Snoooooooooooo

I'm glad I got my outside chores done over the last week, because I woke this morning to find the ground and trees covered with snow. There's not a lot of snow -- maybe an inch. Fairbanks is a desert, of sorts, and we never get a lot of snow at one time. It just never goes away.

Seems ungracious to complain about it when it's starting so much later than usual this year, though.

I'm fairly sure that I never actually realized what winters in a temperate climate were like until living in Illinois for a few years in the early '00s. Intellectually, I had always known that subarctic/arctic winters were harsher than the temperate sort, but I suppose I had always imagined them to be shorter versions of the winters I was familiar with ... like, maybe it doesn't snow 'til early November and then it melts in March or something like that. The whole concept of a winter where snow falls AND THEN IT MELTS AGAIN and you go back to having what feels to me like fall (thirty degrees and bare brown trees with maybe patchy snow in the shadows) was a real eye-opener. I always used to look at pictures of medieval clothing and think, "But how do you SURVIVE in the winter?" ... and yes, I know that winters during the Middle Ages were colder and longer than they are now, but still -- I always heard "winter" and thought "four feet of snow on the ground for six months". Which is actually quite unusual in most places.

Snoooooooooooo

I'm glad I got my outside chores done over the last week, because I woke this morning to find the ground and trees covered with snow. There's not a lot of snow -- maybe an inch. Fairbanks is a desert, of sorts, and we never get a lot of snow at one time. It just never goes away.

Seems ungracious to complain about it when it's starting so much later than usual this year, though.

I'm fairly sure that I never actually realized what winters in a temperate climate were like until living in Illinois for a few years in the early '00s. Intellectually, I had always known that subarctic/arctic winters were harsher than the temperate sort, but I suppose I had always imagined them to be shorter versions of the winters I was familiar with ... like, maybe it doesn't snow 'til early November and then it melts in March or something like that. The whole concept of a winter where snow falls AND THEN IT MELTS AGAIN and you go back to having what feels to me like fall (thirty degrees and bare brown trees with maybe patchy snow in the shadows) was a real eye-opener. I always used to look at pictures of medieval clothing and think, "But how do you SURVIVE in the winter?" ... and yes, I know that winters during the Middle Ages were colder and longer than they are now, but still -- I always heard "winter" and thought "four feet of snow on the ground for six months". Which is actually quite unusual in most places.

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