The Winter Solstice was at 04:19 GMT on December 22. For me, in Minnesota, it happened at 10:19 PM CST last night. And today, the first official day of winter, it’s sunny and currently 41° (F) out.
At least we got snow for Christmas. We don’t always.
We interrupt this regularly scheduled blog post for an Important Weather Update! Afterwards, please stay tuned for News From Space!
We’ve been having a good old-fashioned Minnesota February this year: bitter cold and lots of snow. It harkens back to the days of yore. (Of your what? Of your yore lore, of course.)
You know you’re a True Minnesotan when you wake up, realize that while it’s 19 out, it’s also a clear blue sky because the storm passed during the night, so you hurry through breakfast so you can go out and play in the snow.
By which I mean shovel your sidewalk and driveway before the condo crew show up and spoil the fun.
Washington (D.C.) is the expected epicenter of an approaching patch of extreme weather, an historic storm that is, in large part, due to the damage our modern society has done to the environment. And utterly without irony, there’s going to be a big snow storm there, too.
The crazy weather does seem suited to the craziness going on in politics. As with climate change due to the increase of CO2, the flow of other pollutants into public discourse has changed the social environment.
The Earth’s weather is getting chaotic, and so is its politics.
Whoo-Hoo! Did you feel that? We just went around Darkness Corner. Not that circles have corners, but — zipping along at 67 thousand miles per hour — we just swung past the point of longest night and shortest day.
For those of us north of the equator anyway.Those of you below it must regret the days starting now to get shorter. My condolences. (If it’s any consolation, the Earth’s speed is 107 thousand kilometers per hour.) Naturally the Way-Back link is to the 2012 Winter Solstice post.
This empyrean reason for the holiday demands extra-special music…
When, oh when, will I learn to keep my mouth shut! After going on about the unseasonably warm weather — three straight days with the temperature locked at 46-ish — and even posting pictures of the vanishing snow…
I wake to what you see here and a 25-degree drop in temperature. My (currently still working) indoor-outdoor digital temperature gizmo tells me it’s currently 21 (point nine) outside. Said gizmo also tells me the high today was 32 (point whatever), which was probably at midnight.
So, Hello Winter, I see you found us again. Now go away!
Today is a date most folks living in the USA write as 12-13-14, and for anyone who loves numbers a date like that demands a post of some sort. I’d planned to goof off today, maybe catch up on some movies, but there’s just no way I won’t post on a date with a sequence like that.
Of course, others write today’s date as 13-12-14, but they’re not from around here. And there’s just no helping those who insist on writing 2014. The real error is putting the year last — the sensible way is 14-12-13, which allows proper sorting of dates chronologically. We should all change to that immediately.
If it’s not obvious yet, today is just a meandering ramble.
Pure Hawaiian White!
In a former life as a college Film & TV student, I worked on a mock commercial written and directed by a classmate friend of mine. It featured two guys in a run-down warehouse — one wanting to buy from the other some “premium Hawaiian white stuff” for his wife who desperately needed it.
The seller opens a case containing bags of white powder. The transaction is interrupted, and the commercial ends, with both men fleeing sudden sirens and flashing red and blue lights. The piece is really funny because it was done in the mid 1970s, during the height of the sugar shortage when prices skyrocketed.
Just this past week we had a whole other kind of “white stuff.”
I’ve been trying to re-synch my clock to a more normal daylight cycle. All my life I’ve been a “night crawler.” My very first official job involved a retail position, but we worked outdoors. I noticed how, no matter how tired I was, once the sun fell, I got a fresh breath of wind. And even at my advanced age, staying up all night is easy (and so is napping all afternoon).
My (ex-)wife used to say I must have vampire blood in me. It’s true I do like to bite necks, but so far I have drawn only moans, no blood. It may be more that I’ve always identified with the idea, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Life is filled with so many interesting things, who wants to waste time sleeping? And for all my life, five hours seems to do me just fine.
But the point here is that I’ve been trying to become more of a day person.
