Before Holy Mountain

  Originally published as a Facebook Note on January 16, 2009. Photos by Jane Nesmith. The record was broken January 30, 2019. Below 0 (photo by Jane Nesmith) We set a record low temperature in Cedar Rapids yesterday morning, -29. Being blest with a long but unreliable memory, I had thought it had been colder in 1996, but, no, just looked it up and it only got to -25 then. So we are the champions, my friends. How cool, no pun intended, to make history. I mean, have you ever considered how lame a temperature -5 is, for example? It's uncomfortably, inconveniently cold, but not memorably cold. However, this week, it has been memorably, historically cold. I've been walking to work anyway, because why sit in a cold car for 5 minutes when I can at least be moving? I figured out that, with down and Thinsulate, if I wrap myself in enough layers it's not too bad, as long as I keep moving. And as I suggest above, there is a bit of self-glorification in being out in such ridicu...

Originally published as a Facebook Note on February 19, 2008. from clipart-library.com As a connoisseur of misery I've noticed two things about it. One is, it's easier to handle when it's shared (for the sharer, that is, not the sharee). Secondly, it's easier to deal with when it can be quantified. This has been, without doubt, a miserable winter in Cedar Rapids. Another snowstorm over the weekend has added to the huge pile of snow in our yard, and left a layer of ice on the streets and sidewalks that makes going anywhere like stumbling across the surface of the moon. But I am happy--yes, happy!--to report that we are now among the top 10 snowiest winters on record here. 4.4 inches on Sunday afternoon brings the seasonal total to 54.8 inches, snowier than any winter since I moved to Cedar Rapids (passing the winter of 1996-97), and 9th on the all-time list. So what if the storm so unnerved the school system that they cancelled school on Monday, and had a...

Posted as a Facebook note February 7, 2008. Piles of snow, February 2008 One week from today, the Cubs begin workouts at their spring training camp in Arizona. The other major league teams will begin workouts at roughly the same time. This is important, because in Iowa we have been inundated with snow. We got 13 inches yesterday, the latest and greatest in a series of ice and snow storms that has made a long winter. Aside from reducing my morale to the size of a pinhead, the snowfalls have created two problems. One is what to do with it. At our house, the driveway is short, but runs along the alley at about a 15 degree angle. If there's any quantity of snow at all, we have to shovel it from the alley side of the driveway to the yard side, which means we are often throwing the same snowflakes two or three times, and that we eventually get to a huge wall of snow at the edge of the yard. I think we're about at capacity now. At least it was fun burying our picket fence...