Local Warming

Sorry to have been gone so long, but it has been a busy holiday season. I hope everyone who reads this had a Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Happy New Year or happy tenth anniversary of the day she ran off with the mailman.

Alma, Nebraska, enjoyed a white Christmas for the first time in four or five years, but it's all beginning to melt away. I am told that some winters here there is no snow at all, but we had enough to make it look like a Christmas scene from a Currier and Ives painting. Further, late on Christmas Day we were visited by what the weather people called a "freezing fog". I had never heard of that before, but what it did to the trees was magnificent.


The "fog" left little feathery ice crystals on the branches of all the trees. It looked like a fantasy creation by a Hollywood studio special effects team. It was not the heavy caked kind of ice that can cause so many problems, this ice crumbled and fell away at the slightest touch. It was almost like a dream sequence from a movie.




These are shots of the snow covered lawn area near my parking spot. What's interesting about it to me are those little footprints in the snow. They belong to a very busy squirrel who apparently doesn't believe in hibernation. I see him at various times of the day racing back and forth from his nest, which is hidden somewhere within the tree. Those tracks of his fan out to form a semicircular pattern from the tree's base as he searches for food. I thought that at this time of the year he would be curled in a furry little ball within his hideaway sleeping out the cold weather. Apparently he has other plans.

It is getting warmer during the day and the snow is starting to melt. The white stuff has already disappeared from most of the roadways and sidewalks and is now melting from the lawns.

By the end of this week, according to the forecasters, most of the snow will be a memory. Friday the temp will be between 45 and 50 degrees, which means it's time to wash the car. Now those in California will


probably say, "That's not warm!"
Well, once a person adjusts to this climate, 45 or 50 presents opportunities not available when it is a few degrees cooler. My poor car looks like it's been through a mud war and deserves better treatment. The do it yourself car wash in town will probably be very busy this weekend.

I was startled one day to see someone using the car wash when the temperature was below freezing and was told that some people do that regulary to wash the road salt off the under portions of the car. Sure, some of the water freezes to the car surfaces, but if the salt is gone, that's OK.

People here continually ask me how, as a Los Angeles transplant, I am dealing with the cold. I patiently explain to them that I am not having a problem. I visited Nebraska at Christmas time on several occasions. I flew out for my oldest daughter's birthday in January, and I flew out when my youngest graduated from the U. of Nebraska in Lincoln (normally referred to as UNL) in December when the wind chill was -38 degrees. I am no stranger to cold weather. I have cold weather clothing and may have been the only guy in L.A. who owned two sets of thermal long-johns. And, of course, when I was in the army I spent a year in Greenland, near the North Pole. Maybe I'll talk more about that next time. I have discovered that some interesting things are going on up there.