Old Man Winter is running out of steam—or ice, that is. On March 10 high temperatures reached into the fifties, and Upper Midwesterners were out in droves enjoying the nice weather. We’ll probably get some snow this weekend, but daily highs will mostly be above freezing, and the sun is climbing high in the sky now.
This was my second winter since moving back to Minnesota from California, and I have to say it wasn’t too hard a winter. It was cold in early December, and we had a brief period of below-zero weather in February, but we escaped much of the bone-shivering cold of a more typical Upper Midwestern winter—though we’re all wondering what is typical now given the likely existence of global warming.
The Minnesota Climatology Working Group declared it another “balmy??? winter. It published this description of our “meteorological winter,??? which runs from December to February:
…[F]or the 8th time in the past 9 winters, it was warmer than normal. From December to February the average temperature was 5.3 degrees above normal or 22.6 degrees. This makes the winter of 2005-2006 the 9th warmest winter in the Twin Cities. The last time a winter was below normal was the chilly and snowy winter of 2000-2001.
As I mentioned several weeks ago, this past January, with an average temperature of 28.6 degrees, was the warmest January since 1846.
It hasn’t been a great winter for cross-country skiing, what with warm weather and a lack of snow. However, the warmth allowed me to get out and ride my bicycle for part of every month except December.
The brief cold snap on February 17 and 18 gave the Twin Cities some of its lowest temperatures of the winter: minus 13 on both days. Here at our house, it also gave us a frozen water pipe.
I’m probably partly to blame for the frozen pipe. Frugal environmentalist that I am, I had closed off some of the heating vents in the basement for greater efficiency. Since most of the basement is underground and shares walls with the neighboring townhouses, and since the furnace gives off some heat, I thought that this was a fairly risk-free decision.
I was wrong, however. Cold weather discovers the weaknesses in a house, as it does in people, and in our house it poured in through some unsealed holes in one vulnerable corner. That’s where it froze the pipe, as we discovered when we woke up on the morning of February 18 to find that we did not have water.
A plumber restored our water later that day, but four weeks later I’m still working on that hard-to-reach corner of the basement, trying to insulate it better from winter’s probing fingers. I give thanks that those same wintry digits didn’t penetrate my own vulnerable corners this past winter. I’ve made it through another Upper Midwestern winter just fine, and I look forward to the gentler season of spring.
