Brrrrr. . . .it's cold outside! And maybe that's not that unusual.

Pathfinder Reservoir a couple of weeks ago.  Last year it wasn't even frozen fully in this bay, at this time of year, although normally it certainly is.

This winter has been really cold.  Everywhere in the US, it's been cold.  It's been on the news constantly.  Particularly when a big cold snap or storm hits the East Coast, although this year its been so cold that cold snaps or heavy snow even out in the West have been making the news.

But maybe what's newsworthy there isn't that its really cold.  It is. But that the last several winters have been so mild that we find cold newsworthy.

After all, it's winter.

 

 State highway outside of Casper on Sunday afternoon, in the morning it had been bright and sunny.

Truth be known, the winter we've been getting isn't odd at all, it's just normal by  historical standards, not even really a particularly brutal one.  It's just that we've had warm winters long enough, say a decade or more, that people are caught by surprise.  For some people, say who were children a decade ago, that's probably not surprising.  For folks who've moved from one region of the country to another it probably isn't either.  But by and large, at least people in their 40s, and certainly people in their 50s, should remember winters normally being pretty nasty.  That's why some people dreamed of moving to warmer climates in the south.

Now, according to a recently article in the Casper newspaper, December are actually no worse than they ever were, in spite of people approaching geezerhood may recall.  When I read that, I was briefly convinced, but I no longer am.  I can definitely recall even Decembers being like this when I was a kid, and its January now. And brutal winters were certainly not out of the norm when I was in my teens and twenties.

I'm not making an argument here about the cause, or whether we should be concerned or not.  I'm only stating an observation, and relating it to the news.  I'm amused, frankly, by the degree to which weather that was routine even relatively recently has slipped out of the public mind and is now regarded as newsworthy.  It shows our evolving, or rather our temporary, concept of what is normal, and what is not.