Variable Conditions

My reaction to this weekend's freak snowstorm, on getting up Sunday morning and going out to get the paper, was, "That's it?" But this was highly variable depending on where you happened to be. When I saw on the news that an area around the Massachusetts/Vermont border got 30" of snow, and a wider area around that got 20", I realized how much it must suck to live out in the boonies. Even Worcester got a pretty serious hit, and an informal survey of people in my office who live between 128 and 495 found that four to six inches was the average.

But in closer to Boston, it was much more of a whimper than a bang. We heard on Saturday night that the peak of the storm would pass over our area between 2 and 6 am, and as a bonus I got a firsthand look at what was going on at 4 am, courtesy of the dog. When she wakes one of us in the middle of the night, it can mean only one thing.

[This is not the first time she's done this during a storm. There seems to be some correlation between severe weather and nocturnal stirring. It may be a moon influence, or possibly an atmospheric vibe she feels, or something else entirely, but it is real.]

Since I didn't yet have any winter outerwear handy (still in storage in the basement), I layered up under a raincoat and added a scarf and a waterproof hat. But when we got outside, it was more rain than snow that was falling, and the sidewalks, driveways, and streets were covered in maybe an inch of slush. That's what I found several hours later, plus the sun was out, and it stayed out all day, so the slush melted away within a few hours. That's definitely one good thing about off-season storms: the weather tends to move back to more or less normal quickly.

Maybe it wasn't so bad earlier in the month, when it was warmer than normal.