We’ve been having the kookiest weather!
One day last week when I got out of bed it was pouring rain and 36F.... Gale force winds started, and soon all the clouds were gone and the temperatures had dropped below 32F... we had half an hour of bright sun then it began to cloud up.
I had an early class, so I hopped in the shower and when I got out it was snowing - tiny little flakes, few and far between that swirled in the wind a long time before finally meeting death on the still pooling ground.
I left my house, walked down the block, turned right and was hit in the face by a blizzard. Huge wet flakes, falling so densely you could barely see through, blowing sideways into me. I walked the 8 blocks to my class and when I arrived I was the abominable snowman - my entire front side was coated with a thick layer of wet snow. It was piled up on the horizontal surfaces of my purse and backpack. And the office was locked.
I took off my coat and gloves in the unheated stairwell, and shook them and beat them to get the snow off.
My student arrived and we had no choice but to find someplace else to work, so we went to a sweet little coffee shop that has a fireplace where my things could dry out on a stool in the warmth.
Our class was 90 minutes, and during that session the snow slowed to a stop, the clouds blew away, and the sun came out so bright I had to shade my eyes when looking at my student.
By the end of the session, the sky was heavy with clouds again and on my walk home the snow started in earnest again. I had a half hour to wait before my pickup and during that time it snowed like hell, stopped, and the sun came out again. I’m told it repeated this cycle once again before sunset (which as we know is 4 pm at the latest).
I wouldn't know, because my experience is that though these towns I teach in are only 40-30 kilometers apart, they each have their own "climate pocket" (can't remember what this is called!). So as we headed north in the car we left the Radom "climate pocket". And within 20 kilometers we saw evidence that there had been no 36F rain to melt all the snow along the sides of the road, AND somehow the road in this pocket had become a sheet of ice. Traffic came to a stop and we inched along for about 2 kilometers, with trucks putting their right wheel onto the shoulder of the road to gain traction.
After we passed the glacier, new teacher / new driver Ania was so frazzled that when I jokingly said "You want me to drive?", she said "Yes!". So we stopped the car and, for the first time since September, I drove 15 kilometers to school. Thankfully we'd reached a weather pocket where nothing much was happening.
The next night, on the drive home, the snow was thick and blowing almost horizontally into the windshield. The driver Dominika said in her 30 years she'd never seen snow do this.
Everywhere I go the local people say "the weather is very strange these days". GW Deniers are fools.