The warm spell was short-lived, and the temperature is now back in the 20s and 30s, and I am back in jeans and sweaters instead of shorts and tshirts.

All reports and rumors of global warming and climate change are obviously a liberal conspiracy. (<sarcasm>)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled winter.

Well, the 2-and-a-half-week long winter is over with, and it is now 62 degrees.  It rained all yesterday and this morning, and the last of the snow from the Boxing Day storm is now gone excepts for bits of dirty white scum on the sides of the road.

I remember last March when it was in the 90s, and I wonder if that will happen again this year.

It just feels wrong to be wandering around barefoot and in shirtsleeves in the middle of January.

The days surrounding the 4th of July were rather hectic, so much so that the 4th itself felt rather anti-climactic. And having a major holiday like the 4th smack dap in the middle of an otherwise ordinary week just felt… odd.

We have been (and still are… as the temps are supposed to be hovering around 100 degrees today for the umpteenth day in a row) in the middle of a heat wave that has been breaking all kinds of records. Then last Friday we (along with much of the mid-Atlantic region) were hit by a severe windstorm and lost power.

Since we lost power just before we were supposed to leave for the weekend for a SCA event (Baron Wars in Toledo) we kind of shrugged and hit the road. Apparently everything between South Dayton and Toldeo had suffered considerable wind damage and lost power. We saw a lot of downed trees, barns and silos missing roofs, tumbled machinery, convoys of DP&L trucks out to start in on repairs, and bumper-to-bumper stop-and-go (mostly stopped) traffic headed south on I-75 consisting of people fleeing the devastation and seeking A/C and electricity and fast food.

The power was back on when we got home on Sunday. As near as we can figure out, our power was out for over 24 hours. We were lucky, as there are still a lot of people without power.

Sunday evening we joined a bunch of friends for the fireworks celebration in downtown Dayton. And if that particular party hadn’t been taking place in the lovely air-conditioned Racquet Club on the top floor of the Kettering building, we might not have gone… it was just that hot and humid.

Yesterday, the actual 4th, we spent working on various projects. We could have gone to see more fireworks (Centerville puts on a really good show) but decided at the last minute that (again) it was just too hot and humid to venture forth from the A/C.

Maybe when it cools down enough to want to spend time outside we will run around the backyard with sparklers, or set off a couple of bottle rockets. Or maybe not.

We have gotten more snow (it is coming down in big, fat flakes which I am watching through my home office window as I type) and the grass is now almost completely obscured, though the roads remain mostly dry.  There is some ice, but not much.  Pretty tame according to the standards of someone who grew up in the Cleveland snowbelt, and then went on to live in upstate New York and Michigan.  Still, I have lived down here in SW Ohio long enough to be pleasantly surprised by seasonally appropriate weather.

Snow is nature’s way of rewarding you for the winter cold.

I don’t think that many people down here would agree with me, though.  Certainly not the people I encountered on the way to yoga yesterday morning, who were so freaked out by the white stuff falling out of the sky that they could barely manage to do 30 mph on a 4 lane, 45 mph road.  Certainly not the road crews, who were already out spewing salt into the roads.  (Seriously guys?  The snow is not even sticking to the roads yet.  But go ahead and waste the salt now, so that when February hits us with a real blizzard, you are all out of salt and money to clear the roads.  Really, go ahead.  That strategy ensures Level 1 Snow Emergencies and Snow Days.)  Certainly not my snowbird neighbors, who seem to have packed up and flown south for the winter.

“Weather experts” have been saying for the past several months that because the area had a hotter and dryer then usual summer, we were certain to have a colder and snowier (not really sure how that one works, but okay) winter.  It looks like they might be right.  I hope that they are right.  I badly want to have a true white Christmas.  (Two years ago it was gorgeous, and sunny, and in the 50s on Christmas, which is not the type of Christmas weather that I appreciate.)

In today’s edition of “its a small world”, not only does my yoga instructor go to the same cardiologist that I do, but we share a diagnosis.  And two of the other women who are regulars in my class are the wives of co-workers.

Yesterday, on the first day of December, we got the first real snow of the year here.  Now, we have had some really heavy frosts over the past month, but this was real snow, really falling out of the sky in pretty flurries, and really laying a thin layer of white down over the lawn and flowerbeds.

It made me gleeful.  For one thing, it raises the hope that we might actually have a white Christmas this year.  (Because it was so hot and dry this summer, we have had a lot of “weather experts” saying that that means that we will have an extra cold and snowy winter, and I would love for them to be right.)  For another thing, this area is incredibly wimpy about snowy weather and how to deal with snow.  Every year since I moved down here we have had a couple of “snow days” due to “extreme winter weather”.  I haven’t gotten this many days off due to snow since I was in grade school – it always makes me feel like a kid again.  It is not even that Dayton gets an unusual amount of snow… they don’t.  But I don’t think that the city allocated very much money to snow removal, and they usually blow through it all early on in the winter, wasting the road salt on flurries like the one we got yesterday, and then when the real winter hits in January and February, there is nothing left.

Oh, and the flurries yesterday were pretty, but the didn’t do much more then lightly cover the grass and make the roads a little wet.  Yet the news on the radio during my short drive home at the end of the day was full of reports of accidents due to the weather.

Speaking of the news on the radio, one of the hot stories on NPR recently has been the US Post Office and the fact that it is slowly going broke, and how because of that they are having to close locations and ponder cutting down on the number of deliveries per week.  You know what I have to say about that?  I went to my local post office on November 16 and mailed (first class) a small package that contained a birthday present for my nephew.  You know when that package arrived at its destination?  Today.  Two and a half weeks after I dropped it off.  What I have to say is this – let the post office go broke.  Make them reorganize.  Make them become more efficient.  And next time I have to mail a package, I am going to bypass the USPS and go with UPS or FedEx.

Not really.  But we did have tornado warnings here today.  The sirens went off and everything.  Exciting!

I went home for an early lunch to try to beat the expected (thunderstorm level) bad weather, and so that I could do little things like close windows and bring in a few forgotten items from the back deck before they had a chance to blow away.  The wind was already picking up a bit by then – streetlights dancing around, mini-dust-devils of dead leaves everywhere, and a flock of uprooted campaign signs migrating down the street.

By the time I got back to work, the PA system was already blaring and we were all being instructed to “go to our safe areas” (conference rooms without windows, interior offices, bathrooms, and floor kitchenettes) and “shelter in place until further notice” and that if we decided to leave the building, we would do so “at our own personal risk”.

This is the most tornado-prone place I have ever lived, which I suppose isn’t saying much since we are barely on the fringes of Tornado Alley.

I can remember a few instances when I was little, when the sky turned funny colors and my brothers and parents and I would go in the basement and play with flashlights for a while.

And there was that time in grad school when a tornado went by really close, touching down briefly between Ann Arbor and Saline.  I was in the library on campus at the time, and of course all of the students rushed into the library’s totally glassed-in atrium to gawk at the extreme weather instead of sensibly retreating into the safety of the stacks.  Good times.

Any way.  I “sheltered in place” outside the kitchenette on my floor for 30 or 40 minutes or so, and then got bored and went to “shelter at my desk” where at least I could get work done.  And eventually the rain slowed down and the wind slowed down and the PA system came back on to tell us that we were all safe and could stop “sheltering in place”, by which time almost everyone had already abandoned the whole “shelter in place” concept anyway.

Fun times.

I am sure that the cats were pretty much freaked out the whole time, especially Merlin, who is afraid of storms.

Oh, and so far the implant and surgical site look good.  I have another follow-up appointment next week.  Fingers crossed!