Chilly

It has been overcast, rainy, and unseasonably chilly around here for the last week or so. We ran into the first of it on our way back from Placid training camp. This evening I caught a glimpse at the thermostat (well, thermostats, there are several in the house) - all registering in the low 60s.

I try not to complain about the weather: we chose to live here, after all. But when I turned off the heater a month ago I figured that would be it for the season. We'll see if some sunshine bring it back up tomorrow. I'll be miffed if I have to turn on the furnace on Memorial Day. That's just plain wrong.

Spring is Here!

In great contrast to my last post (oh so many weeks ago, I know), there are some signs of Spring around Concord. Despite the fact that it has been pretty cold this past week - the first week of April - we are well on our way:

1. Maple Syrup season is just about wrapped up. After reading Maple Syrup Season by Ann Purmell about twenty times in February and March, we went out to see sugaring in action a few weeks back during NH's official maple syrup weekend. The season was already pretty far long, because we sampled some hot Grade B fresh from the evaporator. In other news


2. I sent off an order form for seedlings for our vegetable garden. Sure, we won't pick them up until Memorial Day weekend, but it is a comfort, looking over the strawa-covered raised beds on a grey morning - to know that our tomato, pepper, tomatillo, and brocolli plants are at that moment growing in a greenhouse a two towns away.


3. The raised beds may be looking a bit forlorn and have nothing but old straw to show at the moment, but there are twinges of green to be seen as well: garlic popping up


4. Although it's been chilly when we do it, Hilary and I have been able to do some outdoor bike rides in the last few weeks. We even did a 30-miler last weekend coming back from an Easter get together in Amherst.


5. Easter! We aren't particularly observant, but Easter is always a fun holiday for us. At the said family get-together, Brynna's easter egg hunt was a real crowd pleaser. Picture one adorable and giggling 4-year old chasing through a yard with 9 adults trailing behind with cameras. Or, better yet, observe:

source: Bill R.


6. The end of snow. Enjoy it while it lasts, Jasper!
source: Bill R.


7. March Madness. Go UConn Huskies! What do you mean "men play basketball, too"?


8. Changing wardrobes. We have bins of hand-me-down girl clothes from our former neighbors. Just today Brynna and Hilary did a grand changing of the wardrobe: culling the extra warm and increasingly small clothes and replacing them with sundresses and shirtsleeves for the coming summer.


9. Ice cream. Sure, it was hovering around freezing when we got it, but the neighborhood ice cream shop opened for the season on April 1st - and we made a point to be there! Not that we sat around outside to eat it through.

Blizzard Nemo

A'yuh, here in New Hampshuh, we got a bit uh snow.
 

Our snowblower-equipped neighbors were out in force to save the neighborhood. Much thanks for their help!
 

All bundled up, B finds a fun snow bank. I was tempted to pitch her off the porch and into a snowbank. For fun, you see.
 

We found that we could not open our back door to let Jasper into the yard this morning, so we cut a path to it by way of the gate.
 

Jasper the wonderdog LOVES the snow. Here he is reenacting the battle of the Somme from WWI.
 

Being near the fence, the snow tended to drift into high piles on the raspberry path. Look closely and you can see the horizontal wires for training the canes: those are 18" apart, and there's one that you can't see that's 18" off the ground!
 

The back door has snow piled about halfway up the lower pane. Fun drifting, too.
 

 

Jasper likes bounding and rolling in the snow. Here, he wades.
 

Brynna did make it to the swingset eventually, slid once to clear the slide, swung once to clear the swings, then gave it up.
 

That's a 4-foot fence. The pile on the raspberries comes almost level with the top!
 
Actually, my favorite part of the storm was last night around 11 pm. I pulled on my backcountry skis (I rock the old-school 3-pin bindings, no heel strap) and went cruising around the neighborhood. Great weather for it, and I had the streets to myself for the most part. The wind was up (sustained approaching 20 mph, gusts up to 30), temperature in the mid-teens, and snowfall over 1" per hour of fine powder. Heading down towards a local park was fine: in places where a car or truck has passed in the last hour, the tire tracks made a nice packed surface. In the park the powder parted around my shins. Heading back home was tough: into the wind. Had I planned a bit better, I would have had a balaclava and ski mask. As it was, the headwind and snow made things quite uncomfortable. As I returned home, I noticed that my outbound tracks down the middle of our street had been completely obliterated by wind and fresh snow - all in less than an hour!

Warm January

For anyone in the Northeast, it has been a very disappointing winter. Since our freak snowstorm before Halloween, we've had much more precipitation as rain (several inches) than snow (less than a foot). This past weekend'spond hockey tournament, after being postponed several weeks ago, still had logistical problems of all kinds trying to keep the rinks from getting too chewed up. Ski areas have struggled even to keep their man-made base, as daytime highs have been routinely above freezing. We've also been effected by the lack of snow elsewhere: if it doesn't snow in NYC or Boston, no one down there thinks to come up here - just not in the mood. Anecdotally, some have seen their crocuses and daffodils poking up through the (not at all frozen) ground. In some places they are already sugaring. My relations in Rochester inform me that they've received barely two feet of snow all winter, for an area that routinely receives 100"+ each year!

To illustrate just how outta whack things have been, consider this graphic:

I worry that B isn't going to grow up to be a cold-hardened Yankee!

Snow in October

You may have heard the reports: we had snow last night. Not just a little, we had what would have been significant even in February, but is downright ridiculous in October. I haven't seen official numbers, but I would estimate about 12" of heavy, wet snow.

The weather has been cold for days. We have waited in vain for the numerous green tomatoes and peppers in the garden to ripen up. But considering that it has been about as cold outside as it is inside our fridge, we didn't get far with that. Saturday morning was the final (outdoor) Farmer's Market for the season: stock up on potatoes, beets, carrots, turnips, and onions.

Knowing weather was on the way, Hilary and I decided to make a mad dash to clean up the back yard and put the garden to bed. The leaves are only half down, but Hilary raked the yard. I pulled up all the remaining shreds of plant life in the garden, emptied half the compost bin into the beds, turned the soil, planted some garlic, and covered it over with the rakings. Take down the swings. Add some guy lines to keep a section of godawful fence from collapsing this winter. Spread some grass seed. Move the porch table and chairs into the garage. Clean up the random trash from the backyard.

American Gothic it is not.

In the final five minutes of that work, late in the afternoon, the flakes started to fly. They continued all through the night and into the morning. We awoke to this:


The remaining leaves on the trees were like nets capturing and retaining the snow. The snow weighed down the branches, the branches broke. We lost power intermittently in the night. Come morning, we had some downed branches in our backyard:

A little damage, but nothing I can't fix in the spring. That's nothing compared to what my neighbors woke up to.


Theoretically, the weather will warm up a bit this week and all this snow will melt away. Let's hope so: Halloween is too early for it to be winter.

Hurricane Irene

A'yuh, that's a lot of rain.

Lost power around 1:00, too, but things aren't too bad right now.  It's quite pleasant and quiet at the moment.  Perhaps the storm will get Brynna to take her first nap in a week.

B still has light in her room thanks to the combination of Twinklepic and AA-to-USB!

(this update brought to you by my iPhone and cell towers with backup generation)

[UPDATE 2011-08-28 22:27 - We got our power back after an hour or two]

Cold Water

We've got our first triathlon of the season - King Pine - coming up on Sunday, and we're gettin' jittery about the water temperatures. It was a cold winter and, although we've had some nice days so far this spring, it hasn't been exactly hot. The last few days has been heavily overcast, chilly for May, and rainy across all of NH, with a forecast for more of the same through the remainder of the week. The Concord Monitor recently had a piece on canoeing Purity Lake, which is more or less the body of water we will be swimming in for the King Pine. The article mentioned stubborn patches of ice. Ice!

Not long afterwards, I did get word from the race director that the lake is, in fact, ice-free. Which only means it is some unknown number of degrees above freezing. Larger bodies of water to the southwest (Winnipesaukee and Newfound Lakes) are registering in the low 50s Fahrenheit. That's do-able with a wetsuit, but makes for a very chilly 10-15 minutes. The first year we did King Pine the water was somewhere around 60 F, and it definitely caused Hilary some trouble. She's a much stronger and more experienced swimmer and triathlete now, but even so... although we both put ourselves through all this training and all, we're not actually masochists.

We're hoping somehow, somewhere, to get in some open water swimming between now and Sunday. Even just a quick splash and a hundred yards would be enough to remind the body after being out of the water for the last eight months. We've done plenty of pool time in the off-season, but it is a very different experience being out in the open water. Stay tuned!

UPDATE 2011-05-19: Yesterday I did dash out from work a touch early and headed off to Clough State Park, which happens to be the venue for a triathlon I did last September. On a warm day people come down to the beach and swim. But in 50-degree weather with light rain in May, with ~50-degree water, it was completely deserted. There was no one else there; no cars parked up on the road. On with the wetsuit, on with the goggles, wade out to my waist and... my feet start aching with the cold. Normally I'd just dunk myself an get it over with, but somehow it seemed better today to draw it out. After about 5 minutes I was up to my chin, quivering at the continual stream of cold water entering my wetsuit from the zipper up my spine. I struck out for about 50 yards paralleling the shore. The cold on my face was unpleasant. It became hard to work my hands. Everything inside the wetsuit felt fine, but the exposed bits weren't loving it. Water in my ear gave me a low-grade ice cream headache. After another 75 yards I got used to it, and ended up doing another 100-200 yards before calling it quits. It should be alright on Sunday, but I'm glad that I took this chance to try it out and wrap my head around it. Transitioning onto the bike with more-or-less numb feet should be a whole lot of fun.

But, on the plus side, it looks like we might actually see the sun that day.

Snow

That's a four-foot fence back there - only the tips of which are visible. I sometimes wonder where the raspberry canes are - then I remember that there's another level of guy-wires about two feet down.



A'yuh, we've had lots of snow this year.

Haze

There is a great deal of haze in the air this Memorial Day. No, I'm not talking about the haze between real and affected patriotism on this holiday (I did hang the flag off our porch, though). Nor am I talking about the very real haze of oh-so-many barbecues going on today. Nope, I'm talking about real, genuine, atmospheric haze. Look off into the distance, and you'll see if as a white veil between you and the horizon. It lends a strange odor to the air that reminds me of campfires and my mother's old iron (no connection, I promise). Observe:

This is just the view down the street. I haven't tweaked the image of adjusted the exposure settings - it really is that hazy out there right now. Turn out there are some wildfires going on in Quebec right now, and we're currently downwind. Beats the heck out of southern california, where this kind of thing happens a couple times a year, I gather. Makes me wonder about hopping on the bike to pick up Brynna later today.

Wind

You may have heard about it on the news: New Hampshire got hit with some serious wind on Thursday night. We managed to get through more or less unscathed, but apparently that was not the case for nearly half the state. You can get all the gory details from your news source of choice, I'll just add our own experience. Being an engineer, I've made a graph:
Although the wind was heavy and the rain was spitting against the windows, things weren't all that bad until late in the evening. The only real downside was that the noise kept Brynna awake late. However, have a look at the above graph, right around 22:30. That's me taking Jasper out for an evening walk. In the rain and 40 mph gusts. Our road, like many, has power cables strung alongside, and quite a number of tall conifers on what tonight was the windward side. So while trying to avoid getting rain in my eyes, I was keeping an eye on the heavily swaying trees above, bracing with every howling gush of wind, hoping that I'd have enough warning before a falling branch dashed my brains in. I've been in gales on mountains before, but that didn't concern me as much as this. This was more reminiscent of getting caught in a thunderstorm above treeline than a walk down around the neighborhood. Pretty wild.

There was a moment of panic when, three minutes from home, the whole sky turned a glowing, under-the-sea green color. Great, I thought, I'll miss getting hit with a downed powerline only to get hit with an exploding transformer! That was followed by an exceptional dark when all the street and houselights went out. They came back after a few lengthy seconds, but it was definitely time to get indoors.

The electricity held out long enough to watch the end of the womens' figure skating competition, then started getting intermittent. Each flicker, brown out, or momentary loss signaled yet another power line getting snapped somewhere in the nearby grid, till it went out quite definitely around midnight and stayed out for some four hours.

Still, by morning, we had power back and there was no damage to the house. The tree in our backyard didn't seem to shed too much. But, when I took Jasper for a run Saturday afternoon, there was a whole lot of debris and trees around. Some had been visited by chainsaws already; many had not. I passed two downed power lines, and more than a few humming generators within a few blocks. So yes, it was pretty exciting, and the party is far from over for a whole lot of people across the state.

Cold Weather Play

Winter comes, the snow falls, the wind is up, and what do the moosesofthenorth do? We go out to play, of course. Taking advantage of the fresh powder, we got all bundled up so that we could go for a walk down to the park.

Brynna ready for her moon shot.


Our neighbors from down the street gowned up and came out, too.


Brynna, as it turns out, is very skeptical of the toboggan. You may noticed that, in a brief moment of forethought, we brought the baby backpack in case we needed to carry her. It is well we did bring it: about halfway down to the park Brynna began launching herself off the toboggan into a nearby snowbank.


The girls got tired of the slide pretty quick, and decided they wanted more wind in their faces by swinging. Negotiating those legs into the swings with clonkin' boots is no easy task - only surpassed in difficulty by getting those legs back out.

Unfortunately, the waning daylight, the increasing wind, and just plain time spent outside meant the girls started getting too cold for their good spirits to last. Brynna was by this point about an hour late for a nap, which didn't help. We ended up beating a hasty retreat back to the warmth, by which time Brynna was well on her way to a total meltdown.

Jasper, of course, is unfazed by the snow. He does, in fact, love it.

I hoped to take enough video footage to be able to put together a montage similar to this autumn one, because the characters and setting were largely the same; only the seasons change. But, the bevity of the outing, the difficulties of handling a camera in the cold with (or without) gloves, and fewer hands to watch the B made this impossible. Perhaps next month!

More Traveling blues

I made my mother cry on Friday.

No, no, this is a good thing. I surprised my mother for her 60th birthday by showing up. She hadn't thought that I was going to make it at all.

Still, that was Friday. It was supposed to be Thursday. It came down to weather, poor timing, and a bad call.

It snowed here on Thursday. This is not a big surprise - it's February in Minnesota, after all. I had arranged to fly from Rochester, MN (RST) to Rochester, NY (ROC) on Thursday afternoon/evening. I had a layover at MSP (minneapolis / st. paul airport, that is) at 7 pm Thursday.

It should have been a apparent that this wasn't going to go well when, the day before my flight, I was pre-emptively bumped to a slightly later flight out of Rochester (RST), 5 pm, which still left me with an hour to make my connection in MSP. When I left the house at 4 to head to the airport, the flight was on time.

By the time I got to the gate half an hour later, the 5 pm departure had been delayed to after 6 due to the weather (and ensuing snarl it caused in flight traffic across the upper midwest). It ate up just about all my slack time in MSP, but I figured that I could still make the connection, because surely things would be delayed in Minneapolis as well. I should have checked: that flight was still on time.

At this point, had I been smart, I would have left the airport and immediately started driving north. RST to MSP by road is nominally about 95 minutes. In this bad weather, it would have been a touch over two hours. It would have been dicey, but I could have made it. Had I been really smart, I would have realized that Rochester would have had problems and gone straight to MSP when I left the house. I would have had plenty of time.

But no, as it turns out: I wasn't that smart. I put my faith in the airlines. How idiotic that seems in hindsight! No one trusts the airlines for anything! Least of all punctuality! No, I dutifully sat at the gate in Rochester for the flight that wasn't going to happen. When the attendant got on the horn at 5:30 to say that it would be delayed past 8, I dutifully got in line to see about my connection. My flight out of MSP was indeed still on time (not sure how they managed that one, but it I checked it a few more times that evening and it did indeed leave on scheduled). Unfortunately, it was the last flight that could get me to Rochester that night. The next availability on Northwest (or NWA's new owner, Delta) wasn't until 10 the following morning.

Well, that really put a damper on my mood for the rest of the evening.

Weather is weather, and I've been stung by it before. Although frustrating, it is tough to stay angry at the weather. No, I was mostly pissed at Northwest for being so unhelpful and getting me to my parents' nearly a full day late...and at myself. Had I taken a moment to think things out, do the math, I would have quickly concluded that there was no way that flying out of Rochester was going to work. Although hindsight is 20/20, I do believe I could have made the right choice and driven directly to MSP and made my flight - if I'd thought it through. My only defense against self recrimination is that it's possible that, had I risked driving to MSP at that time, I could have ended up in a ditch, in which case I'd probably be kicking myself even worse.

All in all, I did manage to get to Rochester (NY) on byFriday afternoon. Boy, was my mom surprised!

On the move again

We are on the move again.

Hilary, Mark, Brynna, and Jasper the Wonderdog are on their way to occupy the new apartment in Concord. Hopefully they won't find it sucha mess of boxes that they can't crash when they arrive.

I am drafting this from the cramped seat of a medium-range aircraft set to whisk me back to Minnesota. This plane is actually a replacement for the one that was supposed to leave over an hour ago. These things happen, although they seem to happen all too often in air travel.

But wait, there's more! I noticed earlier, by checking the weather using my iPhone and the free WiFi in BDL, that there was freezing rain and rapidly dropping temperatures awaiting me in MN. Just in the last few minutes the pilot informed us of more bad news: MSP is down to one runway due to icing, and air traffic control is limiting traffic in and out of the airport. We just missed the departure cutoff for being exempt from those extra restrictions. Finally, the computer at the gate is having difficulty generating the passenger list, which must be in place before we can take off. The list made it to MSP, but it can't be printed out here, so it was faxed to BDL. The first attempt transmitted 1 of 9 pages.

Sooooo, we shall see how it all pans out. I have a 9pm (CST) shuttle from the airport back home that I originally had over an hour to catch; now, who knows.

Sent from my iPhone

In New York

It would appear that we lucked out in oh-so-many ways with our trip so far. First, even though the windshield wipers bit the dust early on, we managed to have dry roads and no precipitation for basically the whole 22-hour drive. It got a little dicey once we left I-90, with lake-effect snow and splatter from cars ahead of us, but that was just for the final 1/2 hour.

Also, if one looks at the weather, the fact that we encountered almost no precipitation is nothing short of miraculous. Rochester, NY received a foot of snow the night before our arrival (i.e., at the time we were leaving Minnesota), and has since received two bouts of several inches more. Meanwhile, in Rochester, MN, the night after our departure (as we were laboring pulling into NY), the temperature plunged well below zero, and stayed there all through Sunday and into Monday, with 20 mph sustained winds. They got snow, too.

So, for those keeping track, we managed to time our trip to be right in the lull between two storm fronts, and moved with them as they swept across the country. Of course we planned it that way.

Never fear, dear readers: the car is being looked at now, so we will have functional wipers by the time we move on in a few days.

Joggin' in the Cold

Thanks to Brynna's Aunt Katherine, we have a wonderful jogging stroller for Brynna. Until recently, however, Brynna couldn't hold herself up well enough for us to feel safe using it. The recommendations are to wait until six months or so, but Brynna is quite precocious. And it's just in time for a chilly start to December - perfect weather for going running.


Brynna's getup for this kind of outing, with temperatures in the teens this afternoon (and falling), is thorough to say the least. Her typical clothing these days is a fleecy suit of some sort. Over this she gets a warm sweater and a comical conical knit hat (with ear flaps!) before being put into her Dartmouth bunting. A thick blanket is placed under her in the stroller before she's strapped into the harness, which is followed by M's warm jacket. The mesh cover of the stroller is pulled down, followed by the clear plastic cover to block the wind. So far as we can tell, she is incapable of movement by this point - but hopefully also incapable of feeling the cold.


Of course, anytime someone goes running in this house, Jasper wants in on it.


Even if Jasper is highly suspicious of this stroller thing.


And they're off!

Turned Cold

It turned pretty cold two days ago. It was dreary and overcast all day Sunday, started to drizzle, then turned to snow. I hear that the East Coast is currently under this scourge now. Much as I enjoy winter weather and all that comes with it, the speed with which it came on was a little unwelcome.

But, hey, even though the temperatures fell below freezing in a serious way, it was a great chance to try out techniques and clothing we'll use on Brynna when it gets genuinely cold. In addition to her usual outfit was an extra pair of socks, fleece leggings, fleece jacket, knit mittens, hat, and her Dartmouth bunting. Then getting swaddled into the Ergo carrier with Hilary, and a down jacket over the whole setup. Good grief!





The sad part is that, after all that work, for unknown reasons, Brynna started bawling about a block into our evening walk, and Hilary had to take her home. It's possible that a touch too warm.

Weekly Dose

A weekly infusion of our little Brynna bean:


I promise you there is actually a child in there, somewhere.


Brynna has this Dartmouth bunting that was given to us by good friends. It will be very cozy for Brynna in worse weather. Thankfully that will be sometime in the future, when she can better fill it out. For now, in the moderately cool weather of early autumn, with Brynna not more than two months old, it is still very cozy, but downright comical in its over-size. The tall pinnacle of a hood will continue to be funny. It reminds me Maggie's snowsuit in The Simpsons:



Brynna at nine weeks. I promise that we will not refer to her age in weeks forever (I'll tear up when, at 1140 weeks, she graduates from college). For right now, it's still the most convenient unit. Besides, we've got these really cool signs - why not use them?


Brynna takes the election very seriously. She likes to catch up on her reading while taking in some tummy-time.

Spring! Or Not.

Walking up the steps this evening, we were greeted with two crocuses just opening up in the front beds. Hurray! There are also many other little green shoots that bode well, and the very tips of what I think may be tulip leaves.

Forecast for tomorrow: 4-5 inches of snow.

Arrrgh!

The Power of Passive Solar

Weather.com current outside temperature: -9 (windchill -25)

What are Jasper and I doing as I write? Lounging on our south-facing, unheated porch, sharing a bag of chips. I—the queen of being cold in just about any situation—am very comfortable in jeans and a fleece. It's probably 70 degrees out here, thanks to a brilliant sun all day.

MPR says that last night might have been the last really cold night. I'm not sure if I believe them, as they said that last weekend, and it wasn't true! It would be great just to have a few weeks in the teens and twenties (above zero, if you please), so we could go play outside in the snow a bit more.

But the days are most definitely growing longer, so I suppose it will be spring eventually!

Tomatoes!

Alex returned from the winter farmers' market this morning with something even more exciting than the scones that I was pulling out of the oven: tomatoes!

We're not sure how the farmer managed to pull it off, but apparently this is his one winter harvest, so Alex got a good number of the tasty red treats, along with the first lettuce we've seen since October. So we had an incredible dinner: big fat slices of tomato topped with slices of local mozzarella cheese, drizzled with the olive oil we picked up at the neighboring farm in Italy. All of that on top of a nice baguette, and then some pepper and salt sprinkled on top. A little taste of summer in the midst of winter!

Our local food plans are turning out quite well. We've been using a lot of the frozen veggies that we stowed in the new chest freezer: butternut squash for pastas and a wild rice dish, red pepper for a bunch of recipes, leeks for potato-leek soup, zucchini and green beans and pesto for Steph's black bean soup, salsa verde for enchiladas, and berries on our Sunday waffles. Our un-frozen bags of garlic and shallots are holding up nicely, as are the potatoes. The onions aren't doing quite as well...some are sprouting despite being in the root cellar. We may not bring as many home in the fall next year, since plenty are available at the winter market and the farmers seem to be doing a better job of storing them than we are.

We do still buy some produce at the grocery store: the occasional spinach, celery, or fresh fruit like pears or bananas. We try hard to make sure it's at least from the US, rather than being shipped all the way from South America. In another eight to ten weeks, we should see the first local spring greens, like asparagus and maybe some early lettuce, from the farmers with heated greenhouses.

In the meantime, the miraculous tomatoes, and the balmy outside temperature of 26 degrees, give me hope that winter is not actually endless!