And the danged kids are home again tomorrow. They missed last Friday, and Mon-Wed this week.

We're all going a little stir-crazy around DC.

It got up to 50F today, and I still have 18" of the damned stuff. And it's getting cold again! We don't have the equipment for this...

(At least we didn't lose power this time.)

-jk

I know where you're coming from! Why, last night the temperature here dipped all the way down into the 60's, and people this morning were out in their parkas with the hoods up, and their dogs all swathed in fleece coats. To make it even worse, today the temperature didn't even make it into the 80's, 79 degrees was as warm as it got.

Yeah, Winter's a bitch!



tanstaafl.

By the way, sorry if it seems like I'm being insensitive by making light of your snow situation. In the past, I've been in snowed-in without power for three days. It's not pleasant.

In particular, I'm acutely aware of the problems which exist in cities which get snow rarely enough that they don't have any infrastructure to handle it. Doug, having lived in Alaska, probably had it a bit easier there than people in milder climes, because it's something that the towns there deal with every year, so the infrastructure is in place.

Though now that I've said that, I'm curious if that's actually true. It's something I assumed, and something that people say all the time, but I have no firsthand experience. Doug, are Alaskans properly prepared for heavy snow? Or do Alaskan cities have all the same problems that, say, Seattle has when it snows heavily?

Not insensitive, but I think a lot of folks don't know how rarely and occasionally the more southern areas have serious snow.

When we got the "Snowmageddon" (and its followup "Snoverkill") in 2010, we were without power for most of a week. I was getting really worried about the pipes - inside temps were in the mid 30's when the power finally came back on.

Blizzards: all fun and games until someone loses their power!

The DC area averages a little more than a foot of snow a year, and usually in nice, bite-sized portions - the sort that solar plowing usually clears in a day or so. (As long as the idiots are paying attention and not abandoning cars everywhere, anyway.)

2010 and this one were two of the 5, top, all-time snowstorms in DC. Two to three feet falling in a day and a half is way more than any of our jurisdictions are able to handle effectively. My Montgomery County assures us that every county road will have seen a plow by 7am tomorrow - almost 5 days after the first flakes fell, and no more than a single lane scraped in many places.

My little Town of 350 houses has a couple maintenance guys; they usually have no trouble keeping up with snow. This time, they were running the plow and the bobcat non-stop from midday Friday until late Sunday afternoon. There was so much snow that it fell back onto the street over the plow. They needed the bobcat to move that snow into the parks.

Of course, my street is the town sledding hill; I have no idea when I'll be plowed out. We did build a nice luge run. And I dragged some groceries in on a sled today. It's (mostly) fun, though!

-jk

I'll just echo everything you said, JK. I'm in Sterling, VA. Our back deck was piled up about three feet due to the high winds that were going most of Saturday. I had two feet on the driveway, and haven't shoveled most of it. We fortunately didn't lose our power either. It's funny, we lost power for about 3 hours a few weeks ago when there was no weather event, but this storm and Sandy never knocked it out once. Go figure.

But yes, this area is simply not prepared for this kind of stuff, and doesn't really have a need to be. I remember a time in high school when they cancelled snow due to some early morning flurries, and by 11am I was walking outside in shorts and short sleeves on completely dry ground. We just don't see much snow here.

The DC area does get fairly frequent freezing rain storms, though. I think it was like four years ago that people had 9 hour commutes home, and people had to abandon their cars on the sides of highways due to the horrible ice conditions on the roads. Tons of accidents that time.

My wife and I were living in a condo during Snowmageddon and we were lucky to have power during the whole thing. We were stuck inside for about a week, which I had no problem with because I finally got my wife to watch the entire run of Buffy This time there was no time for binge watching. Not with a demanding toddler to look after!

The areas that actually receive heavy snow are adequately prepared. Where I lived (Fairbanks) heavy snowfall was uncommon, nonetheless a 12" snowfall is not a problem.

Some of this was that the people themselves are prepared for it. Many people (myself included) have snow plows for their vehicles, and if you came across a pickup truck that didn't have four wheel drive it would be a rarity. A high percentage of the families have at least one four wheel drive vehicle. Consider also that at least six months of the year the roads are icy or snowy and thus the people know how to drive in the stuff. One year a new Department of Public Works manager who came from the East coast thought it would be a wonderful idea to show these unsophisticated Fairbanksans how it should be done and salted the roads. We damn near ran him out of town on a rail. When temperatures remain below freezing for months at a time, all he accomplished was to make the roads slippery at lower than expected temperatures, and as a useful side effect cause rust damage to the cars.

I suppose in a way it would be like someone from Arizona asking someone from Seattle "How do you deal with all that rain?" and you look at them and say "Hunh?" It's your normal environment, you don't think there's anything there to deal with, it's just the way things are.

tanstaafl.

Growing up in Minot, we were worried about the pipes in the basement freezing even when the power wasn't out. That happened to a couple friends, but never to us.

I don't ever remember having any problems in Anchorage. I don't know if it was because there weren't any problems, or if I just don't remember them.

We did have problems in ND one year, even though we had enough snow that it was up to the roof of the garage every year. There was a blizzard that started the Tuesday after Easter. It didn't stop snowing until that weekend. We were snowed in until Wed or Thur.

Good times, especially since my father fertilized the lawn the week before and ended up having to mow the lawn twice a week that summer.

The first year we were in our current house, the winter was pretty mild. The second year, though, had regular temps in the teens and lower. That year was awful as the pipe to our kitchen sink froze several times. We were putting space heaters under the sink and in the basement right below it, trying everything we could to free up the blockages but only the warmer weather could do it.

We even tried leaving the faucet dripping like they say to do. Well, that was too slow and the pipe still froze. I tried leaving it on at a trickle another time, and that didn't even work! I wasn't about to just leave the water on all the time and end up with a $500 water bill, so we just lived with it.

The next spring we replaced our deck, and opened up the floor of the bay window that houses our sink from underneath. What did they find? Well, an uninsulated bay with bare copper pipe! I'm not sure that would have stayed flowing if I had left it on full blast! Thankfully, we never had a leak and now that it's insulated we've never had it freeze up again.

That is much more snow than we typically received in Fairbanks.

But... I remember one time when I was living out of town up in the hills, in a relatively clear area exposed to wind, and we got an atypical weather front that put down perhaps six inches of snow, accompanied by 40 MPH winds. The wind direction, the terrain, the structures, and the parking area all interacted in such a fashion that the next morning I had to go out walking on the tightly packed drifted snow, some of it six or eight feet deep, taking soundings with a broom handle in order to find my car. To make it worse, my wife had left a window on the windward side cracked about half in inch. The car was filled to the dashboard with snow. We had to hire a bulldozer to clear the driveway (a mile and a half long) and it took several days to dig the car out and clear the snow out of it.

Good times, but only in reflection. At the time it wasn't that much fun.

tanstaafl.

WOW.

Is the temp that different between here and Ajijic? It got down to almost 40 last night in Zapopan, but the high was only 70 today.

Yes. We have our own micro-climate here, different even from towns only 10 miles away. The lake (largest in Mexico at roughly 15 by 70 kilometers) stabilizes the weather. Water temperature usually stays in the mid-70 degree range.

At this moment, current temperature in Guadalajara/Zapopan is 52 degrees, temperature in Ajijic is 69 degrees.

tanstaafl.

Interesante, las dos veces que he ido a Ajijic, la temperatura estaba casi igual a GDL y no me di cuenta que hay una diferencia.

Growing up in New Brunswick, Canada, we didn't get as much snow as parts further inland, but it wasn't unusual to have twelve inches at once. It normally started snowing around Halloween, and I can remember more than once having the remnants of drifts hanging around behind the house until early May. In the middle of the winter it got below -40F a couple of times. We actually had a mercury thermometer freeze, which I've never seen since...

Two months later, of course, it could break 100 deg F!

One year we had a very heavy snowfall, perhaps sixteen inches or so, which took about two days solid, and it was blowing a gale at the time, gusting to over 50MPH. When it stopped the windward side of the house (on which lay my bedroom on the second floor) was covered with one huge drift halfway to the roof. It was a good twenty feet deep.

My father opened the front door about half past six in the morning, which was on the OTHER side of the house, mind you, to find there was a perfect imprint of the door in a huge snow bank, some eight feet or so deep at the house, which completely covered the garden, driveway, and car. The wind must have changed direction for a few hours in the night.

When he stopped laughing he had to fill the front porch with snow, as there was nowhere else to put it, to dig out to the driveway where it went down to only five feet deep. Then, when he finally had a four foot wide passage to the outside, he had to transfer all the snow from the porch, which luckily was unheated so it didn't all melt, back outside. Which all in took another two days.

Even though the roads were plowed by the afternoon even on the outskirts of the town where we were, we couldn't get the car out for a week. It took a day to find it, two more days to dig the driveway out, then, of course, we were faced with a twenty-five foot bank of snow and ice which the plow had helpfully pushed off the road onto the verges, including across everyone's driveways...

That took some effort to shift.

I still had to go to school, since the heating was actually working which seemed to be the only allowable excuse to close the place if it failed. I had to climb out my bedroom windows with snowshoes and walk, easy enough since it was now a two foot drop and only a mile in a straight line, which was easily possible under the circumstances.

Happy days of childhood

Glad I wasn't an adult at the time, I could play in the stuff rather than try to move it!

Of course, living in the UK as I do now, it always amuses me when we get about a quarter of an inch of snow and the entire country panics and grinds to a halt. Assuming it snows at all which it very rarely does in Somerset these days. It went a good ten years with no snow at all.

pca

Hey, that's my line!

Where abouts exactly, Patrick?

For me, it was McAdam New Brunswick, then later Saint John, and Fredericton during university.

Sixteen years in Sackville, my father lectured at Mount Allison university. We spent a year in St Andrews because he was running the aquarium there, attached to the Huntsman Marine Research Institute, and doing research on the various critters in it. He was a marine biologist and biochemist.

I met the current Canadian Premier's father there once when I was about eight or nine There's a photo of me standing next to him with my father somewhere in the family archives.

I also nearly had my head removed by an insanely aggressive wolf-fish which went for me when I looked over the edge of the holding tank it had just been put in. I'll remember the enormous teeth snapping shut an inch from my nose for the rest of my life! It was enormous, extremely bad tempered, and really damn quick...

pca

Living in Austin for a time and traveling through the rest of Texas during the winter was eyeopening for my former Colorado views of snow.

Austin never had any serious snow accumulation when I was there, however it did have a few ice storms. Snow along the front range in Colorado tends to be dry stuff that compresses into a decent driving surface when dirt was spread on it. Slick icy spots still formed, but usually not enough to cause problems, even when in a rear wheel drive muscle car.

Austin's pure ice on the other hand was a problem for pretty much every consumer vehicle. RWD, FWD, AWD, didn't really matter when all 4 tires simply spin without moving the vehicle forward. Those incidents are so rare that the city didn't find it financially viable to keep equipment around to handle it.

I was amused when I talked to some people who didn't believe it snowed in Texas. Some of my road trips back home took me through the more northern latitudes of the state where cities did have similar snow clearing capabilities as any city in the front range. Larger low pressure storm fronts sitting around Albuquerque often hit the panhandle just as hard as they would the front range.

Which speaking of those Albuquerque lows, those were the magic words during my childhood to know that school might be delayed or cancelled. Many of the school grounds during those times turned into massive sledding areas for the kids that lived within walking distance. The largest storm I remember happened where the house I was in had a perfect setup for trapping a lot of snow in the back yard. Basically there was a retaining wall about a story high in the middle of the back yard before getting to the detached garage and alleyway. It mostly filled in with no easy way for the wind to blow it back out. Ended up digging tunnels in it and having a blast with my childhood dog.

During the blizzards in North Dakota, every 10 minutes the radio would remind people it was time to open the outside doors wide, just so people wouldn't be trapped inside in the event of a fire.

Ahhh... memories.

I remember stopping at a minor accident scene (school bus slid just far enough off the road that it couldn't get going again), and once I was stopped in the middle of the lane, the camber of the road was enough that my 4WD Toyota Landcruiser quietly slid sideways down towards the ditch, stopping when the off-side wheels hit the snowbank.

Another time, in Eugene, Oregon, I had to make it to Portland in time to catch an airplane, a 110 mile trip. It had snowed earlier that day, then the temperature warmed up enough that Interstate 5 was a sheet of ice with water standing on it. Air temperature about 35 degrees, ground temperature about 30. There were cars and trucks off the road about every half mile. Going up the gentle grades on the road was a real problem because the slightest increase in power to overcome the hill caused the rear end to break loose. Years of Alaskan driving experience proved invaluable then, knowing how to feather the throttle at the first sign of slippage to stay coupled up to the road. I was by far the fastest vehicle on the road that day, making the trip without too much drama.

Oh, BTW, I was on a 600cc BMW motorcycle.

tanstaafl.

I've driven my Moto Guzzi in snow a few times. Such fun.

I hit an iced over bridge with a downhill slope once on the Guzzi. Thankfully I had enough wits to keep power on the back wheel so I didn't fall.

Road a dirt bike on ice a few times. One minute your up and then in a second down. Not knowing what happened.

But 4 wheelers are fun as heck on frozen lakes.