Tuesday, January 19, 2010, 02:19
Meet Me Halfway
We are past the halfway point in January.
Yipee! Woo-hoo! Hooray!
I don't know why, but January seems like a terribly long month. Well, in a way, I suppose it is because it has 31 days. But not only does it have 31 days, each of those days seems to be twice as long as days in other months. And that's a strange thing, because the daylight is much shorter than other months. So wouldn't you think the days would go by faster because the daylight is shorter? Instead, it seems to be the length of the night that makes each day feel like it is much longer.
Snow and ice that makes it difficult to walk even out to my truck makes the days seem longer, too, I guess. But the snow and ice also makes the *distance* out to my truck seem a lot farther.
One good thing is that we are in the middle of our "January thaw." I can't say the snow and ice are thawing so much. The days have been cloudy, and it has been foggy and frosty in the morning. But the milder air at least makes it possible to be outside for a while without freezing to death while you are out there.
And now the days are growing longer, too. Around Christmas, it is mostly dark by 5 p.m. The sun sets a little after 4:30, and dark comes quickly. Less than a month later, however, there is still light in the sky by 5:30. What a concept.
I'm going to have to try to figure out a way to celebrate January 31. Too bad the state of Wisconsin (and other northern states with long winters) have not had the forethought to declare Groundhog Day a holiday when all businesses are closed and everyone gets the day off . . .
LeAnn R. Ralph
Wednesday, January 13, 2010, 15:35
Twenty Degrees. . .
It really puts winter and temperatures into perspective when you start thinking that 20 degrees Fahrenheit feels warm and balmy. Tuesday the temperature was up around 20 degrees, and it wasn't so much the afternoon temperature that felt warm and balmy as it was the low morning temperature when it was 2 degrees. For some reason, 2 degrees above zero felt so much warmer than 10 degrees below zero -- but it was only 12 degrees difference.
Monday morning a gentleman came into the newspaper office and was talking about an article he had read in another paper about the six week stretch of below zero temperatures in 1936. I got out the archive book from 1936, and we started looking through the articles. And sure enough, there was a cold spell that winter when it was below zero for about six weeks.
After the man left, I continued looking through the 1936 newspapers and found an article later on in February when the temperature actually warmed up to 41 degrees above zero. The article noted that the temperature on the day that it warmed to 41 degrees was 90 degrees warmer than it had been two weeks prior to that when it was 51 degrees below zero. I wouldn't even want to try to imagine that -- 51 below zero straight air temperature, not with a windchill. The windchill must have made the temperature feel far colder than that.
The man who came into the office said he could remember some really cold temperatures when he was a kid and that when he walked to school, he would have to stop at several different stores and establishments on the way to get warmed up a bit before going on because it was SO cold. The man also remembered that there was so much of a drought that summer that farmers cut down trees so their cows could eat the leaves. When they ran out of trees to cut down for them, they started shipping their cows out to pasture to places where there was marsh grass. The marshes were all dried up, but there had been a little moisture earlier to encourage the marsh grass to grow. They shipped the cows up north for the summer to the marshes.
A gentleman who came in after that to renew some gift subscriptions said he could not necessarily remember the cold in the 1930s, but he could really remember how hot it was in the summer. And yes, he too remembered cutting down trees so the cows could have something to eat. He also recalled that what little bit of crops had managed to grow, a severe grasshopper infestation had destroyed what was left of the crops and that fields were just thick and alive with grasshoppers with only an occasionally spear of grass sticking up here and there.
At any rate, the temperature is supposed to get up to around 30 degrees later this week, and I am looking foward to it!
LeAnn R. Ralph