Winter: Baby, It's Cold Outside!

Someone sent me this earlier today: --Percy

When I woke up this morning it was -6F. We never made it to 0F today. Tonight it will go down to about -10F and stay there for most of the day. Next weekend we are supposed to see 30F again. Very mild and warm winter. This is our coldest night so far. Usually we have seen -20F by this time.

You must be in a relatively warm part of Wisconsin.Here (Chicago suburbs) I woke up to -9, and it will go down to -16 tonight.

I feel like the tropics here at 21F. Lots of trees down especially in the Portland area and lots of power outages. We got about 2 inches of ice pellets here on Saturday that was a solid sheet of ice on Sunday. Walking across the yard to refill the bird feeders is treacherous! Wind is predicted today and then slowly warming and getting up above freezing Wednesday. A power outage is the only thing that would mess up riding this out...We bring our 3 hummingbird feeders inside over night and swap them out about every 2 hours or so when they start forming ice. My wife was up at 4AM yesterday and herd an odd tapping on the patio door. It was a hummer, so she put the feeders out then. It's still astonishing to me that we have hummers overwintering here. They can only survive because people put out feeders all year long. As far as we can tell there are 3 hummers for each feeder and the continuously fight and try and dominate the feeder.

I am far north. 5 miles from the big lake. It is still putting off some heat and moderating our temps. Woke up to -12F this morn. That should be the bottomed for this go round.

Well, this looks like it's going to be nasty. 28F and raining hard on top of 2 inches of solid ice. Power lines are going to be coming down tonight!

How was the last day? Power?

37F this morning and we have had power the whole time. It seems like it rained all night but with everything frozen there is a lot of standing water on top of ice. I'm hoping to be able to go over to my lab and check for any damage and also refill the bird feeders, etc. I took down the hummingbird feeders over there in the Fall, so there were no hummers relying on those feeders for survival. There were ice cycles hanging everywhere when we went to bed last night and now they are gone, whew!I used to put studded snow tires on our vehicles before Thanksgiving and only took them off in April, but since we retired and with some Winters not even giving us any snow I got rid of the snow tires.I'm ready for Spring!