Snoooooooooooo

[sholio]

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.

Comments

[tei]

...yeah, that's wierd to me to. For me, winter starts with a few snowfalls that don't really mean it, and then for a few weeks every time it snows people predict that "this is the one! It's sticking around this time!" And then one day there is an audible whump as an entire season's worth of precipitation is dumped on the ground and doesn't go away until April.

Which is why I really like reading British newspapers in the winter, because every other headline is something along the lines of "WHITE STUFF ON GROUND. ECONOMY STOPPED DEAD. APOCALYPE IMMINANT."

[sholio]

To be fair, I suppose the worst part of winter is always right after the first serious snowfall, when the roads are all ick and no one remembers how to drive in it, and places that aren't all snow all the time have to go through that EVERY TIME IT SNOWS. And they definitely have my condolences for that!

[mackiedockie]

This. The first couple of storms are the worst, and all the people riding in new SUVs end up farther off the road than anyone else *g*. No snowbanks built up yet to bounce off of...

Though Christmas is just as bad--something about Christmas jingles makes everyone forget how to drive. It's like a sonic weapon of mind control.

[sholio]

Heh, a snowbank saved my ass one winter when I got rear-ended. The guy behind me didn't see me signal a turn into a driveway, hit me hard and sent me sailing across the driveway, kerploof into the snow berm. My car was fine and I was fine, though very startled.

[schneefink]

Apparently yesterday it snowed in Moscow! I am excited, even though all I saw was rain. In Vienna we don't get a lot of snow (less each year, sadly), so I'm really looking forward to the Russian winter. Except the cold, of course. I'm expecting thick white snow blankets on the ground and on the roofs, afternoon walks through falling snow, and I'll be very disappointed if I don't get them.

[sholio]

I hope you get a nice snowy winter and get to have all of that! :D I really do like snow quite a lot, all complaints to the contrary aside. *g* Fairbanks actually doesn't do nearly enough of the big fluffy-flake snow for my tastes. We get light powdery snowfalls of an inch or two at a time, and we're lucky to get one snowfall in a year that is sticky enough to build snowmen or make snowballs. I grew up in a wetter, milder part of the state, where we had a lot of ocean influence on the climate and heavy snowfalls with wet snow all winter long ... which must have sucked to drive in, but I was just a kid, I didn't care about that. *g* I miss those big, picture-postcard snowflakes.

[schneefink]

Snow is one of the things that you never get exactly the way you want it: either not enough, or too much, or not the right quality... and people can't decide on the "right" quality, which doesn't help! ^^

[michelel72]

I thought snow was fascinating when I was a kid. I always wondered if each year would be the year we finally got some. We did get a dusting that actually stuck, sort of, once when I was in high school ... but no, no matter how many times I read about people eying the sky and determining that a certain type of cloud promised snow, I wasn't seeing any such thing in those oh-so-frigid mid-50s Gulf Coast winters.

And now I live in New England and would be delighted to see no more than one snowfall a year, and that three inches or less. (I can't get over the way drivers lose their heads in snow here, either; I didn't grow up with the stuff, and I've had very few problems driving in it, so what's up with that, people?? Learn to drive in it or get off the road! Heh.)

[sholio]

Constant exposure does take the shine off it. *g* I think as an adult, I appreciate snow somewhat less than when I was a kid, too, because rather than "snowmen and snowballs, yay!" it's more like, "Nasty roads and plowing, ugh ..." (But I still like snow, even if it's inconvenient. I guess you have to like snow if you live here, or move somewhere else ...)

[astridv]

Yeah, I don't know how you people in the North deal with it, not just the snow but the darkness as well... I guess one gets just used to it? Here in Germany last year we got snow that wouldn't melt for several weeks and traffic nearly ground to a halt because no one here knows how to deal with that. In normal winters many people in my town will just ride their bikes through all of it, so last year with its unusual amounts of snow turned getting places into a logistic nightmare. (And when I say unusual amounts... it was maybe six inches, but that's a lot when you're used to one or two, that melt away within a day.)

I wouldn't mind living in a more southern, warmer climate, really.


I always used to look at pictures of medieval clothing and think, "But how do you SURVIVE in the winter?"

According to "The Name of the Rose" the poor even went barefoot *brrr* I can't even imagine.

[sholio]

I find the winters a little harder to deal with now than when I was younger, mostly because when I was a kid I just didn't know any different. Like you said, though, it's something you get used to ... my first Fairbanks winter when I got back from Illinois was really hard to get through.

According to "The Name of the Rose" the poor even went barefoot *brrr* I can't even imagine.

I *know*! My feet hurt just thinking about it. *shivers*

[brightknightie]

As you know, I grew up in AK, and sometimes I miss it with all my heart, but... there are reasons and reasons that I now live in CA. :-)

[sholio]

I think that I would miss it if I never had any winter at all, to be honest! But ask me again in another three months ... *g*

[winter_elf]

hey - how about some pictures of that legendary white stuff? :)

No snow here. And this weekend it was very warm - so I was running around in a tank top and sandals.

[sholio]

It's very white out there today! I'll see about taking some pictures later this afternoon. :D