Some snow

 Last Friday morning, we were surprised with a nice dusting of snow, here in north eastern central-ish Connecticut.  I decided to take the scenic route to school and I took a few rolling shots.

Of course is all melted pretty much as soon as the sun came up, but it turned out to be a beautiful day and as it would turn out, the snow was just a taste of what was to come.

 

 As anyone on the East Coast already knows, Saturday brought a surprising snow storm, laying down over a foot in some places.  I had to shovel about 7" off my car on Sunday morning.  I didn't take any photographs of the carnage, but carnage it was.  It was an incredibly heavy snow, even on Saturday the branches on trees were hanging quite low, and by the time Sunday rolled around there were power lines down everywhere.

Here's a couple shots from early Saturday afternoon.

  Hopefully, and I say hopefully as an overwhelmingly small portion of the population around here, that this is a precursor to another snowy winter.  Realistically, an extreme event like this will turn out to be an outlier, and can't really be a means of predicting the winter to come.  I did some research though, and NOAA is predicting another moderate La Nina year (like last year) which results in cooler than normal temperatures in the north central states, and a wet cell near the Great Lakes which often translates to snow storms in the Northeast.  La Nina may also mean slightly higher than normal temperatures and lower than normal precipitation in the Southeast states, which I'm hoping means favorable conditions for my Appalachian Trail thru-hike in the late winter and early spring of 2012.  As far as snow in the Northeast goes though, the bigger factor is the Arctic Oscillation, which is less predictable, and can bring large snow storms.

 This storm, for me, has just been a big teaser.  I'm already dreaming about gliding through the fluffy white stuff on my skis.  Perhaps sometime, relatively soon, the focus of this blog will detract from the bicycle trend that it's been on.  The thought of starting another, bicycle-centric blog and naming it "Ride the Gamut", has crossed my mind.  For now, let's enjoy the rest of the fall.