Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to talk about the vortex. You may remember me from such posts as “The Cold”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
You can see that there’s snow on the ground. So far this year we’ve received 0.26 inches (6.6 mm) of water, from now. The average for this month is 0.38 inches (9.7 mm), so that’s not bad.
Not much has been going on here, which is why I haven’t posted in a while. We did have a “fire weather” warning on the 30th of December, on the third anniversary of the Marshall Fire, which didn’t make the guy I live with happy, to say the least, but he also told me that right around where we live is probably the wettest part of the state right now. We had three times the average precipitation for November, and well over the average for December. It was a lot drier in Denver.
I can tell when the guy I live with is unhappy, and let me tell you he’s been extremely upset by the news of the fires in Los Angeles, where he grew up, and has lots of happy memories of the place.
He’s also been upset by the idiotic and nasty comments online made by people who don’t understand weather, or firefighting (his nephew is a firefighter), or, really, anything.
In some places in southern California it has not rained since last March. It rains in Los Angeles in the winter; the city gets more precipitation in winter than we get all year. But this winter, none.
Imagine getting no rain for nine months.
We get katabatic winds here, like the Santa Ana winds in southern California, and those winds caused the Marshall Fire here. (There was also something burning at the time.) That year there was no precipitation for six months, and the winds swooped down from the highest part of the Continental Divide, sometimes gusting over 100 mph (161 kph).
There isn’t much firefighters can do with winds like that.
Raymond Chandler’s story “Red Wind” takes place with a Santa Ana wind blowing, all through the story.
Anyway, it was 57 degrees F today (13.9 C); pretty nice, especially in the sun. We’re a lot closer to the sun than most people so it’s hard to convince people that it’s very warm in the sun, even when it’s really cold.
The guy I live with said there’s going to be a “polar vortex”, which sound scary to me, but he said we’ve gone through this before. I tend to forget things like that.
We’re supposed to get snow, and temperatures below 0F (-17 C) by this Sunday night.
It won’t really affect anything but I’ll have to wear my boots on our walks. I’m very glad the guy I live with made the decision to get a new furnace a couple of years ago.
The snowdrops, which are the only plants in flower here, will have to wait.
This is Galanthus plicatus subsp. byzantinus:
These are the ones he moved just a few weeks ago.
The snowdrops in the shade garden (there are about a thousand of them, maybe more) are just starting to open:
There are so many of these that the guy I live with doesn’t even walk in this part of the garden. There are many more right under the surface of the snow.
The snow you see there is just slush. For now.
I don’t have any willow pictures for this post. We walked down there this evening, hearing weird noises (the guy I live with said maybe the noise was from foxes), but the pictures he took were about the same as the ones I already posted, so that’s really it for this post.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
Mani, I hope you stay warm and hunkered down with your guy over the weekend! And hopefully, the snow we are supposed to get will insulate all those snowdrops trying to do their thing!
The LA fires have been such a concern for everyone, even those of us looking on from afar. I had two kids in SoCal who relocated recently and they have been anxiously monitoring the fires knowing from experience the gales than can result from the Santa Ana winds. Hopefully, weather conditions will improve so the firefighters can start to get a handle on it. No precipitation is a scary, scary thing combined with such high winds.
It’s terrible. Almost all of the guy I live with’s memories of going to bed when it’s raining and waking up to rain come from his childhood in L.A. That hardly ever happens here, these days. (It did in the past.)
The snowdrops would be okay without the snow cover, but the snow will be okay.
Some people who make oddly nasty comments on social media are afflicted with a personality disorder or a combination of such disorders that cause them to do so. They lack logic. In the past, I asked some who complain about law enforcement why they do not take such jobs, since they know so much about doing such jobs better. It did not go well. Their objective is to complain, and that is all.
The guy I live with says you’re right.
It should be obvious to everyone that the combination of high winds and no rain for nine months is a recipe for disaster. A “particularly dangerous situation”, as the weather service said.
It’s supposed to be raining there.
I hope, very sincerely, that the fires don’t come your way.
Thanks. We’re exceptionally damp here, by our standards, and we’re expecting five inches of snow over the weekend.
The difference here is that we don’t get a lot of snow in the winter (March is the snowiest month), so it isn’t “supposed to be snowing here”, but it is supposed to be raining in Los Angeles.
Mediterranean climates like California, South Africa, and western Australia (maybe Chile too) often have fires in the dry-summer period, and a lot of plants are adapted to being burned, for seed dispersal etc., but dry winters certainly aren’t part of the plan. That’s the growing season for the native plants.
I can find no words to adequately express my feelings regarding the horror of the Los Angeles disaster and its aftermath, nor the idiocy of these times. Stay warm, Mani, and thank you for these posts.
It’s really terrible; the guy I live with wonders what’s going to happen with the native vegetation there if there’s no rain during the winter growing season.
We had a really bad drought here, in 2002, with one inch of precipitation in eleven months, but then four in September, and it didn’t seem to affect anything, despite dire predictions from people (they said all the trees would die). So who knows.
Stay warm, Mani. We’re glad to have nothing pressing on the calendar and there’s plenty of dogfood in the house so our mum won’t be going out in the flash freeze that’s slated to accompany this Arctic blast. We see lots of snuggling in our future and our paws are crossed that the California firefighters stay safe. The photos we’ve seen are just jaw-dropping. So are the stupid political comments circulating about the situation. People…ugh.
Your fur-iends,
Elsa & Wilson 🐾
Thanks. The guy I live with said it was possibly inevitable that we’d get a blas of arctic air this winter, even though the weather has been fairly mild so far.
Back in the old days the guy I live with would have preferred no snow, and snowdrops, but these days, snow on the ground is just fine, and the snowdrops can wait.
Yes, people, sigh. There aren’t enough fire hydrants for firefighters to be able to battle multiple fires at once.
Like sometimes we have a sphinxmoth fly into the kitchen, and the guy I live with catches it and put it outside. But if a dozen flew into the house at the same time, he’d have problems getting them all out.
Mee-yow such beeuteefull snowdropss Mani an Guy! Wee happy youss’ got snow an THE ground iss getting hydrated guud. Wee have had 3 more feet of snow….iss so cold THE heeterss can barelee keep up!! It’s been a wild Winter!
**nose bopss** BellaDharma an ((hugss)) Bella Sita Mum
We have about five inches of snow on the ground right now. It’s really cold, too.
5 innchess iss a guud amount fore yous’ Mani!! Wee happy you have snow an THE ground will have moisture. Wee nose how impawtent it iss fore youss’.
**nose bopss** BellaDharma an ((hugss)) BellaSita Mum
Yes, it is important. Though we weren’t worrying about a dry winter after we got three times the average precipitation in November, and more than the average last month. Not to mention five hours of rain on Christmas Day.
Mani I am so glad to see your post. Hooray for your guy’s foresight on the furnace!
Memories of the Marshall fire sure do haunt those of us who live in this area, as we read about LA. Myself I had nothing but a gutter that came loose, flapping and hitting my roof with tremendous force, during those terrible winds. And now, here on Lookout Mtn, everyone is getting their hazard insurance cancelled. I hope you and your guy don’t have that problem.
I am going to look up that Raymond Chandler story.
Thanks. It’s such a relief not to pick up on all the worrying about a fifty-year-old furnace.
We live seven or eight miles southeast of Lookout Mountain. We can see the lights on top of the mountain from some places in our back yard.
The guy I live with doesn’t remember high winds in L.A. when he lived there, though there was one day when all the kids flew kites. Except for him; he couldn’t figure out how to get a kite in the air. He knows how to now.
One time when he was in college in Boulder he tried to fly a kit in hogh winds and the kite just snapped into pieces.
The Raymond Chandler stores, Philip Marlowe, all take place in L.A. except for one. Like the Ross Macdonald, Lew Archer, stories take place in Santa Barbara.