Monday, January 16, 2012

Weather News and Other Oddities

Anchorage, Alaska, January Sunday 2012. Click the pic to make it bigger and note the frozen peak in the distance. Brrr.

I have two sets of cousins who live in Alaska. One set are teachers who live in Kenai. Another are lawyers and live in Anchorage. Since I read in the paper that Alaska is really getting slammed this winter, I wrote my cousin in Anchorage and asked for a picture.

I guess I didn't think about this request very hard. It meant somebody had to go outside to get a photo ...

And on Sunday morning, it was -8°F when my cousin's wife went out on their deck to take the above photos. "Not a creature was stirring," said my cousin. Much applause for his wife who braved the cold for the readers of robinchapmannews.com.

Anchorage has had 88 inches of snow so far this season, though my cousin says it has been "dry snow" and hadn't caused them much trouble.

In nearby Cordova, Alaska, they've had 179 inches of wet snow--very hard to shovel, that--and have had to call out the National Guard to help dig them out.

So I guess they wouldn't be impressed up there to know that the temperature in my backyard was down to 28ºF this morning. I went outside and found a bird iceskating on the bird bath.


I punched a good size hole in the ice so I could show it was ice. Until I did, it just photographed as water! This is fairly unusual for us--quite cold for Northern California.

Meanwhile all our rain has apparently gone up to Alaska as snow, and our days have been sunny and dry.

So much so that my mother's Christmas Cactus finally bloomed for the first time since her death. Why it didn't bloom last Christmas--I don't know.


Someone gave it to my mother as a gift and she was always delighted to see it bloom each year in the middle of the winter. And now, so am I.
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