But one year, winter didn’t show up. Oh, the residents got ONE “snowstorm” that year. It looked like this:

But it was a pitiful excuse for a snowstorm. Gee, a whopping 3 inches. And two days later, a balmy rainstorm washed it all away.

Photo taken last year from the King’s Garden at Fort Ticonderoga. It’s a nice break from the dull, gray and brown, rainy January outside my window.

The weather dudes just informed us that Lake Ontario is experiencing warmer than average temperatures. Lake Ontario fuels most of the the heavy “lake effect” snow that clobbers Upstate New York every winter. When cold air from Canada hit the warm water of Ontario, a roiling stew of snow develops. Some communities close to the lake and others inland but sitting along the wind currents get hit with tons of snow. Some towns get upwards of 10 feet in one storm. That’s a good storm. I am used to this kind of weather, so anything less than a foot of snow in a day is not really a storm to me. I know, some of you folks would be so freaked out if 5 or 10 feet of snow dropped on you, that you’d have to enter a residential rehab treatment facility! But I love the snow, especially the storms. Everything shuts down, no busy traffic.. it’s so beautiful and peaceful.

But today we have gray and brown. Hardly any snow at all this year. Although, with Ontario so warm… any cold current could change things very quickly. And we still have 2.5 months of winter left…

BARELY.

This is the extent of our Upstate New York winter weather, folks. I find it quite remarkable. I hope we don’t pay for our balmy weather this spring…. !

And yes, the skies are as gloomy as the photo appears. We’ve had more November and December sun lately than I can remember in my lifetime, but this week has been a bit gloomy.

Photo taken as we were leaving Virginia a week ago.

We didn’t know it at the time, but on the heels of this storm that followed us up north came another, more insidious storm that tore through Joplin, Missouri. And then another, through Oklahoma City.

The storms in the south are so much stranger than ours here in the North, at least as far as I could tell with my limited time spent in Virginia. The clouds are angrier and “bushier.” But the rain is not as violent. Here in New York, where we experienced severe flash flooding in late April, the clouds were their regular bland gray, as if someone had smoothed mortar over the skies. But from them dumped 2 inches of rain in a matter of hours. And it’s not terribly uncommon, either.

When we were in Virginia, the clouds always looked so terribly fierce– menacing swirls and dark circles, but the rain that dropped was nothing compared to our northern rains of Biblical proportions.

I did spot a funnel cloud while driving outside of Richmond, Va. I’d never seen such a thing before.

The photo is a little blurry, taken with my iPhone as we raced 60mph down the highway!

STRANGE.

That’s the old hot water heater. It’s dead. You can see the waterline from the flooding, and the motor oil that spilled into the water.

We were two days without hot water, which wasn’t a big deal. I was actually sweating out how we were going to get a plumber over here so quickly to install our new tank…. I wasn’t even sure I could locate his rack card printing card phone number! It was a Friday morning and the house and yard were all mud and and I didn’t think he’d be able to come until Monday or Tuesday. FIVE DAYS without hot water?! No way. We were a muddy mess from the cleanup and needed showers.

So the husband installed the water tank!!!!! Can you believe it?! He did the gas line and everything! Oh I love him!!

I just wish it would STOP raining. For a LONG time.