Cold, Snowy Weekend...

Looks like we're going to have an old fashioned Minnesota winter....we haven't had many of those recently, in fact, the last to Christmas' have been brown.  Not this year...

For the second weekend in a row, we picked up 6-8 inches of snow.  It started Friday afternoon...here's a picture of me from Friday night (10 pm) after shoveling the driveway the first time...

I'm having a little fun with the icy, crappy looking beard....I woke up at 6:30 on Saturday morning knowing I'd be shoveling again...here's the after picture from then...

The kids just laugh....Luke loved all the snow, he and the neighbor kid spent almost 3 hours outside Saturday morning before we left for a family Christmas afternoon at my cousins...

The trouble with this weekend wasn't the snow, it was the arctic cold that moved in Saturday afternoon/evening...man it was cold.  Here's Sunday morning at Lake Benton in Cologne...

 Lot's of people were saying that it was warmer in Antarctica or Alaska this morning (true), but it is also true that it was warmer at the Gale Crater on Mars (where the the rover Curiosity is currently exploring).  Interesting that on July 21st, we had a high temperature of 94 degrees (with a heat index of 115).  That gives us an approximate 150 degree temperature range for the state of Minnesota, that's what living in the center of a continent can/will do...

When the temperature is that low, the cold finds it way into the house anywhere it can...

What do you do when it's so cold outside?  It was still -21 when the kids and I went to Waconia to watch Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.  We all loved it...all three of the kids said "when do we get to buy it and bring it home?"

 After the movie it was a balmy -6....a good day...

***Does the current cold spell mean that global warming is a hoax?  Only people like Jim Inhofe or Donald Trump would be stupid enough to say it's cold, therefore there is no warming...

Want to read some of the effects of man-made global warming?  Read this link Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis ..(plus, our winter weather is going to be partially driven by whats going on in the Arctic...being so much warmer than normal, the jet stream is 'wavier' than it should be, the result should/could be more arctic air masses heading our way...)....