Really Frozen North

2007-2008 is the first Real Winter(tm) we've gotten in the Frozen North in a few years. A reasonable amount of snow, subzero temperatures, the whole nine yards.

Plus a new feature this year: the Temperature Roller Coaster. Most years, when we go into the deep freeze, we get a week or maybe ten days of consistently subzero temperatures, barely struggling into positive territory in the mid-afternoon if at all. This time around, we're getting short little bursts of bitterly cold temperature, followed by a warmup a day or two later, and then another plunge a few days to a week or two after that.

This week was especially remarkable, as shown in the graph:

Over a 36-hour period, we went from +45 degrees to -15 degrees, a 60-degree swing. In the temperature plot you can almost see the exact minute the arctic cold front passed our house.

The weather service likes to measure these things in nice 24-hour chunks, and on that basis this was apparently the biggest drop in decades. It was a little surreal to be walking around outside with no jacket on Monday, then all bundled up and worried about the car starting on Tuesday.

Welcome to Minnesota.

This week, they're forecasting a snowstorm on Monday, and more moderate temperatures (nothing below zero). We're past the midpoint of winter, there's noticeably more daylight now than back in late December, and it will get harder and harder for those arctic airmasses to compete against the warmer air coming from the Gulf of Mexico.

We've also now completely consumed the five cords or so of firewood I'd stockpiled in the garage, so I'm now starting to move wood in from the outside piles. The wood in the garage lasted until February, almost exactly as long as I'd predicted. The supply is looking good, though I'm spending a fair amount of time picking through the piles to find the best wood to burn while it's still relatively cold out. The lighter wood (mostly cottonwood) is best for burning in the spring, when we don't need to keep the stove going all the time. It just burns too fast for the middle of winter. The biggest problem is that I've still got something like eight cords of cottonwood, most of it in large unsplit pieces. That's almost half a season's worth of wood, which is good, but there's so much of it that I'll be spending a lot of time splitting, stacking, and moving it.

On the other hand, it was all free. Beggars can't be choosers.