Here it is, February 29th. It is bad enough that February is such a lousy month, weather-wise, but now they add another day. If I were doing it, I’d add the leap day to some nicer month, like June. Giving June 31 days every four years would be ideal and not mess things up much since that would give 4 months in a row 31 days, all of which are warm months.
For those that looked at my blog last February 2nd (under sports), you’ll know I’m not a big fan of the Super Bowl. However, the one yesterday was interesting as a football game as it had everything: underdog vs. perfect season and a truly exciting last 10 minutes. The only drawbacks were having to have to listen to Troy Aikman for a couple of hours and the fact the NY Giants won.
First, Aikman. If I were a UCLA grad I’d be embarrassed that one of my fellow alums—assuming Troy actually graduated from college—had such a poor mastery of the English language. I’ve yet to listen to a Fox broadcast where he was doing the color where he didn’t butcher the native tongue to some extent—i.e. “we was”, “they is”, etc. I swear the man treats the “g” in any word ending with “ing” as silent. There has to be someone out there that is better. (If I hear “I’m gonna tell ya.” one more time, I’m going to throw a shoe through the TV screen.) To think they used to make fun of poor Dizzy Dean for using “slud”.
As far as the Giants were concerned, I must confess to not being a fan—never was, won’t be now. As far as my rooting for a professional football team is concern, I tend to move around depending on players—primarily the QB—and coaches rather than follow a team based on geography. Over the years I’ve rooted for Graham and Brown, Namath and Ewbanks, Bradshaw and Noll, Merrideth and Landry, and, currently P Manning and Dungey. (Note: Brady and Belichick aren’t included, primarily because I’m not a Belichick fan.) Otherwise I go with a team trying to prove something. Yesterday I was hoping the Patriots would win just so they’d have the perfect season and shut up those petty ’72 Dolphins.
Seems to me that if anyone should appreciate perfection it would be that team and they should welcome any team that could duplicate their feat. Instead they gleefully break out the champagne every time a team that is approaching an undefeated season loses. It’s kind of like dancing on someone’s grave for spite. I was hoping the Pats were going to end this.
So, at any rate, the Giant fans have their win and they can now go back to where ever it is they go those years when their team finishes out of the play-offs. Also they can practice their boos for Eli and “Tom must go!!” chant for next year, because you can expect to hear both come next November.
This is what it looks like when we get 6 inches of Lake Effect Snow in 12 hours. Unless you live in an area where this kind of weather pattern occurs, you have no idea what it is like to go from sunshine to a complete white-out in a matter of seconds. The bands of snow–called “streamers”–can be as narrow as a half mile or less but produce snow at the rate of 3 to 5 inches an hour–this not only cuts visibility to zero, but, since the squalls are usually accompanied by high winds, can glaze roads in seconds.
We’re lucky in that we live on the fringe of most of the LES but, when the winds are from the Northwest or really blowing from the west, we can get socked with LES off Lakes Ontario or Erie. That is what happened beginning yesterday afternoon and into this morning. Imagine too that a year ago this time we were playing golf.
Remember this? It is the 2007 hurricane prediction. I want to know if it is ok now to come out of the cellar or are we going to get hit with a dozen or so storms before the end of the month?
I know a bit about weather and can prognosticate right up there with the local tv weather people. While I don’t have access to the latest computer models, I can read a weather map and figure out from the location of the jet stream and various highs and lows what will happen in the next day or two with a fair degree of accuracy. However, I’ve always been amazed at those–primarily media people–who rush to press with these long-range predictions (as well as those who make and believe them). To me, the hype does little but promote either panic or complacency, while increasing ratings and inflating egos. In truth, to make a prediction on the weather for more than a few days is little more that an educated guess and to make one for a season or, in the case of the hurricane experts, a full 6 or 7 months is impossible.
Unfortunately the public, in general, and the media, in particular, move on to other things once the initial response to these predictions passes and forget them entirely. (I say “unfortunately” because, since they forget, they give the next prediction, especially if it is dire, too much credence.) It will do us well to remember the accuracy of the April 2007 hurricane forcast when April 2008’s comes out.
I took this this morning from our hill looking back toward town. The fog came in during 20-degree temperatures, causing the frost to cover the trees. Sure makes for pretty country.
There is irony here if you look for it, I doubt that there were 60,000 votes cast in the general election last week in any one of the areas. Also, there seems to be a problem with how to spell piorghi–”pierogi” is how my friend from New Britiain, CT spells it and I see it is either “pierogy” or “pirohi” in the article. At any rate, Hilary knows when to jump on a sure thing.
The local weatherpeople have a new word to describe pelleted snow: “grauple”. I would guess they are trying to catch up to the Eskimos in the number of words for snow. I admit, I had to look this one up:
Grauple: Soft, opaque hail with a snowflake-like structure that bounces off of hard surfaces. Also referred to as snow pellets.
I’ll admit too at being surprised they are actually using a single word to describe something where two words can do it, usually it is the other way around. They use terms like the temperatures are “rising up”,- or falling down” and be careful when you’re out on the icy “roadways” and lately have taken to adding “hour” on to times, i.e. “midnight hour, one o’clock hour”. I always figure they need these extra bits–like reading today and tomorrow’s temperatures for half the towns on the local map–to stretch what would be a 1 minute presentation into 5.
At any rate, if your kids are excited when they look out and see snow pellets bouncing off the sidewalk, just tell them “Relax, it is only graupling.”
In case you wondered about the statis of the black kitten that was dumped here a couple of weeks ago, if you look on the lower right hand corner of the photo below you will see she is with us. (Look for the eyes.)
She has taken to my wife–ignoring the fact that it was I who pulled her from the woodpile–and follows her around the house, sits on her lap when she is working on the computer and, as you can see, listens raptly when she practices violin. We have named her Midnight but prehaps it should have been Mozart, since she seems to enjoy the classics.
Last night we had the first frost of this growing season, over three weeks later than normal. It is so late, in fact, that there was little need to protect anything in the garden since it had all been harvested.
(Family story: When my mother went into the hospital to have me on October 6th her neighbor decided to wait to the next day to pick a bouquet of flowers to take to her. That night the flowers were killed in a frost. Because of this story, I’ve always been aware of that first frost and, if it didn’t occur before my birthday on October 7th I figured we’ve had a long growing season.)
When something like this extra couple of weeks happens it is convient to blame it on global warming and, maybe, it is, but it also could just be a glinch in the weather patterns combined with a little luck. While I can’t recall a year when we went this long without frost, there have been plenty in memory where we’d get a frost during the first week of October and then have three weeks of 60-degree weather into November.
Then too, this late frost may be because I planned ahead last spring and created a “tomato house” to give my tomatoes and peppers a headstart in the spring and protect them against an early frost. It wasn’t necessary to use this protection since the tomatoes were done bearing a week or two ago and all I needed to do was get the last of the peppers picked–about a peck. So maybe my preplanning caused the gods to delay the frost–lets hope it works next year as well.
Yesterday I found this kitten in our woodpile–cold, starving and scared to death. Apparently someone had dropped her off thinking that she would survive in the country. Had I not found her, she would not have–actually two of our older cats discovered her and had her trapped under the deck. She is very tiny and, I suspect, not much more than 8 weeks old–if that. Judging from the fact that she took readily to a litter box and seems unafraid of either my wife or I, I suspect she was raised around humans.
Now I’m no friend of PETA, having raised and slaughtered chickens, ducks and rabbits plus hunted and fished, so I’m not against the killing of animals when necessary but the dumping of a pet–dog, cat, ferret, bird or fish–with the idea that it will survive in the wild is beyond all my understanding. How can anyone be so cruel or stupid or both? Stupid in not neutering their pets and cruel for dropping them in the country. If nothing else, the offspring can be taken to the local SPCA which will find them a home.
For some reason people seem to have an idea that cats will just move into the nearest barn and live happily ever after on mice and the farmer’s largess–the fact that the nearest farm/farmer to us is over a mile away didn’t seem to deter whoever dropped this one. This is the fourth animal that has wandered in here this way–two other cats and a ferret. Luckily for all, I was able to rescue them and find them homes.
The fate of this kitten is still in abeyance–inspite of the fact she is really a lover, we already have 4 cats and don’t really need another. But whatever happens to her will be a lot better than her fate would have been wandering in the woods and her life will be a lot longer and much more pleasant.