Forecasting

I'm not here to talk about bugs today; the temperature has not gone above 20ºF for the last five days. The bugs are all sleeping under the snow, or tucked up in the bark of a tree. I am here to talk about meteorology. Today the forecast said that there was a 48% chance of snow showers around 5:00 in the evening. It snowed all day (but we only had about an inch of accumulation from all that). Not the most accurate forecast, in spite of all the fancy technology they have these days. But last night I made my own forecast, based on this:

There are a lot of folkloric ways of predicting the weather, and my favorite, because it is extremely accurate, is that if there is a ring around the moon, there will be precipitation. Snow if it's cold, rain if it's above freezing. I don't think I have ever known this to not be true. So when I saw this in the wee small hours of the morning, I made my forecast: we'd be having snow. And I was right. I may not have been able to give a pinpoint forecast about timing and snow amounts, but then, neither were the meteorologists and their computers.

I went outside this evening after the snow stopped to shovel, not because it needed to be done then, and there was barely enough to shovel, but because I wanted a reason to be outside. Last year over Christmas break we went for a hike every day. This year I have not spent any more time outside than it takes to walk from the house to the car. I haven't even been going out to get the mail and the newspaper because my husband is on vacation and he has been getting them. Aside from our traditional Christmas hike, every time this week I have tried to get someone to go for a walk with me I have been rebuffed. I am not used to spending so much time inside, so shoveling snow in the moonlight was a beautiful interlude. But I have to say, I miss the bugs.

I probably won't have any reason to post tomorrow, so Happy New Year!