Thursday, January 08, 2015

Livin' In A Winter Wonderland

     ...It's highly overrated.  -6°F this morning!  That's -78 Centrifugal, of course, and cold enough to freeze your socks clean off either way.  TV weatherkins are begging viewers to "wear several layers of loose clothing" and that's just to stay inside and lookit the various flavors of timesuck screens -- if you actually go outdoors in suboptimal clothing, you've got about ten minutes before frostbite begins to set in.  In another ten, the synovial fluid in your joints freeze and you're stuck in whatever pose you were in until someone comes along with a teakettle-ful of warm water and thaws you out.

     We did get a little sun the last couple of mornings, hooray!
     The snow is not too deep and remains fluffy wherever it has not been compressed or thawed.  But I'll tell you what, along about Thanksgiving, the squirrels around here were getting fatter and fatter, until some of them could barely manage the usual dramatic leaps and were just lumbering lumpishly along, clambering up the fence posts and pausing to catch their breath before waddling along the tops of the boards to the nearest tree, where they'd blink up at it a bit, trying to work out how it'd got so far away, then push off, drop out of sight, and reappear making their way up the trunk with painful effort.  Now I know what they were putting on all that fat for.  Haven't seen a one since the snow and cold started.

10 comments:

  1. Yep..we had a cold front move through here in South Florida. The temp nwent waaaaay down to 62.....but the sun is shining .....

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  2. I pointed out the fat squirrels to my wife the other day and said, "it's clear that this warm spell we're having is a fluke."

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  3. Thank God I'm on the banks of Lake Erie - that thermal mass makes it noticeably warmer here!

    Merle

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  4. That's very cold, we're expecting high winds here in UK and the weather people said it's due to the very cold air in the US generating really low pressure systems that cross the atlantic to us, but I never thought it was that cold over there. Hope you can keep warm.

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  5. Centrifugal?
    Used only on Frothop out on the hidden frontier?

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  6. "But I'll tell you what, along about Thanksgiving, the squirrels around here were getting fatter and fatter, until some of them could barely manage the usual dramatic leaps and were just lumbering lumpishly along, clambering up the fence posts and pausing to catch their breath before waddling along the tops of the boards to the nearest tree, where they'd blink up at it a bit, trying to work out how it'd got so far away, then push off, drop out of sight, and reappear making their way up the trunk with painful effort."

    That's how you want 'em in case of a sudden economic downturn.

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  7. They were smarter than we are...

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  8. Bruce: possibly!

    Rick: I never liked the taste of squirrel. I'll eat 'em but I don't like 'em.

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  9. Let's stay POSITIVE. I mean, degree-wise.

    -6F is still:
    252K, or
    454R

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  10. Your fat squirrels remind me of the weather person interviewing the tribal member regarding a weather prediction regarding the coming winter.
    Said tribal member, when queried, told the weather person to expect a colder than normal winter.
    Weather person asked the tribal member what indicators were used to make this prediction.
    Tribal member replies, "White man have heap big pile of wood."
    The logic is irrefutable.

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