Snowflakes in the air

We finally got our first substantial snow of the season. We're still getting it, as I write this, after sunset. After spending the winter of 2019-2020 and 2020-21 complaining about how we hadn't had the sort of significant storm that the area should have, getting one ... well, I can't say I like having to deal with it. But it's at least the sort of weather we should have in early February, so it's good having it delivered.

This came after the first warm stretch we'd had since December, possibly the first day it was appreciably above freezing. And, again, in December we had days getting close to 60 Fahrenheit, way too warm for a non-broken climate. But that January was for the first time in years seasonably correct does not mean I didn't like, or want, a day where it got up to the mid-40s. There's usually a couple of these periods in any winter --- when it first appeared on the long-range forecast the noon news weather person described it as ``the first false spring'', although at its first signs it was supposed to be two or three days long. Here, it dwindled to a little over a day, as rain moved in. As the temperature dropped, it became snow, sometime after I went to bed last night. And it just didn't stop falling, and still hasn't stopped falling.

A curious thing about our block is when the snow is really heavy, people start shoveling others' sidewalks. Someone shoveled much of our side of the street, including our driveway and driveway apron, around noon. I went out myself a couple hours later, clearing a path to the sidewalk and our sidewalk, getting two or three inches of fluffy, heavy powder off. And then again a couple hours later and another two or three fresh inches, with the snow blower, to clear our driveway and, what the heck, the neighbors' sidewalks. (The next-nearest neighbors had their sidewalks reasonably clear anyway.) I didn't use the snowblower in the midafternoon because bunny_hugger was holding her classes online. Her campus is far enough north to have avoided this storm, so they weren't going to cancel just because all the faculty who live in Lansing faced impassable roads. There'll be another round of snow-cleaning tomorrow. It's got to have been ten inches by the evening round.

As this was the first serious snow we got hooked watching the City of Lansing's live snowplow tracking map. Last year they held a public vote to take names for their snowplows and one of bunny_hugger's suggestions --- Coldsmobile --- won. So we were checking out just where Coldsmobile was in town. Just as I was writing this we noticed the map reporting it was heading towards us, on the street at the end of the block, so we went to the window to see it pass. This resulted in our learning that the map was regularly updated but was maybe ten or fifteen minutes behind real-time, so we had long missed it. A shame. Maybe we'll get lucky next time, now that we have some idea how the plows move.

And I understated the snow, it turns out. According to the National Weather Service, by 7:19 pm the official Lansing station (within walking distance of our house) had recorded 12.9 inches of snow today, smashing the old record set during the Groundhog Day Blizzard of 2011, a scant 8.4 inches. And that snowfall total was on top of the 0.81 inches of rain recorded between midnight and whenever the precipitation froze up. 0.81 inches of rain is also a record rainfall for the day, smashing the 0.51 inches recorded on Groundhog Day 1892. There can't be a lot of days that break two precipitation records. And remember it wasn't done snowing yet.

Michigan didn't bother rousing the Official State Groundhog for today. They're apparently planning to hold a snow-day Groundhog Day the 5th. I have not heard anything, not one word, about Coatimundi Day at the Cohanzick Zoo in South Jersey.

Now we're to the train ride part of our Crossroads Village trip. Here's what things looked like as we readied to set out:

The Crossroads Village and Huckleberry Railroad has actual antique rolling stock. They light it with this simulation of an old-type gas lantern although I imagine this one much less likely to accidentally burn the car down.

Looking across from our seat at the main village. You can see what we were fighting with the windows fogging up and why we finally remembered to bring a cloth to wipe the windows clean.

For all the good it does. I tried taking fewer pictures this ride, hoping to enjoy the experience instead, but also because I know this is what all my pictures during the ride look like. This is not one of the village decorations, just some homeowner adjacent to the property. There are a couple houses that do that, and they aren't all people putting up Keep Christ In Christmas signs.

Trivia: The day before the Blizzard of 1888 the temperature in Manhattan rose into the forties, and city residents opened windows to air out their homes. It began to rain in the afternoon, more and more heavily.
Source: The Epic of New York City: A Narrative History, Edward Robb Ellis.

Currently Reading: Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World, Simon Winchester.

PS: From my Fifth A-to-Z: Zugzwang, which you get in game theory so it is too a mathematics term and not just a chess term.