They're seeding the soccer field out the window, here, and the grass is green and growing.

There's snow -- a very little snow -- on the little mountains, but this is still no kind of winter and I still feel lost.

In other words, it's warmer now than at any point in this 24-hour period, including now.

I've seen this on weather sites before. I suspect it's because the predicted high doesn't change once they set it. You'd think they'd code the site to bump up the predicted high if it's exceeded, but they don't.

I grew up in Michigan. New York "winters" are pathetic.

MKK

February's snow and sleet
Freeze the toes right off your feet...
-Flanders & Swann

Minnnnn-e-sota
Where the wind comes whistling through the plains
And the snow and sleet will fill your street
And you'll wish that you had put on chains....
- Prarie Home Companion (tune: Oklahoma)

The weather tried to freeze him
It tried its level best
At a hundred degrees below zero
He buttoned up his vest.
- The Frozen Logger

Talk of your cold! Through the parka's fold
It stabbed like a driven nail...
- Robert W. Service

"'Taint nothin'. Remember '95? We had snow every calendar month that year."
-- Practically everyone in Colebrook this morning

He never shaved a whisker
Off of his horny hide;
He hammered in the bristles,
And bit them off inside.

I must be getting acclimated to the cold. I found myself running out to go pick up Peter from his chess class wearing a sweater but no coat. It was 17 degrees.

MKK

All of my best clothes are layers of wool. I would trade any of you-all this 60 degree day for your -2, and smile while the windchill froze my lenses to my eyes.

I'm glad we're in ~southern~ NH.

Kate

You would hated the weather 200 years ago. The winter of 1780 was so cold that the ice on the Hudson was thick enough that the British were able to transport cannon across the river on sledges from Manhattan to New Jersey.

http://www.lihistory.com/4/hs424a.htm

MKK

Even in our moderate climate, I *hate* winter. I hate the dark (especially) and the cold. But someone on the Harplist posted a poem that (temporarily) makes me feel better about winter:

Deep in the arms of winter
The snow falls like a blessing
The wild things sleep below the ground
They are not cold, they are not lonely,
Deep in the arms of winter.

Deep in the arms of winter
The starlight is holy.
The Hunter stalks across the sky.
The dancers dance; I hear their music,
Deep in the arms of winter.

Deep in the arms of winter
The flame calls like a spirit.
The hearthfire warms our very souls.
In heart and home we are enfolded
Deep in the arms of winter,
Deep in the arms of winter.

{attribution unknown}

Natch. Nearing the tail end of the Little Ice Age. The onset of the LIA is believed to have caused the Norse to abandon their colonies in Greenland and Vinland. Not necessarily colder winters, but cooler, wetter summers which caused trouble with food storage and also more storms in the North Atlantic.

http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/lia/little_ice_age.html

I have amended the following to avoid shocking the pureminded - it is by that well-known poet Anon, and appeared on the biffy wall recently.

Cold as the lock on the outhouse door,
Cold as the feet of an elderly whore,
Striver, Labrador

:(

The worst thing about the sudden thaw is that we've gone from 70/30 sunny/snowy days to 100% overcast, with fog, drizzle, or rain.

My brother gets that in Ottawa at the start of next week. Here in Boston my only regret is that I don't have a proper parka or any legwear better than denims after a dozen years in the Decadent Tropics of Massachusetts. Other than that and not having a working furnace, it makes me quite nostalgic for my youth in Toronto.

The main downside of the unexpectedly cold weather is that many people here assume that a warm spell in a couple of days will clear their ice, so some street corners have healthy dwarf cirques, lilliputian morraines, microeskers, and minidrumlins. A larger scale failure of foresight seems to have led to a lot of freeze distortion in the roadway of Rte 128 in the marshier bits of Cape Ann.

Wednesday we go back to Massachusetts and a foot and a half of snow on our deck.

Jane

I wonder if the cold snap back east will help put the kibosh on the West Nile epidemic.

Barbara, you're in Labrador? Yeeesh. Don't you people get to, like, condescend to people in Winnipeg for being wimps about cold weather?

Walked a mile and a half in it, too. (Uphill, if you must know.)

Never so glad that I wear a beard.