So How’s the Weather?

Thanks to good fortune or the mysterious bends of the Jet Stream, all of last summer both overheat and drought and giant storms and floods managed to miss us. In the fall and winter thus far blizzards have also avoided us. Weather systems either slide in a south-northwesterly direction past Detroit to the north; else, obeying the same angle of advance, they passed beneath us and left us high and dry. An interesting map of global temperatures for 2014 showed a while back our region, call it the Jet Stream Dip—bounded by Minneapolis to the west, Detroit to the east—colored blue to indicate unusually cool temperatures whereas the rest of the country was yellow and orange, streaked here and there with brown to show unusual heat and dessication.

Yesterday, finally, came the exception to prove the rule: a genuine snowstorm. It endured a good 24 hours and left us under nearly a foot of snow with wind-blow drifts that here and there topped four feet. Yet even this storm, you might say, just barely touched us with one wing. But today, under a brilliantly sunny sky, we must tackle a forgotten problem: Where to put those giant mounds of frozen water. It felt like I was at the bottom of Grand Canyon already—just shoveling a path to the garage to reach my new Toro Snowblower… When I bought it two weeks ago, we were joking around here: “Now that we have one, it’ll never snow again.” Wrong again. Plenty of work for the little Red Devil—enough so that I now regret not buying the next bigger version…