Brrrrrrrrr!!

It's COLD!  We had a low of 9 above zero last night.  It's now only about 10 above, and there's no sunshine burning through the cloud cover to warm us up.  The good news is the wind has stopped.  That wind yesterday knocked down trees and caused power outages in some areas.  We seem to have escaped that, but we had 70 m.p.h. winds in some places.  I could hear it more than feel it - roaring through the trees around us. 

As you can see, the block is still tipped drunkenly, but I have no doubt it is solidly frozen into the ice.  Some locals were absolutely right on when they predicted we'd be "making ice" this week.  It seems as if each "warm spell" gets a little warmer and each "cold spell" gets a little colder.  If El Nino continues through summer, it's going to be an interesting ride.

I went to the latest predictions I could find about weather patterns expected this spring.  After reading several of them, I came away thinking the weather experts don't really want to make any guesses.  They apparently don't know what to expect because the patterns this year, one of the strongest el nino influenced and comparable to the weather we had in 1997, are different than before, so all bets are off.  They are thinking spring may arrive sooner than normal in the northeast - but that doesn't seem to be happening, at least not this morning.  I'll be interested if any of our local weather people say these single-digit temperatures are "about normal for this time if the year."