your windshield if you don’t have a scraper. (No, Jan, you don’t use the credit card to PAY someone to do it for you…)

Fortunately for her, the snow was so dry that the windshield wipers swiped it right off.

We didn’t make it to Cape Thursday night. We stopped at too many neat places along the way. My brain is too fried to try to post them tonight. You’ll see them in the days to come.

January 24, 2013February 16, 2021

Snow is Like Cold Sand

I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. After doing a dry run at the Athens County Historical Society and Museum, I decided to rework my presentation to include more photos taken in Athens County.

I was feeling a bit sleepy (make that REALLY sleepy) around 2 a.m., so I thought I set the alarm on my cellphone for a 20-minute nap. I set it all right, but failed to hit the DONE button. I woke up with a start at 4 a.m., saw the time, saw the phone alarm, then decided I was still too tired to do anything. I set the alarm for 7:30 and hit SAVE and DONE.

After getting the show put together, Friend Jan Norris and I headed downtown for breakfast. Excellent food. Jan had eggs, two sausage patties, hashbrowns, toast and an order of pancakes (which she pronounced the best she had ever eaten). “I heard that you’re supposed to eat lots of carbs when it’s cold,” she justified.

Presentation went well

I had a good audience for my photos of Southern Ohio and the years of protests at Ohio University. There’s a good chance that I’ll be working with the group for quite awhile. (You can click on the photos to make them larger, by the way.)

An icicle!

Jan was excited to see an icicle hanging above us. I tried to explain how guys at Scott Quadrangle, the dorm I lived in, would suspend a thin wire out a second or third floor window, then drip water down it. Layers and layers of ice would build up until the ice spear would be 20 or 30 feet long and a foot or more thick at the top.

The university, not looking forward to writing a “Dear Mom and Dad, Your child took part in an innovative experiment to determine just how long an icicle can grow before breaking off, ” letter, put an end to the practice.

Starting to find the style

She was looking a little less like a rainbow-covered Michelin Man today. [Wife Lila suggests that I clarify that the Michelin Man look is from all of the layers of clothing, not the natural Jan. Of course, Wife Lila hasn’t seen the size of those breakfasts….]

She got cold AND snow

Jan went roaming around town while I was wrapping up at the museum. She came back to say that it was snowing. Indeed, it WAS. A fine dusting of dry snow that didn’t look like it was going to amount to much.

We made arrangements to meet OU friends Terry and Lyntha Eiler for dinner, then drove around to find the apartments Wife Lila and I lived in when we were newlyweds. We found one for sure, and maybe a second one. It looked “almost” right, but I couldn’t be positive. By this time, the ground was turning white and some of the intersections were getting slippery.

We had a great dinner (sure wish I had left off the onions), then walked outside to see the sidewalks covered and quite a bit on the roads where the cars hadn’t worn it off. On the way back to the motel, we passed a car that had slipped off onto the median.

We head toward Cape Thursday if we don’t see bad weather rushing at us. I told her she’ll have a chance to scrape ice off the windshield in the morning. I mean, after all, she wants the WHOLE cold weather experience, right?

January 22, 2013January 22, 2013

Cold: A Matter of Degree(s)

Road trip Day Two checked off some boxes:

Friend Jan wanted to go to to Mary Jo Fabrics in Gastonia, NC. Done.

She got to see snow

Norris wanted to see snow. She got to see snow going through the West Virginia mountains. This area got about a foot-and-a-half of snow in the last week or so. I would like to have taken a better photo, but my model was whining and running inside.

She wanted to feel cold air

She wanted to experience cold. She got to feel minus 3-degree wind chill when we pulled into Athens around midnight. I have to admit the 10-16 mph cut right through you.

From now on, “cold” will be when she turns the AC down to 65.

Photo gallery of Day Two

Here some other photos of the day that I’m too sleepy to write about. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery.

December 26, 2012December 24, 2022

Christmas Snow in Cape

If news reports are right, there’s gonna be a lot of stale bread in Southeast Missouri in the aftermath of the blizzard warning that predicted as much as 18″ of snow. There was a rush on the stores for staples in the days leading up to the storm.

The Cape area received from 4 to 6 inches, but winds gusting as high as 40 mph piled it up to look much higher in some places. The hard blow caused the wet snow to stick to vertical surfaces. Fortunately, there was very little sleet and ice in the storm.

Video of spinning ornament

Here is a video Brother Mark shot with his iPhone of Mother’s snow-covered lawn ornament spinning in the wind. (You can see the same ornament spinning in an afternoon thunderstorm last summer.)

Mark: I should have bought her a pony

Mother’s cordless phone was getting a little iffy, so I bought her a new one with three remotes for Christmas. Brother Mark called and said, “I wish you had bought her a pony.”

“A pony?”

“Yeah, ’cause if you had bought her a pony, we could be out riding it and having fun…”

“Instead of setting up the phone?”

“Yep.”

Here is an Amazon link to the Panasonic phone I bought her. The range is great: it worked all the way to the far end of the basement. I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t reach all the way to the clothesline in the back yard. Sound quality is excellent and she loves the speakerphone.

Of course, I’m not the guy who had to set up something more complicated than a missile defense system. (Gee, do you think I might have planned it that way?)

More snow photos

Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery. Click here if you want to see what our snows looked like in the 1960s.