Saturday, February 05, 2011
crocus & tulip bulbs, dogwoods & robins
One of the enjoyable on-going news stories this week has been the rotten weather in Super Bowl Dallas. All the sports writers & privileged folks who flocked there from the northeast & upper midwest states expected typical daytime temps in the high fifties & week of thumbing their noses at us & our miserable winter. They got an ice box. They wondered why Dallas-Fort Worth had never heard of salt & sand spreaders; why a little bit of the frozen precip we handle as just another crappy winter day results there in utter chaos. I suppose it was marginally better than the third-worst blizzard in Chicago history. But my contacts in rural Iowa & Wisconsin posted online photos of cleanly-plowed roads bordered by 15 foot drifts. They were briefly inconvenienced by Snowmaggedon.
At the Super Bowl media center, WFAN's blustery Mike "let's be honest" Francesa - one of the big shot NY broadcasters - had his radio/TV booth planted in front of doors that admitted blasts of arctic air whenever they were opened. He discovered he couldn't step outside & hail a passing cab; he had to call & wait an hour. You gotta have a car, he said, but if you drive one you can't even get it up the access ramps to the highways, which are like demolition derbys. The final indignity is that he has to return to NY Sunday morning for his NFL Today show & his post-game televised "Mike'd Up" on channel 4. He doesn't stay to watch the actual game from a press box (or wealthy pal's luxury suite) in a domed, heated stadium. He has to watch it on TV just like every proletarian football fan.
My sister's Facebook status gripes weren't that she was snowbound in North Jersey & couldn't get down her steep driveway & over the big hill to her job at a toy store - it's just a driving challenge of the sort she almost enjoys - but that melting snow on her roof was finding leaky routes into her kitchen & family room. The leaky spots inside don't tell you where the water is coming in outside, guaranteed to drive a Virgoan nuts. When they lose control of their orderly surroundings, the more obsessive Virgos turn into crazed Lady MacBeths muttering "Out, damned spot! out, I say!"
So we get a couple days of thaw before another deep freeze arrives, but there's no serious snow in the ten-day forecast. Maybe spring will arrive early, as the groundhog predicted. In any case, crocus & tulip bulbs love the snow cover, dogwoods blossom more beautifully when they aren't tricked into early bud, & robins are never deterred.
(The winter pushes me toward Handel & Haydn.)
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
At the Super Bowl media center, WFAN's blustery Mike "let's be honest" Francesa - one of the big shot NY broadcasters - had his radio/TV booth planted in front of doors that admitted blasts of arctic air whenever they were opened. He discovered he couldn't step outside & hail a passing cab; he had to call & wait an hour. You gotta have a car, he said, but if you drive one you can't even get it up the access ramps to the highways, which are like demolition derbys. The final indignity is that he has to return to NY Sunday morning for his NFL Today show & his post-game televised "Mike'd Up" on channel 4. He doesn't stay to watch the actual game from a press box (or wealthy pal's luxury suite) in a domed, heated stadium. He has to watch it on TV just like every proletarian football fan.
My sister's Facebook status gripes weren't that she was snowbound in North Jersey & couldn't get down her steep driveway & over the big hill to her job at a toy store - it's just a driving challenge of the sort she almost enjoys - but that melting snow on her roof was finding leaky routes into her kitchen & family room. The leaky spots inside don't tell you where the water is coming in outside, guaranteed to drive a Virgoan nuts. When they lose control of their orderly surroundings, the more obsessive Virgos turn into crazed Lady MacBeths muttering "Out, damned spot! out, I say!"
So we get a couple days of thaw before another deep freeze arrives, but there's no serious snow in the ten-day forecast. Maybe spring will arrive early, as the groundhog predicted. In any case, crocus & tulip bulbs love the snow cover, dogwoods blossom more beautifully when they aren't tricked into early bud, & robins are never deterred.
(The winter pushes me toward Handel & Haydn.)
Labels: weather
