Snow Cover.

It's cold out there, and the moon on the crest of the newfallen snow sparkles about as it should—a fine way to ring January out and drag February in. I was ready for spring, was happy to see the pansies beginning to recover from the last snow, but this ought to set us back about to the right date, the right spot, ought to hold the pansies as they were and keep my way-too-late-planted daffodils and tulips from arriving too early. This is how it goes in January. You want for a sooner spring. You know you shouldn't want for it. You want for it anyway.

Rainfall totals coming. Busted rain gauge and the impossibility of converting six inches of snow plus two of sleet has held us up thus far. Doppler-estimated seems the way to go. More to come, more to come.

That woodstove works OK. I'm mired in chapter seven of book two, but I'm not cold.

Dog. Boots I bought in Boston. Split oak. Coffee. Sour mash. Snow shovel. Four or five layers of shirt. School on the edge of starting back up. This is a life about which one probably ought not lodge complaint.

Sledding Snow.

Many and big thanks directed towards the person of JBW, who pushed me back out into the finest sledding snow I've seen since the nineties, I think, or maybe 2000, if that was 2000—whenever that was, back on Carr St., when we picked up those two big snows back-to-back in grad school. It may have been 2000. I was in my second apartment, across the street from my first, so that must bring us screaming into the last decade, but still and no matter: JBW, he of the MD and MA upbringing, knows from snow, and as he said, 'Today the runner sled is king,' which means we're packed, we're powdery, we're icy, we're of the sort of snow that even a homemade 2'x4' 1/4" plywood sled—slider?—would and did do in a pinch, though the steering left something to be desired.

Cold. Sleet like a textbook definition. Roads packed down to where you wouldn't want to be out there.

In the oven right now rides along a roasting chicken, some yellow-fleshed potatoes, and, as soon as the timer dings, some skinny little carrots to finish off our one-pan meal. The fancies want 12 degrees tonight. They also wanted a foot of snow, but that doesn't mean that later on I won't step out onto the back porch, covered over again by a half-inch of snow that didn't even make the radar, and see what cold feels like.

Much talk today about how this is not the sort of snow you see all the time. That this is the kind of snow you only see every few years. Not so much amount, but type. There's a lot of bluster over here at ANYLF—never seen it rain like that, don't remember it ever so hot, etcetera—but this is for sure a five-year snow. Maybe ten. This is and was a go-down-in-the-basement-and-build-an-unsteerable-sled snow. And that's good, because that's about the way things went today.

I'm thirty-five. It feels right about now like an unsteerable sled pitched me several times off it and down a hill. I love it.

Not quite...

...the foot they promised, but at least six inches of snow, maybe eight, followed by as much sleet as i've ever seen. It's been sleeting—hard—since five or six this morning. Still sleeting. Best sound in the world. This has something to do with temperature layers in the air. Past that, you'll want an expert. More to follow. There is an idea around ANYLF GlobalSnowDay HQ about a sled made out of plywood.

WFMY, WGHP.

Same song, deeper verse.



Nobody quite seems to be on the same page about just where that one foot line might be, but this is how things go. NWS says 8 to 11 inches. Well, that's not true. They said that all morning, and then this afternoon they added "or more."

Don't touch that dial.

Really? Really?

from the NWS: ...THE HEAVIEST PRECIPITATION IS EXPECTED TO FALL FROM 4 AM SATURDAY THROUGH 4 PM SATURDAY. THIS MAKES THIS AN UNUSUALLY LONG DURATION WINTER STORM FOR CENTRAL NORTH CAROLINA...

Eric; Van.

Thanks, WFMY and WGHP.

Your Source.

Friends and fans of weather, if you're not keeping it tuned here, it seems like it may be about time to start to possibly consider maybe keeping it tuned somewhere.

Winter Storm?

They say snow. I want to say that I both do and do not believe. News 14 says ice. There, I'm closer. I do have a vision of AMR and the cats and the dog and yr hmbl svt, ANYLF, all piled into the shed and onto the guest mattresses while the woodstove burns along apace. And I want to say that that there vision is not the worst I can imagine. I could manage that. 48 or 72 hours of coffee and woodstove and animals all piled in and on would be a fine way to close down January. So: absent a limb through the building or the outbuilding, I say bring it right along, if you please.