I shot some video today that I suspect my friends in San Francisco would say, oh hell no!about living in New England in the winter. While it’s not that bad for me I can see why living here is not for the faint of heart.
We had weather yesterday that we got to wake up to 4° and now today it’s 50° and tomorrow it will be possible 60°. In my mind this is good because it will melt the snow which we might get 1″-4″ of snow two days from now. To be honest, stop reading this and click on the video because a picture is worth a thousand words and a video is worth, I don’t know a million?
We’re entering fall now here in Northampton and I get to wake up to temperatures around 28° that on a good day warm up to 60°. This is unlike San Francisco where the morning and afternoons are pretty much within 10° of each other.
Before I moved here I read what people didn’t like about San Francisco and oddly enough the New Yorkers always said that it was the change in temperature and after being here for six months I’m sort of…WTF?!?!
I’m adapting well, but it is a bit odd walking out to put my daughter on the school bus at 7:27am [on the nose every day] and it’s really cold compared to San Francisco, but not so bad because people understand how to heat and cool a house. I only need to be exposed to the external elements of hell for a less than a minute so I’m good. Later in the morning when I venture out we have a car which I can remotely start up and warm it up and melt the frost and ice off it and I even have built in ass warmer seats so the ride it quite comfortable compared to San Francisco on a cold day when you started your car in 48° weather and got in freezing your ass off because we don’t think about warming up the car from a distance because the gas tax in California makes it expensive to sit and let your car run without driving it, let alone all the pollution you’re putting into the air.
Well, my fair readers there are a few other things that I have learned after Labor Day that may perhaps shock you. There are changes that occur that those of you out west may be horrified by.
First off, my daughter likes a daily trip to a local chain called Friendly’s after school. She has a thing for bacon and we go there every day even though I feel I could make it just as well at home. The price jumped $4 after Labor Day and I asked and they said, Oh, that was our Summer promotion pricing. Apparently things are cheaper in the Spring and Summer other than Fall and Winter. In my mind you would want to make prices cheaper in Fall and Winter when it’s colder and a lot harder to get people to leave their nice warm homes than to give them a deal when it’s warmer and they’re going out of their house anyway. This isn’t just a Friendly’s thing as there are stores that the prices have increased as well. I suppose it could be because transport in the Winter is more costly because of snow, but I haven’t seen any snow yet…
There are seasonal businesses that shut down after Labor Day. Mostly these are the roadside shacks that sell ice cream or seafood that aren’t the warmest and don’t have an place to sit down inside. Luckily, I’m happy with my ice cream from a pint carton or one of the local restaurants to get my clam strips.
On the other hand, holidays are huge here. We have a lot of distance between homes here, but there are tons of people who have gone all out decorating their houses for Halloween and in talking to my neighbors there are a lot of kids who come knocking at your door. This is interesting to me since I suspect you’ll have to drive the kids or be a marathon runner to get more than a few bite sized bars, but we’ll see. I’m working myself up to take my daughter out. We’re a week away from Halloween, but now it’s hard to find anything to do with Halloween available in stores, so I guess they expected you to buy it all by now.
Yet, Christmas stuff is everywhere and this is a big area for Christmas. Not that Jesus born in a barn in the Middle East Christmas, but more of a Germanic/Americanized trees, ornaments, FOOD sort of thing. There’s way less religion here oddly enough.
Lucky for us we’re finishing up the remodel which was easily affordable here so if we’re stuck inside for a day or two it won’t be so bad. When it’s finished I’ll have a full video to post of it, but things are not so bad here considering all my friends from the Bay Area have been telling me, It’s looks really nice, but I couldn’t deal with Winter. Honestly, Winter doesn’t suck when your community is prepared for it. We’ll be inside and doing lots of cooking and watching lots of movies…
Speaking of movies, here’s one I made of a drive through my neighborhood that’s about five minutes away from downtown Northampton. It was 37° when I shot this video, but rather pleasant in the car…
I knew it would be cold when we moved to Massachusetts, but we didn’t think we’d see any snow. We were wrong and we learned about several variations that came down on us since last night that caused a few minor problems today.
Last night we looked out the window and it looked like snow was on the cars, but we didn’t see any snow falling. My wife informed me that it had iced over which means the air isn’t cold enough to freeze the waters but the ground is so rain drops hit the ground and splash up breaking apart and then freeze. It made things kind of dry rain if something like that can be said to exist, but it wasn’t unpleasant even though it was 30° out last night. I stood out talking to a friend of my on a phone call for about 10 minutes and while if was cold I didn’t feel like I was freezing.
Apparently overnight the rain stopped and snow fell and there was a couple of inches of it on my car and lots of other cars in the morning. It stopped raining so it was pretty out, but hard to walk since it was still cold and the ice that remained was slippery. This caused us to hold off driving anywhere since our California Honda Civic LX didn’t have tires suited for this type of weather and we didn’t want to risk it.
Then the rain came back. The problem was it was daylight and warmer so we didn’t see any icing over, but instead the warmer rain came down very slowly melting the snow creating slush. It was like a 7-11 slushee machine exploded all over the area only it was fairly dirty if it was on the streets. As the rain melted the snow there were suddenly huge puddles everywhere. As the rain continued through the day it got a lot heavier and appeared close to what the El Niño rains were like in San Francisco. It wasn’t that bad to drive in, but there were still remains of snow and slush from earlier in the day that you had to be a little careful of.
So the last 24 hours have been a bit of a work out, but for me who’s a big kid down deep inside it was a lot of fun. I’m getting used to the colder weather which isn’t that bad I figured out because cold and clear feels a lot warmer than cold and overcast which explains why I used to complain about 50° weather in San Francisco, but 30° with the sun out isn’t so bad.
This is a little late in coming, but we got up early Saturday morning and hopped on a plane and are back east after a two hour layover in Philly. I got to have a cheesesteak from Geno’s at the airport which wasn’t very spectacular, but it was from an airport so I won’t hold it against them. The first leg of the flight was pretty awesome since it was real first class with an entertainment system, lie flat seats and decent food. The flight attendants were really, really nice. Especially when you’ve got an autistic daughter on her first flight and leaving home.
We’ve been running around while trying to get ourselves settled and adjust to weather that’s about 26° in the morning or “feels like..ARE YOU NUTS!!!!” Oddly enough I was just outside and it’s about 32°, but while it’s cold it’s not freezing.
So far I’ve noticed a few things like, you have to drive to get places, but there’s lots of freeways and less traffic so you get there faster. We’re staying in Holyoke, MA which is about 9 miles south of Northampton, MA where we’re looking to live and it takes maybe 15 minutes to drive there. Just as a comparison, when I was driving for Uber it could take me 30-45 minutes to drive 4 miles to get to downtown San Francisco.
Then there are the stores. We got Walmart here and it’s so big along with grocery stores like Big Y and Stop and Shop that my feet started to hurt after walking so much. Seriously, after growing up in San Francisco we’re talking grocery stores that are the size of Costco and just groceries. The other upside of being here is that the groceries are cheap. We’re staying in a suite with a kitchen so we stocked up last night and have a weeks worth of food for about $20. I think I rarely got out of a grocery store in SF for under $60.
Today we’re going to try and go a little north of Northampton, MA to Deerfield to visit the Yankee Candle Factory because our daughter has been really, really good throughout the transition and that should be a fun place for her to visit. Posts will be short and sporadic unlike my usual feature length articles, but it’ll be fun to share my experiences quickly.
Incidentally, I got up this morning to a snow flurry. While it’s been about 15 years since I’ve been in snow it wasn’t falling snow so this was a weird experience for a San Francisco Native to have. I probably looked like a goober doing this, but I shot a little video outside as I was experience falling snow for the first time since I was about 17. Enjoy!
A few people have been talking about this, but unfortunately they weren’t old enough to experience it first hand [you darn kids!]. In 1976 something weird happened in San Francisco…it snowed. Now I spent plenty of time outside San Francisco on vacations and even had a chance as a five year old to drive up to Hamm’s Station in the Sierra’s from my Aunt’s house in Jackson to experience snow and tobogganing. Unfortunately my much larger football playing cousin fell off the back leaving light old me to shoot up over the end of the snow and head face first for a trailer hitch with my parents just standing there screaming and doing nothing to stop the toboggan. For some reason a little voice in my head told me to lie down and I slid under the car and was stopped by a gas pump.
That was the last time I was allowed on a toboggan, but it wasn’t the last time I dealt with snow. So on sometime around February 5, 1976 I heard my Grandmother yelling from downstairs for me and I jumped up and ran downstairs at 3am thinking what do you want and why are you screaming at me at 3am in the morning and then she opened the back door. SNOW, in San Francisco. There must have been close to a foot at the time because it was the middle of the night. Our dog ran down and ran outside and got to the bottom of the stairs and decided to come back in the house. He had never seen snow so this was something he didn’t understand. I started making snowballs and throwing them all over the place of course because that’s what you do with snow.
In the morning there was still snow and I got bundled up for junior high school and walked down and as I turned the corner was hit by a snowball. OK, it’s on now. I knew how to be a machine gun with snowballs and several of the kids started to run away while a few joined my team. One of my friends Martin who was on the other team who happened to make a rather large snowball and as I saw it coming at me I ducked and heard a rather large crack behind me. Apparently it was so big because it was a snowball made around a heap of frozen dog poop. Throwing frozen dog poop is kind of like throwing a rock at someone because the person who got hit took it right in the nose and ended up with a broken nose. That was probably the most not fun part of the snow storm.
The roads were icy in places and it was the first time a lot of the city kids had not only seen snow, but seen cars swinging back and forth on the ice. Note I had hike a few miles to the Sulphur Works in December at Lassen Volcanic Park with a friend of mine Mark Ghiorso wearing snowshoes so there was a bit of mountain man in me. Slipping on the ice you just expected if you didn’t have crampons attached to your shoes which we didn’t. I understood the snow while most of the other kids didn’t.
This was a whole new world to a lot of us, but we actually have had snow since then. I lived for a short time in Midland Terrace and in the mornings would see a few trucks coming down off the top of the mountain and they’d have some snow in the back of their trucks. In 1986 I worked on the third floor of the Pacific Bell Building and we started to see snow fall and all ran downstairs to see the snow which had melted by the ground floor and just turned into rain.
We do have every few years of weather where it’s cold enough for your car windshield to ice over which I would always go and get a bucket of hot water and pour over the windshield. The first couple of times my wife would yell at me because you apparently don’t do that back east because it either freezes over or cracks your windshield. Well, on the west coast it doesn’t stay cold enough for that to happen and the ice just melted away.
Snow can be fun, but after hearing what living through a winter back east is like, I’ve decided I’ll just take the cold rain here. You don’t need an old beater car to drive in the snow so you don’t ruin your good car. You don’t need chains and the stores don’t run out of food and your power doesn’t go out for a couple of weeks at a time. Thank you San Francisco.
It looks like winter has finally arrived in San Francisco. Winter here is different that in other parts of the country. We don’t get snow [well maybe every 30 years we get an inch], we don’t get ice, we don’t get below zero temperatures, but for some reason you are freezing when it’s 60° outside. It’s a different kind of cold. It’s a very wet cold that soak through to the bone and there are a few things you have to keep in mind.
If you have a fireplace check to see if you can close the flu. I have to do that today because even though we have our fireplace blocked off with our daughter’s toys I was still gettiing hit by 50-60 mph wind gusts blowing down the chimney and around the boxy toys blocking the fireplace. Make sure the windows are closed because cold air will blow in and if have your heater on it’s just sucking the heat out the window. If you have gas heating, use it. It’s cheap compared to electric space heaters and will keep your PG&E costs down. It will also warm the whole house and not just a room. Don’t use your fireplace, especially if you’ve closed the flue as it will heat only the one room and might flow over a bit to a closer room. Things like this will make your home life more comfortable. It’s also more eco-friendly not to use your fireplace.
When you have to leave your house, always bring a small umbrella. It might be clear when you leave, but an hour into it you’ll be hit by a downpour. You’ll also have to make sure you wear layers just the rest of the year, but it’ll be time to pull out the sweaters and other long sleeve shirts. Think of how the people dress on the TV shows in New York. You’ll want that. You might sweat a bit on your way in, but trust me, you’ll be warm.
If you’re one of the lucky few that gets to drive into work you’ve got another thing to deal with and that is the manhole covers on hills. I haven’t been out today, but I’m sure with the rain that’s been coming down that we have a few manhole covers being lifted up by too much water and flooding the streets as it rolls down the hill. You won’t need to sandbag your house if you live in an area like this unless it’s a heavy downpour and you live in the downward corner houses. The streets are also not very even so you’ll get puddle build up especially near corner drains that get blocked with pine needles and leaves being blown off the trees. I would suggest you keep to the middle lanes when driving. I remember a horrible experience I had when driving in San Rafael one winter where I was driving and underpass and saw a line of water all the way across and thought to myself…PUDDLE JUMPING TIME! Turns out as I speed up the water was over three feet deep and spewed everywhere soaking my engine and stalling out my car. Luckily I had time to get off to the side, but this was before cell phones so I just put on my blinkers and luckily a tow truck came by and took my AAA card and helped me out.
Another thing you’ll need to think about is power outages. Even in San Francisco where it gets wet and windy, but not as bad as the North Bay we get power outages. If it happens after you go to bed then your alarm doesn’t go off and you’re late for work. You’ll get up and have no power to cook yourself breakfast unless you’ve got a gas stove [we don’t]. It helps to have one of those butane burners on hand if the powers out for awhile. Don’t open your refrigerator or freezer very often to make sure you keep things cold. The frozen stuff will stay frozen for a day or so, but your refrigerator might get warm because it’s used more often within 12 hours. It’s also nice to have an old style oil burning lamp. I have my grandmothers for when we’re sitting in a room together, but we also have several rechargeable very bright lights that will last for 12 hours we can carry around with us. It’s kind of interesting showering and shaving in the dark with nothing but a bright LED light to brighten the room. We also have a gas grill outside that we can cook on if it’s not a downpour. If it is we should think about getting an awning to cover it.
If you need to kill time hopefully your iPhone/iPad/Tablet/SmartPhone has 3G or 4G that can pick up a connection. I learned how to turn my iPhone into an alarm clock with out it buzzing with every email or tweet I get. Just be careful that you don’t overuse your time or you’ll have to pay big time. I always kind of liked the quite during a power outage. It just makes me feel like I’m not being attacked by electrical energy from all the devices in the house. The power outages only last about four hours, usually less unless it’s an earthquake then it could be 12 hours without power. I have some friends who own a Victorian they restored to its original form so if they get a power outage they light the gas ceiling lamps and are fine. Most of their appliances are gas powered which saves them money and keeps them going during a blackout. Just a little something to think about.
Yes, winter is the magical time of Christmas, but there’s nothing magical about living in a freezing house or working in a freezing office. I do like coming home from work and opening the door and feeling heat hit my face. To me that’s the magical part of winter for me.
When I was a young teenager I had a mentor, Mark who was working on a degree in Geochemistry. This meant he had to do a lot of field work and I was lucky enough to be asked to accompany him on a tree up north to Lassen Volcanic Park. He was studying hot springs and what better time to study them than in winter. You really haven’t lived until you’ve seen hot springs in winter.
We traveled up to the Lassen ski resort and had to snow shoe about a mile to the Sulphur Works. As we pulled into the parking lot I saw wall of freshly ploughed snow and I got an idea. While we were staying in a hotel we still had a lot of stuff you would need when hiking up to the outback wilderness areas of Lassen. I have an idea I said because this wasn’t going to be a work only trip and i pull a saw out of the trunk and started cutting blocks of snow and piling them up. I can’t find a picture of it, but it looks a bit like the picture I included with this article. Being from San Francisco and not being a skier snow is a fascinating thing to me because I don’t see it. I haven’t seen snow in over 15 years and people look at be funny when I pick it up in my hand.
It was cold and a bit windy out, but we proceeded on and soon had a 10’x10′ igloo built. We crawled inside and found that without the wind hitting you we suddenly felt warmer. A few passers by stopped to take a look and we invited them in. People were surprised at how nice it felt inside a hand built tent of snow. Granted it wasn’t as nice as the ski lodge, but still it was better than standing out in the cold winter air.
We left the igloo and traveled up to the Sulphur Works. The heat of the hot springs had melted the snow all around it and air was surprisingly warm and humid. The strange part of the humid sulphur filled air is that it would freeze on your hair and create little icicles. The water in these springs has an almost unbearable stench and we spent a few hours testing the pH and temperature of the waters there. The smell of rotting eggs was heavy in the air, but when we finished we made our trek back and stopped at the lodge for some hot chocolate. As we walked back to the car we noticed that our abandoned igloo had remained untouched and that there was a beer cooler sitting out side. When we poked our heads in there were a couple of squatters who had taken over my igloo. I told them that I had built it a few hours ago and they were welcome to it.
[imagebrowser id=7]Every year I get into the holiday spirit early, but this year it took me awhile. Twas the night before Christmas Eve and I had to take a trip to 34th and Quintara to get in the mood. There’s a guy who owns the corner house that for every holiday puts up a display for everyone to see. Whether it’s Valentine’s day or St. Patrick’s day he does up the house, but Christmas is his biggest time of the year.
I have no idea what his name is, but tomorrow I’m going to knock on his door and introduce myself to him. Cars that drive by his house slow down and people bring their kids to have their pictures taken in front of the house. His house is so magically Christmasy that even during the day it looks beautiful. Why he hasn’t been written up in the paper yet is beyond me, but I’m hoping someone from the Chronicle or Examiner or even SF Weekly will stop by and interview him.
He works hard to do what he does and i feel he should be acknowledged for it. We take our daughter down every Christmas and Halloween [the two biggest times for this houses decorations] just to see that WOW look on her face. He is the Santa for all the kids that need something more than the mall Santa’s. He doesn’t get paid to do this, but he does it anyway. That’s a rare thing in this day and age and I feel he needs to be recognized for it.
If you get a chance, definitely go by and see his house. It is a wonderful Christmas tradition that is non-sectarian like the Christmas’ I knew as a kid. In honor of his work, I did a little work tonight and put together a video tribute to his house and it’s decorations. I hope you enjoy it and drive by and see his place. He and his wife are doing a great community service for what they are doing and they deserve an award. My video is the best I have to offer so far. I’ve included a slideshow at the top from pics I took last year and this year. While I can’t give a gift to all of my readers I hope you’ll all accept this. Enjoy!
Louis Black once said that the best job in the world would be the weatherman in San Diego, “How’s the weather today Bob?…Nice.” Now I don’t want to put down our local meteorologists [the new way to de-sexify weatherman], but our people who handle the weather have their work cut out for them and they should get paid more than the same people in San Diego where it’s nice.
I love my weather app on my iPhone and since my wife is from the East Coast I’ve learned that the Weather Channel is sacred to them back there. Whenever someone from the East Coast comes to SF they always want to watch the Weather Channel for some reason. I always tell them you can watch, but don’t expect them to get it right all the time.
San Francisco has four micro-climates, The Fog Belt out by the beach, the Banana Belt out in the Mission, The Wind tunnel of downtown and I’m not a meteorologist, so I don’t remember the name of the fourth, but I believe it’s on the Bay side of the city. When I lived out in the Mission district for six years I don’t think I put on a sweatshirt once unless I was traveling over the hills to get to my parents house in the Sunset where I gladly live now. Here in the Sunset I sometimes get to wear a short sleeve shirt, but it’s usually under several layers because the morning start out cold and wet and sometimes actually warm up so you have to shed your layers of clothes until around 2-3pm when the wind starts to kick up and then you put on heavier clothes if you have to spend time outdoors at all.
Meteorologists always have to give a forecast for the coasts and inlands because you can see as much as a 40° difference in weather. When I go to work it’s cold and wet out here in the late morning and when I get to work in Marin it’s bright and sunny. It was warm there today and for once they got it right. It was supposed to be hot on Friday, but then the wind changed direction and it got cooler and foggier. Then yesterday it was supposed to be heavy fog at the coasts and it was more like an overcast day with high clouds, at least in the Sunset. Richmond District may have been worse.
We all know that the best way to spot a tourist in San Francisco is anyone you see downtown in Summer in shorts. May, if we’re lucky and then usually September & October are the times for wearing your tank tops and shorts [usually]. Sometimes like when we had the big el Niño in the late 90’s we had to wear our winter coats in July and I was grilling in shorts and a tank top on New Year’s Eve. There’s a lot of things that screw with our weather here, but it’s mostly the winds on the coast and the hills. I called my wife from work today to see how things where going, “It’s cold and wet”. I didn’t really want to tell her I was basking in 78° bright sun in Marin, so I just left that out, but she likes the fog here anyway.
Predicting the weather is a hit or miss option in San Francisco so make sure the next time you listen to a weather report to cut your weatherperson a little slack. If they could control the weather they wouldn’t care what you think because they’d be Gods. Oh and contrary to popular belief, Mark Twain never said, The coldest summer I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.
I was surfing around the web yesterday when I got a notification that an old friend of mine Kirsten had added me to the Sunset District Group on facebook. I had to check this out since it’s one more thing about San Francisco. I’m glad I did.
Someone started this group so that all the people who grew up and or lived in the neighborhood could get together and talk about the old times. I like nostalgia so as I’m starting to look over the postings a portion of my brain unlocked and all these childhood memories started flooding back in.
Names I hadn’t heard in close to 30 years started to pop up. People were posting old photos of places that no longer exist [Don’t cook tonight, get Chicken Delight!] It was fun reading all the old stories. There’s a lot that’s gone over time. Like the Fotomat booth that used to be out near the foot of Noriega. Aladdin Bowl on Noriega which I always remember people complaining that the lanes were warped and of course you can’t talk about the good old days in the Sunset without a mention of the old ice skating rink out on…45th Ave was it?
Then there was the post of all people I knew as a kid who had died. It was kind of sad finding a bunch of people who’s names you haven’t heard in years only to hear more names of those that have died. But at least there’s more fun to cover the sadness.
There’s over 2300 people now in the group and it’s growing faster every day. If you want to know what it was like growing up in the Sunset amidst the fog this is a good place to go.
On a completely unrelated note, I received a tweet today from @geeksugar which is a website for techie girls that was in response to their request for the nerdiest/geekiest pick up line ever used. I guess I won with:
Sorry, I will not tell you what CHMOD 777 means if you don’t know and I didn’t realize how funny it would be until my cellphone started vibrating off the table with all the retweets. I’ve finally come up with something that’s gone viral. Let’s see how far it goes now.
