Old Man Winter

Winter arrived with a vengeance yesterday. We have already had some cold weather, some hard killing frosts, and even a bit of snow. But the last couple of weeks have been very mild, with temperatures above 65° as recently as Tuesday. Last Sunday for dinner, I barbecued chicken. All of that has come to a screeching halt. The change was presaged by a series of loud thunderstorms on Wednesday. By Thursday, they were predicting a major snowstorm. The Weather Service initially said that it would have started at about 3 in the afternoon on Thursday. That would have been a problem because I had a dinner that I was supposed to attend way out in the western suburbs on Thursday evening. The keynote speaker was a friend who has recently been elected to a county level office. It’s her first foray into politics as a candidate, and she ran an outstanding campaign. I wanted to be there to show my support. If the snowstorm had arrived on schedule, there’s no way that I could have made it there. As it was, I was worried about getting from the dinner back home late in the evening on back roads. Fortunately, between the dinner and home, there was nothing more to contend with than a bit of intermittent sleet.

Sometime after midnight, the storm kicked in. By morning, there was about 6" of snow on the ground. We did not go into work Friday morning- they hadn’t even plowed my street yet, and it was still snowing hard. We did get out and shovel the driveway. The ground has not yet frozen, so the bottom inch was wet, heavy slop. But we did shovel, and it’s a good thing. This morning we have seen a number of people really struggling because the slop layer is now frozen. Late morning, we went back and got up what the plow had kicked up, as well as the additional three inches or so that had fallen. I finally got into work at about 2:00 yesterday afternoon.

Now it’s really cold out. It got down into the single digits last night, and is predicted to again this evening. It is not predicted to get above freezing through next weekend, so a lot of the snow may be with us for a while here. The up side is that it’s really pretty out right now. Plus it really feels like the holiday season. In the main, I’m glad we had the storm. It’s very early for a snowstorm of this size in Chicago, but I now feel ready for winter.