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We've gotten a good bit of rain today, but the temperature was warm enough for shorts. I wish I had a little bit of snow.

I had with this winter. I want spring to start. I'm sick of snow.
Sun appeared today since I don't know when. it was nice. Snow was melting. But, alas, more snow is expected later this week.

Well I manage to get my truck stuck this past weekend. No biggie as there were some helpful snowmobilers around to give me a push. And everyone in that restaurant got some cheap entertainment as I had to make a couple attempts to get back on the road. I had parked on the lake and done some ice fishing, but there's just a little too much snow on the ice for a vehicle. Eh, sh*t happens.

At least I caught those three tiny perch!

I also sort of fell thru the ice of a creek while snowshoeing. One foot crashed through and I fell forward on the bank. This caused my snowshoe to launch a volume of water directly at my ass. Needless to say the people I was snowshoeing with found it quite amusing. So I had an interesting winter weekend.

Bumping the winter thread because it's snowing here. Again.

This is that magically time of year where all of us in the northern tier start getting pretty goddamn sick of winter. Even people like me who enjoy winter start to get antsy for some green grass and some warm weather.

On the plus side, snow conditions have been outstanding since the start of February. In fact, this is the most snow I've seen on the ground at this point in March ever. That's a good thing, too because we had drought conditions going into this winter. That's good news for a lot of lakes.

Good snow means high ground water which means higher lake levels. That is, unless it all melts too fast and causes flooding without recharging aquifers very much. But now it's time to get out and clear some snow.

Every day I'm shovelin', every day I'm shovelin'...

No more semi-bone-chilling temps for me. We in the Houston area are expected to hit the upper 80s today. Yay! Yep. Spring's pretty much over down here. Has been for about a week.

We had some snow last week. It seems that was it for this winter. Finally! Spring is in the air.

When you're a kid, the annual snow melt provides countless opportunities to indulge your inner hydrological engineer. Unlike playing in the rain, the weather is beautiful, but there's tons of water around to play in. There are those few glorious days every spring when it's like 60 degrees and sunny, but there's still snow. You can be comfortable in a T-shirt, but still get into a snowball fight. (And late season snowballs hurt like hell since the snow is more like tiny balls of ice by then.)

We would dam up flowing melt water with snow to create a nice puddle, then after arranging various sticks and pebbles downstream, breach the dam and bring untold devastation to the carefully arranged population of twigs and bark.

Riding your bike through puddles, trickles of water and even sun-softened snowbanks was always fun. I would ruin shirts every year with the splatter of dirty water from my back tire. Being out on your bike for the first time in months was great enough, but the neighborhood was transformed into this glorious playground of water and mud to make it even more awesome.

It was also fun to excavate snowbanks that had little rivulets of water flowing through them. That was an annual mission of us elementary school boys to dig up the playground snowbanks and expose the little melt water streams. Usually took several recesses to get the job done.

So many great ways to come home with wet feet and muddy clothes. (Sorry, mom!)

As I grew older, I realized that melting snow created a miniature version of the end of an ice age. All the temporary puddles and rivers of melting snow were exactly what was happening across the continent thousands of years ago. The puddles are glacial lakes, the trickles of water are melt water streams, the rivulet tunneling through the snow bank is making a miniature esker. The sand and gravel embedded in every snow bank is exactly like the chunks of rock (till) that a glacier leaves behind when it melts.

Because it's small, everything happens fast. You can watch a trickle of water erode a little waterfall upstream. You can watch sediment accumulate into a delta where a water trickle enters a large puddle. You can watch another trickle form braided channels in the dirt it flows through. It's all the same processes. The only thing different is scale. Amazingly awesome.

I wanted to post this in "The Winter Thread," but I also made a thread of it's own as this board is dead right now and I wanted people to see it. Nevertheless, a mention is warranted in this thread as well.

Punxsutawney Phil, that groundhog who predicts whether or not there will be an early spring, has been indicted in Ohio for: "misrepresentation of spring, a felony "against the peace and dignity of the state of Ohio."

Read about it in the following link, and comment either there or here in "The Winter Thread," or both threads:

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=72398

F%&$#! it's snowing again. Snow and low temperatures are expected throughout the following week.
Winter, enough is enough. Why don't piss off already. Everybody's sick of you.

P. S. triplemultiplex, that was beautifully said. You have my like.

A wild lapras appeared and used Blizzard on Norwich!
Again. It seems to be summer for 6 days a week then it snows. Done so for 3 weeks. Not sure what season it's meant to be at this point!

It's so cold in the D.

Let's just change the thread title.

It's hard to believe, last year at this time it was so warm I only had to wear a t shirt in the afternoon and light jacket during the night. It's so cold now.
it's still snowing. Like I haven't shoveled enough snow during the winter, I have to do it in the spring too?