wellllll shit (weather)
Jan. 24th, 2019 07:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7So yesterday morning it was balls-ass cold and the snow was deep and poorly cleared, right?
And then yesterday all day it was in the mid-40s and raining.
So last night I trudge/sloshed home through the thaw.
So, with about a foot of snow, the snowbanks where things were plowed out are pretty tall and solid. They line, unbroken, all the sidewalks and all the roads. That's the nature of cleared snow.
The melt has nowhere to go unless it can carve through these snowbanks.
So the awful length of uncleared walk by Carubba Collision was a rampaging river, which was terrifying, with the huge ridges along it forming dams making several lakes six to eight inches in depth.
There were several other awfully ponded areas too, on the way home. Fortunately I'd thought ahead and worn my decommissioned slaughter boots from the farm, instead of my snow boots. Snow boots are waterproof for several inches but there's more emphasis on being warm. Slaughter boots are injection-molded rubber with neoprene insulation, intended primarily for waterproofness to about six inches, and reasonably water-resistant above that.
These are my old pair, though, and there's a crack that lets water in at about six inches up (it's between two different materials). Now, here's the thing, in rain-- you can kind of see the low areas, and skip around them, so you don't have to go through very deep water as you walk. But with incomplete snow melt, not only does the snow make dams so there's more water collected, it also means you can't just hop off the side of the sidewalk in the corner where it's sunken. That's a two-foot ice berm now, you really can't just casually climb on it. (Especially because not only will it be slippery, it also might be rotten, which means it'll dump you sideways into the deep water or maybe you'll just break your ankle or something.)
(I did have one very philosophical moment, as I sloshed along a deepening pond of former sidewalk, to ponder what parts of me would get soaked the worst if I went down. My hands would probably get the worst, I had decided, in unlined fleece gloves, but water would go up through the cuffs of my rain pants too, if I went horizontal at all, and then would be trapped inside that waterproof layer. I was on the way home though, so I could just strip into the laundry basket, and it being 45 degrees out meant I wouldn't get frostbite or anything in the meantime. But as it happens, I neither fell nor drowned.)
I was going to walk in today; it's going to snow, but it wasn't supposed to get down below freezing until after noon, and I figured that would mean it would stay slush all day. But I awoke this morning to a solid two inches of freshly-fallen slush, which is not only ugly but also dangerous: how much of that water will have frozen? It's impossible to know. And it's going to get down to 25 this afternoon, so...
If I didn't have banjo lessons tonight I'd just hike in and gamble; if the conditions weren't bad, I'd hike home, and if they were, I'd just wait for Dude to pick me up on his way by. But with lessons, we've got to get home fast in order to have time to eat and go. So, I think I'll just drive. I do like to defrost my car and let it run at least a little every week; I'll probably use it this weekend, so it's best to just clear it off now before the temperature drops too much.
I like reading about other people's descriptions of things like the weather conditions and specific logistics of their commutes, in other parts of the world and even often quite nearby-- this is something I absolutely love, with social media. I love being able to say 'well I happen to know it's quite cold in Manitoba just now!' or 'did you know the tomatillos are just coming ripe in Australia', I like thinking about the sunrise in France as I look at my own sky while I'm walking, that sort of thing. So I hope people aren't bored by my fondness for cataloguing mundane details of my own environment; I like to think about it, is all.
I wish it was easier to post images on here. I need maybe to clear out all the images from the image hosting allowance I have on here, but I would have to figure out what posts they go to, and fix the links, and it's not worth it for how few people will look at those posts but I don't want to just break every image because I use my own archive, occasionally, to keep tabs on my own progress and life, and... anyway, if I get in the habit of just uploading my phone photos to Flickr, I guess, I could start embedding them in posts more. I should. I'll think about it.
And then yesterday all day it was in the mid-40s and raining.
So last night I trudge/sloshed home through the thaw.
So, with about a foot of snow, the snowbanks where things were plowed out are pretty tall and solid. They line, unbroken, all the sidewalks and all the roads. That's the nature of cleared snow.
The melt has nowhere to go unless it can carve through these snowbanks.
So the awful length of uncleared walk by Carubba Collision was a rampaging river, which was terrifying, with the huge ridges along it forming dams making several lakes six to eight inches in depth.
There were several other awfully ponded areas too, on the way home. Fortunately I'd thought ahead and worn my decommissioned slaughter boots from the farm, instead of my snow boots. Snow boots are waterproof for several inches but there's more emphasis on being warm. Slaughter boots are injection-molded rubber with neoprene insulation, intended primarily for waterproofness to about six inches, and reasonably water-resistant above that.
These are my old pair, though, and there's a crack that lets water in at about six inches up (it's between two different materials). Now, here's the thing, in rain-- you can kind of see the low areas, and skip around them, so you don't have to go through very deep water as you walk. But with incomplete snow melt, not only does the snow make dams so there's more water collected, it also means you can't just hop off the side of the sidewalk in the corner where it's sunken. That's a two-foot ice berm now, you really can't just casually climb on it. (Especially because not only will it be slippery, it also might be rotten, which means it'll dump you sideways into the deep water or maybe you'll just break your ankle or something.)
(I did have one very philosophical moment, as I sloshed along a deepening pond of former sidewalk, to ponder what parts of me would get soaked the worst if I went down. My hands would probably get the worst, I had decided, in unlined fleece gloves, but water would go up through the cuffs of my rain pants too, if I went horizontal at all, and then would be trapped inside that waterproof layer. I was on the way home though, so I could just strip into the laundry basket, and it being 45 degrees out meant I wouldn't get frostbite or anything in the meantime. But as it happens, I neither fell nor drowned.)
I was going to walk in today; it's going to snow, but it wasn't supposed to get down below freezing until after noon, and I figured that would mean it would stay slush all day. But I awoke this morning to a solid two inches of freshly-fallen slush, which is not only ugly but also dangerous: how much of that water will have frozen? It's impossible to know. And it's going to get down to 25 this afternoon, so...
If I didn't have banjo lessons tonight I'd just hike in and gamble; if the conditions weren't bad, I'd hike home, and if they were, I'd just wait for Dude to pick me up on his way by. But with lessons, we've got to get home fast in order to have time to eat and go. So, I think I'll just drive. I do like to defrost my car and let it run at least a little every week; I'll probably use it this weekend, so it's best to just clear it off now before the temperature drops too much.
I like reading about other people's descriptions of things like the weather conditions and specific logistics of their commutes, in other parts of the world and even often quite nearby-- this is something I absolutely love, with social media. I love being able to say 'well I happen to know it's quite cold in Manitoba just now!' or 'did you know the tomatillos are just coming ripe in Australia', I like thinking about the sunrise in France as I look at my own sky while I'm walking, that sort of thing. So I hope people aren't bored by my fondness for cataloguing mundane details of my own environment; I like to think about it, is all.
I wish it was easier to post images on here. I need maybe to clear out all the images from the image hosting allowance I have on here, but I would have to figure out what posts they go to, and fix the links, and it's not worth it for how few people will look at those posts but I don't want to just break every image because I use my own archive, occasionally, to keep tabs on my own progress and life, and... anyway, if I get in the habit of just uploading my phone photos to Flickr, I guess, I could start embedding them in posts more. I should. I'll think about it.
