The Party's Over...

It looks like summer is over for good. We missed the big storm that dumped snow out East. But it's 10 degrees at the moment, with a wind chill of minus three. And that's an improvement from yesterday, when the wind chill was on the order of minus 15, and felt every bit of it while we were walking around in it. The newspaper the other day said we'd have freezing temperatures "for the foreseeable future." The high temperature so far this month is 32 degrees.

I finally got a vision yesterday of what winter is going to look and sound like around here – relentlessly gray, with wind knocking hard against the car when we drive and whipping along the siding when we're home (and, sometimes, blowing our cheap front door wide open – terrific). This picture only gives a hint of it:

A court security officer explained his view of Fargo's year to me a few weeks ago: Any nice day you get after October 15 is gravy, and he'd never seen a Christmas that wasn't white. We have just a dusting of snow down right now; the same eighth of an inch is blowing constantly from place to place.

This morning, I went downstairs to our garage, hopped in my truck, and drove to the courthouse to get a little work done. To get into the courthouse at odd hours, I pull up to the garage and wave my ID in front of a sensor. Well, today, three out of four of the Pathfinder's windows were frozen shut – and this is having been in our garage overnight, and warming up for 15 minutes on the way in! I had to move the truck, step out of it and wave the card. Hardly a hardship, just surprising.

I learned a new term the other day: "Snirt storm." It's what you get when there's high winds and not a lot of snow on the ground already – a whipping mix of snow and dirt that freezes to the consistency of rock when it finally does settle. It'll wreck your car if you hit it, and can even derail a train if it gets bad enough. They're rare, and, apparently, a hell of a thing to see. (Interestingly, though it's a well-known term around here, it gets fewer than 20 hits when Googled.)