The (weather) gods must be crazy

i had a different post planned for today, but you'll have to come back tomorrow to read it because today i must rant about the weather.

i know, it's january, it's cold, it's the north, i should not be surprised. but it's not just that. it's this weird eerily warm and then suddenly brutally cold zig-zag that has me annoyed.

i had planned on going skating again on sunday afternoon. after we got back from visiting doug's mom, i asked doug to drive past the skating spot on como lake. i'm not a good enough skater to go out on the ice where there are small vulnerable children around, and i wanted to see if the the spot was empty.

it was empty, all right. because it had melted! there was standing water on the ice! just like, oh, mid-March, or something.

drat. no more skating for me. it had gotten to the mid-40s on sunday; i just hadn't expected such swift damage.

monday was strangely warm, too--unusual for january in minnesota. when i left work, it was raining softly and 42 degrees. very nice. very nice for April.

overnight, everything changed. i went to bed when it was 37 degrees, and woke up to 17. with howling, howling winds. the boys got quite the truncated walk, let me tell you.

by the time i left for work, it had dropped to 7. by afternoon, it was below zero. in other words, we had a 50-degree drop in about 12 hours.

when i went out to the car to go to work, i couldn't get the garage door open. it had frozen to the ground. the overnight rain turned to ice so swiftly it adhered the door to the driveway.

i had to go out in the howling wind and kick the door repeatedly, all along the bottom, to free it up.

when i walked the dogs in the evening, the winds were fierce and the windchill was thirty-five below. i walked two blocks and then couldn't feel my nose anymore; i feared i'd frozen it, and we turned back. boscoe was so happy to be going home he broke into a run.

by 9:30, it was ten below.

so this should be good, in a way, right? it'll freeze the ice and i can go skating again. except that when water freezes in a strong wind it gets bumpy, and skating is best done on glassy surfaces. especially when tippy me is the one skating. so we'll see.

it was worse up north, where schools were closed because the roads were glare ice on tuesday morning. here's a report from a friend in duluth:

when i left work last night at 9 it was raining and all the road surfaces had a thick thick glaze of ice on them.

it was a very slow and fairly tense drive home--i watched a guy in an SUV who was tailgating me on london road go sliding off into a guardrail on the curve at 44th east; i watched him in the rearview mirror, that is to say.

a monson truck in front of me went fishtailing around the gentle curves of london road. and i very nearly slid into our garage--not the car hole part, but the un-door part of the garage, because our long 80' driveway with its gentle downward slope was a luge run that a zamboni couldn't have improved upon.

so i guess we were spared that, anyway.

i'll let you know how the skating rinks fare. there's also a warmup due; they're saying in the 30s by sunday. and you know what that means. another thaw. i think the skating gods are trying to tell me something.

a note on the photo: from the Duluth News-Tribune website. residents of Duluth playing hockey--on skates--on the street.