Snow Blues

Normally, I am the first person to cheer when it snows. Nah, my husband is first - he's like a little kid. But I have to say that at this point, I am sick of snow and hope not see it again anytime soon.

We love the snow so much, that it's become a tradition for us to go somewhere at Christmas where it's snowing. We started this a few years ago when we went to Beckley, WV just overnight, to see the snow. Last year, we rented an RV and went to Pipestem State Park and we all know what that led to. We are now the proud (and broke) owners of a truck and 40 foot 5th wheel. This year, we didn't even have to go anywhere. We went out and stayed in the RV at the Campground where we store it. Plenty of snow. More snow at Christmas than we've seen in 25+ years, I believe.

We are now on our third snowstorm since Christmas and it's only January 11. I know, I should be grateful. My family in Germany have been digging themselves out since October. But this weather is freaky! Queensland, Australia is flooded. They had an inland tsnuami after flooding that has gone on for weeks. You expect this in California, maybe, or the Midwest. But Australia?? They've been under drought conditions for decades. And yes, I know Queensland is not desert, but the amount of flooding they're getting is something never seen before there.

This freaky weather has been happening all through 2010:

1. In early July in the eastern states of the US and Canada, a heatwave caused numerous deaths and power cuts.
2. In Pakistan, about 1600 people have died since floods struck in July and early August, while about 14 million are struggling to cope with the consequences of the natural disaster, the UN and Pakistani government said.
3. In Russia, an unprecedented heatwave has triggered about 557 wildfires and left the capital Moscow cloaked in heavy smog. Moscow's daily mortality rate has doubled to about 700, the city's health department head said, with city morgues almost full.

In August, meteorologists stated that the cause was a stalled jet stream and that this unusual weather would not affect Australia. Did someone forget to tell the Aussies that? Others blame it on El Nino. I thought it was La Nina? Oh, that's a different one. Accuweather is predicting that January 2011 will be the coldest January since 1985, past or over a period of 26 years, in the U.S.

It seems like we're not the only ones with freaky weather patterns: Saturn is having the same problems:

FROM CNBC:

One of the most bizarre weather patterns in the solar system has been photographed at Saturn, where astronomers have spotted a huge, six-sided feature circling the north pole.

Rather than the normally sinuous cloud structures seen on all planets that have atmospheres, this thing is a hexagon.

The honeycomb feature has been seen before. NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft imaged it more than two decades ago. Now, having spotted it with the Cassini spacecraft, scientists conclude it is a long-lasting oddity.

"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said Tuesday in an image advisory. "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere, where circularly shaped waves and convective cells dominate, is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is."

So we not only have freaky weather to contend with here - now it's on other planets, too.  People could make a lot of suppositions about that one...

As for me, I'm looking for a bar to buy in the Bahamas.