Winter is here, I think?

It’s been a couple of weeks since I had a chance to write. I was looking at my last posting and noticed that I was whining about how warm it was on Christmas. Well, to say the least, things have changed. Well sort of!

Remember the Polar Vortex? Well, it is back and has already made a couple of visits to Minnesota this month. That got the meteorologist over at one of the local stations all excited and she announced that there was snow in the forecast during her “tease” at the top of the newscast last night. By the time my eyes stopped rolling around, she admitted that it would be a chance of flurries 90 miles north of here in Charlotte. I wish they wouldn’t do that. I can just imagine the school kids getting their hopes up with visions of snow days in their future.

Some cooler weather is on the way next week but we seem to be in a snowless pattern; cold clear days interspersed with warmer and rainy weather just before the next frontal passage. It’s still a couple of weeks before we get the end of winter prediction from Colonel Beauregard (After so many blown forecasts, I don’t trust Punxsutawney Phil anymore) so we’ll just have to blindly slog our way through the rest of January. I have my heavy weight coats and my light jackets and just in case Mother Nature can’t make up her mind, I know how to dress in layers.

You know, I won’t lose any sleep if it doesn’t snow this year. Having grown up in Florida, I used to get really excited about snow, and snowless years used to leave me feeling unfulfilled somehow. But a lifetime of worrying if the freezing weather will be an ice storm instead of a dusting of powder and a few years of running projects in Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, New York and New Jersey have sated my appetite for winter weather. I have been told that I would feel differently if I took up snow skiing but I keep thinking that I would wind up like Sonny Bono. You say cross country skiing, but I say that looks like a lot of hard work in freezing cold. Besides, after watching the movie “The Revenant” I have seen enough snow and ice for this year thank you very much.

To my friends who post pictures of the mountains, lakes and glaciers in the Rockies covered in pristine white snow, I say THANK YOU at the top of my voice. I’ll just live your snow laden treks vicariously, siting in my easy chair with my cup of hot chocolate, with marshmallows of course, basking in the glow of my gas fire logs and say “That’s beautiful!” Oh MY!