The Winter That Wasn’t

To misquote Monty Python: “And fall gave winter a miss and went straight on to spring.” If you don’t count what was essentially two days of winter, we didn’t have one. By the numbers:

Number of nights with lows below 20°F: 3

Number of days with highs below freezing: 0

Number of days with snow accumulation: 1

Accumulations over 1 inch: 0

The last three Thursdays have been sunny and over 70°F, which has driven me out to the patio with my work laptop. I’m very glad that I can get a decent wifi signal out there — it means I can get away with doing that. Mason likes to join me, of course, and tries to punch keys on the work laptop (not a good idea) or steal my phone if I’m not watching. Little twerp. This has been the pattern for about a month now: warming through the week, gorgeous Thursday, then storms come in and leave weekends windy and cool with occasional residual storms.

I’ve been saying this winter was more like one long November — it ate December, January, February, and March and now we’re having an early April. Any week with two tornado watches is not so wonderful. Usually, when we have significant thunderstorms in January, that has signaled a mild April peak for storm season. But with winter getting skipped over the way it was, all bets are off.

The Friday storm-blast almost completely passed us by. We had a severe storm go about eight miles south of us that might have started to spin up into a tornado. Other than that, we watched the game from the stands (so to speak). Boom, wind, rain, and then more wind. Lots more wind and low 50s for the highs all weekend.

Thursday’s forecast looks like the forecast for the last three: sunny, 70s, me working shirtless for an hour or so.