Weather win-win

When my parents celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in January of 1997, I was still in the monastery with a vow of poverty, which limited my ability to provide a suitable gift. (I did go in with my brother and his wife on a clock, as I recall.) I decided that my personal gift to them would be a phone call every Sunday. I did that until my father's health began to decline seriously four or five years back. At that point, I began to call daily. I wanted to talk to him regularly and to be in touch with my mother so she could keep me up to date on his condition. Eventually he was no longer able to talk on the phone, and the calls became a daily base-touching with my mother. After his death in 2011, I continued to call her and we chat for anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour every day. (Yes, Peggy, I know all about how much I am like Stuart.)

When my younger brother heard about this, he asked incredulously, "What on earth do  you talk about?"

I wanted to tell him that we talk about him mostly, but that would not only be untrue, it would be unduly paranoia-provoking. We talk about what she did that day, what I did that day, what the weather is like, what Sundance and Cassidy did and what the feral cats she feeds and pampers did. Nothing all that important.

Some (most) days this blog is like that -- nothing all that important. My mother and I joke that if it weren't for the cats and the weather, we might not have anything to talk about most days.

So today is weather day, since I ragged on the cats yesterday.

Not our yard!

The weather people have warned us about lots of snow, and we have had a number of light snowfalls as regular readers know. But nothing compared to last winter. Most of the predicted snowfalls this winter have either not materialized at all or were just a dusting. My sister-in-law sent a photo of Garret pulling the girls through the snow on a sled in Borger, Texas and I had to write her back that they had more snow on the ground than we did. Today it is snowing lightly and we expect maybe three inches all told.

That is not much of a snow event in Wisconsin.

On the other hand, once the snow stops, bitterly cold weather is supposed to move in. For the next two or three days, we expect lows to be ten to twelve degrees below zero. And, yes, my Celsius friends, that is below zero Fahrenheit. You can think of -24 or so. And on Wednesday we will have a high of 5 below (-20.5 C) out there. It will gradually warm up, but it looks like we won't get above freezing again before the end of the month.

To conclude, when I tell my mother how cold it is or how much snow we are having, she always says she is glad she lives in Whitehouse instead of Wisconsin. Whenever I notice the temperature in Texas has been over 100 degrees for a week with humidity in Whitehouse of 80%, I am happy to be here.

It's a win-win.