20 December 2009 not even winter yet

Winter officially begins tomorrow, 21 Dec. at 1247 EST. Looking out the door, it appears winter has already arrived.

The red rhododendron in our front yard will shake this off and bloom beautifully in the late spring of 2010. The plant is admirably adapted for mountain growth zones. Atop the higher Appalachian peaks, there are forests of rhododendron reaching heights that dwarf me and stretching for acres. I recall at about the age of 10, reading a Himalayan climbing expedition journal that mentioned traveling through dense rhododendron forests that exceeded 20 feet in height. At the time, I’d never seen a rhododendron of any size. Now I can think back and at least begin to imagine the beauty that surrounded the expedition members. For them, on their walk into base camp it was more obstacle than object to appreciate.

We turned in, last night, just past midnight, after a four hour scrabble game. We have one of the expanded sets with a game board that rotates on ball bearings and an increased number of letter tiles. During the course of the game we drew every tile from the bag and played all but three tiles. Each of us held a “Q” and Gloria had an “L.” She beat me by about 50 points or so. The couch has a back segment that folds down as a table. It provided a good place to put the game board.

I was up at 0430 to load the stove with more wood. I was up again at 0730 to take the dog out and retrieve the newspaper. There was still no cable/internet. After bringing Loki in, I cleaned another two inches of snow from the steps and deck. When I finished that and came in at 0820 we had both cable and internet. We still have no word as to what caused the outage. Gloria will ask for some sort of billing credit or refund due to the length of the outage. We might get something. We certainly won’t if we don’t ask.

Breakfast was buckwheat pancakes and thick-cut pepper cured bacon. I really love Burger’s dry-cured bacon. It’s hard to find but certainly worth it.

The rain gauge displays a rainfall total of 0.12 inches today and 0.08 inches for yesterday. The large dome of snow mounded over the collection funnel must be slowly melting and tripping the gauge. The rainfall equivalent for snow can be as high as 0.1 inch of rain for each inch of snow, or as low as 0.01 inch of rain for the dry powder common in the western U.S. The water content here was high; almost wet enough to squeeze water from. It would be good snow fort, snow ball fight, snowman material. It is bad snow for older men to shovel. I took great care to push it rather than lift it. Each shovel load was about 50-60 pounds. The water content made it fairly easy to slide each load off the deck. At least, I thought that yesterday afternoon. By this morning various muscle groups and bone spurs made me aware, yet again, that I’ve aged more than I care to believe. The damage done to my spine in September 1998 had long-term consequences that no neuro-surgeon can undo.

All things considered, Loki may have earned a new training collar. She’s a good dog if one overlooks a tendency to take off on trips that she shouldn’t take and ignore our command to return. There are quite a few dogs in the upper valley that run loose and have formed their own pack. We don’t need Loki joining a pack. There are also quite a few feral dogs in the county, a lot of abandoned dogs, and the random coyote pack; all of which are hazardous to the health of a dog that has been an indoor dog all her life. Neither Gloria nor I like using electrical training devices. But we like losing a dog far less.

The high temperature today, 31.82°F, was recorded at 0000, midnight. The snow on the ground has begun forming a crust, making it harder to walk in the snow. The melting driven by ground temps above freezing has put films of water onto the roads so the probability of glare or black ice is high as night falls. It will be treacherous out on the deck tonight when I drag the dog.

“Black ice” when I was growing up, was that horrid stuff found at the sides of roads, a mix of cinders, dirt, traffic trash, and anything else that wound up being compressed and re-frozen over and over. It often began as frozen slush, when it could form sets of tracks at intersections that destroyed alignment and controlled the paths of cars as surely as if the ruts were rails and the cars were on train wheels. “Glare Ice” was the term we used for the nearly impossible to see film of ice that coats roads and steals all hope of traction as you drive onto it. The meteorologists have assigned “Black ice” to the material I knew as “Glare Ice” with the latter becoming the alternative name of choice.

It’s time to start the clam chowder.