Driveway
We didn't get much snow in December. Only about 3 inches. In fact, the last several years, Chicago has gotten more snow in April than in December, and there's a good chance that streak continues this year.
Most of those 3 inches of snow fell on December 30; it started as rain and sleet before transitioning to snow. Wendy and I didn't have anywhere to go that week, so I didn't bother shoveling the driveway the next day. I really regret that now! There's been a solid layer of ice on our driveway ever since. Several times I've gone out and hacked away at it with a metal shovel to try breaking it up. Every time it does start to break up, I clear it off and discover there's still a layer of ice underneath. What a pain! It's been 2 and half weeks since that storm, and I've only managed to clear half the driveway. The weather hasn't warmed up enough to melt it, and doesn't look like it will for the foreseeable future.
Winter Measurements
Speaking of snow, I've been dutifully tracking daily precipitation throughout the winter for CoCoRaHS (See this post for a refresher). Last winter I got discouraged at how much work it was to track snow measurements, so I stopped after a while. Here are all the things they want tracked:
- The melted amount of new snow that fell in the rain gauge's outer cylinder.
- The depth of new snow on a snow board.
- Using an outer cylinder to extract a core of new snow from the snow board and reporting the melted amount.
- The total depth of snow on the ground.
- Once per week, using an outer cylinder to extract a core of snow from the ground and reporting the melted amount.
That is a crazy amount to measure! They do say you don't have to do all of those things, though. You're a volunteer, so just do what you can. This year I decided to be fully prepared heading into winter. I watched all of their training videos, attended a webinar, and bought the extra supplies they recommend, which include:
- An extra outer cylinder for the rain gauge.
- A "snow stick" -- basically a yard stick that measures to the tenth of an inch.
- A "snow swatter" -- basically a hard plastic fly swatter to help collect core samples.
- A snow board on which to measure new snow. They recommend a large piece of plywood painted white but I went with a white commercial-grade cutting board that some users recommended.
It's still a lot of work, but with those extra supplies (and having to work from home due to the pandemic), I've been able to track measurements every day.
One of the handy things I learned from their training videos is that instead of melting snow to measure the liquid amount, you can get the same value by weighing it. An inch of water weighs 201 grams. By weighing the snow in the cylinder using a kitchen scale, subtracting the weight of the cylinder, and dividing by 201, you get the amount of liquid water in inches. When we got the 2+ inches of snow/rain/sleet on December 30th, I tried first weighing and then melting/measuring the amount in the rain gauge, and I was kind of amazed that it worked! Both techniques came out to 0.73 inches of water.
(A clever tip I picked up from the webinar was to use a permanent marker to write the weight of the empty outer cylinder on the bottom. Since I have 2 outer cylinders now, and they weigh a slightly different amount, that tip has been very handy.)
Tahini-Fig Muffins
Finally, a few weeks ago Wendy tried out a new recipe: Tahini muffins with figs. I thought it sounded really weird, but was willing to give it a try. For the first couple of muffins I ate, my taste buds agreed: they were weird muffins. But they grew on me, and by the end of the batch I thought they were really good. Wendy made another batch this week (with an extra egg to make them less crumbly and with twice as many figs as called for), and they were quite good. Here's a link to the recipe, if you're interested:
https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/08/tahini-muffins-with-figs.html
Wendy said she would consider adding cinnamon if she makes them again.