Thursday, November 20, 2008

Day 43/365 - Big Coat Weather



I had to dig my overcoat out of the closet earlier this week and it doesn't look like I'll be putting it back any time soon. It hasn't been earmuff cold yet, but it's definitely been scarf and gloves cold in the mornings. Yesterday the temperature didn't poke its nose north of 40 degrees the whole day and tomorrow we're supposed to have flurries. Hopefully they'll last longer than the five minutes of flurries we had earlier in the week. If it's going to be cold, it might as well snow and be pretty as well.

It never actually gets that cold in this area. In the ten years I've been living here I think the temperature might have dropped into the single digits maybe 3 times and I don't think it has fallen below zero once. Usually the 20s are about as low as it gets here in wintertime. It gets much colder in Missouri where I grew up. Negative temperatures are fairly common there. Not to be gross, but sometimes it would be so cold that when I was waiting outside at the bus stop in the morning the snot in my nose would freeze up. If you've lived somewhere that gets really cold in winter, you know what I'm talking about.

Missouri regularly gets fairly heavy snowfall as well, unlike DC/NoVA. Not Buffalo or Green Bay heavy where the snow is measured in yards rather than inches, but it wasn't uncommon for us to get 10-12 inches of snow in a day when I was a kid. If DC gets half that then it's treated like a natural catastrophe of biblical proportions. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, because it means the Federal government shuts down and I get a free day off. Hopefully having a Chicago guy in the White House won't make it harder for the government to get snow days.

I need my free days off in wintertime. There are books to be read, old movies to be watched, and grilled cheese sammiches and tomato soup to be eaten.

(Taken with my Nikon D80)

No comments: