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Some other links of recent interest to Pasty Cam watchers:
• Ancestors 2007  • New Arrivals 2007
• The Hut Inn Re-opens
Eight years ago on the Pasty Cam: 02/06/99^{Printed on Recycled Internet}

Eight years ago on the Pasty Cam, Jonathan Hopper took this shot of firefighters in Calumet.

Today, we may hit double digits, with a predicted high of 9. The weather service forecast has snowflakes dancing across the screen daily throughout the week--looks like we're making up for lost time.

Mornin'

Good morning from me, too.

Good Morning!

Good morning!

Good Morning

Good morning It's -15 here in Gwinn this morning.

Oh yeah! We're having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave!!! LOL It's only -4 here this morning. Tropical, eh?

Morning All! Thankyou Mary for the profile help! :)

-26 here this morning with -30-40 wind chills schools closed for the second day do to cold weather.

Steve, what area are you in?

It's actually 5 above in Pellston. I am about to walk the dogs who have been mostly inside since Friday due to the cold wind and are having cabin fever.

The comments lately deriding global warming are a bit off the mark. They are confusing weather (a 'snapshot' of a single day) with climate (averages and trends). There will always be cold snaps in the winter thanks to our friends to the north sending it our way, but the global trend is for warmer averages and melting polar ice caps.

Good morning, feels a little warmer today but still no school. Car started with fewer chugs.

Good morning! Heat wave in Illinois, it's 0 and feels like spring compared to yesterday.
Guess I'll get "Joey" some boots for the next deep freeze. Something tells me that he'll just stand there with a "get these stupid things off of me look"!

Good morning! If anyone has questions about global warming, all I say, is look at every glacier throughout the world, and look at what they were 50, or 100-200 years ago, the results will be quite drastic. As for Grand Forks, I noticed a south wind was taking form all day yesterday and expected a heat wave to come along with it, sure enough, the morning after -31, we are now encountering an extreme tropical climate, its -5 with a windchill of -26 today, I think its about that time to pull out the shorts again(maybe even the pasty costume...) cause it feels like summer out there!!!

Well, today is a carbon copy of yesterday for us, with -6 air temp & -23 wind chill when I dropped my son off at school. Once again, the schools in our county are the ONLY schools around that are open (the schools in the surrounding counties & all around are closed), but I won't be surprised to hear that our schools have to close later this morning. My son said that about 1/4 to 1/3 of the kids in each of his classes were absent yesterday. When I took him to school yesterday, the students' parking lot had some open parking spaces, but it didn't look that bad for the time that I dropped him off. But, today, the parking lot looked had a lot more open spaces, yet I was later dropping him off, which tells me that they are missing even more kids today. If they do not have a high enough percentage of their enrollment there on a given school day, they do not get any money from the state for that day. They should have been close to that number yesterday. I will not be surprised to get a call that they are sending the kids home today. (I heard that at least one of the school districts about 100 miles southwest of us did that yesterday, because they did not make their count.)

Yesterday, I underestimated the number of classrooms that the high school had to close because of flooding caused by pipes that had frozen & burst - it was least two (not just one) classrooms.

A couple of you suggested yesterday that I keep my son home from school anyway. That's easier said than done, with a high school kid. He's afraid that he will get behind if he misses classes, if school is open. For instance, yesterday, they had a test in his Honors Algebra class. His German class is conducted completely in German, even though it is first year; missing that interaction would be hard to makeup. On the other side, my son has a bad cold and sore throat now. I told him that I would call the school and tell them that he is sick today, because he really is. It really would have been nice had our school district closed for the day. :-(

-14F here in Green Bay this morning.

Marianne, couldn't speak a word of English when we came to the states, mainly all German. I took German in High School and almost flunked it! A very tough language! My Mom used to tell me that Russian was the toughest to learn.

Joanie--I took German in high school & college. (That's back when foreign languages were required, and German, Russian, or French were the languages of choice for science & engineering majors. My high school offered all three languages, but I chose German.) When I met my husband in college, I convinced him to switch his foreign language from French to German, because more relevant technical journals, etc, were in German than in English. And then, my two of sons decided on German for the same reasons.

I can understand spoken German far better than I can speak it. I might have had a hard time in my son's class, since I never learned to speak it very well. I took it mainly to learn to read it.

When I was in high school in Houston, my Mom & I went to a hair salon for hair cuts that was owned and run by a bunch of Germans. One day, a couple of them were mad at each other & were cursing at each other in German. Well, I understood more than enough German to know exactly what they were saying, so I was laughing. They stopped in their tracks because they were so embarrassed that anyone could understand most of what they were saying! :-)

One more thing, Joanie, I had heard that Russian was the hardest language, too. But, they did not have the middle eastern languages figured in back then, so I don't know where those fit in.

Well, Capt Paul, I guess it's not just the silly Texas builders who design water pipes that freeze. Pipes froze in some of the classrooms in our high school. I read last night that Munising is having problem with freezing & breaking pipes.

What's more, a homeowner in Montrose (near Flint), tried to thaw his frozen pipes with a battery charger, but he apparently overheated the insulation surrounding them, causing his house to catch on fire. The problem up here in Michigan is that when we get this unusually cold Arctic air, not even the fire engines can handle it, a problem that we did not see in Texas. I understand that several of the fire (water pumper) trucks froze up when they tried to fight that Montrose fire.

Munising is trying to avert more problems by telling their residents to be patient and let the Munising Dept of Public Works thaw their pipes, so people don't accidentally start fires by trying to thaw frozen pipes themselves. They are hoping to avert the severe problems like Munising had in 1996, with people trying to thaw their own frozen pipes, by having the DPW thaw frozen pipes.

It's -2 (-13 with the wind chill) on the southern shores of Lake Michigan, today. Supposed to get 3-5 inches of snow today, and I have to drive to Mokena...so I'll be driving into the snow band on the way there and driving with the snow band as it heads into Indiana, on the way back home. Hopefully I'll get back home before it gets too bad...I hate driving in the snow with those Illinois folks...seems the concept of 'it's snowing and you need to slow down' isn't grasped by them.
Hope everyone stays warm today and has a safe day if you have to travel.

Good afternoon from Mishawaka, IN. Had to do a couple of errands this morning before the snow arrived. Sur5er, I'm not so sure it's just IL drivers who don't get the concept of "it's snowing and slow down'. Driver's here don't get it either.

We are enjoying our 2nd day off of school. Hope we are luckier than Marianne's school and the water pipes do not freeze. I don't even want to think about that happening again in the library.

Stay safe and warm

Sur5er, be careful, the roads are bad and we have about 6 inches on the ground. Went to town (Morris) and people were driving so erratically it blew my mind. Fast, slow, real slow, real, real, real, slow, real fast, etc. Oh, forgot about the drivers that should have just put a house number on their vehicles.

Heat wave here in Green Bay. -14F early this morning and now it is 8F. Wow! No new snow, just what is lying around.

Travelling conditions are clear, sunny, and dry here. Doesn't really matter though; east texans drive the same no matter what the roads are.....

The drivers here in mid-Michigan aren't always that swell, either, regardless of the weather conditions. I've seen people making right turns out of left-turn lanes, left turns out of right lanes, across two lanes of traffic, etc. People aren't very good about slowing down for crosswalks (this has resulted in the severe injuries of several school kids in the last couple of years)...and all of those have been in good weather, nothing to do with winter weather.

I've been passed on the freeways just south of here, while I was going 75, & the other car had to be doing over 100, if not more. One day, the Mich State Police had a radar trap set up in that area (between Saginaw & Birch Run), and they said that they were not pulling over anyone who was going less than 80 (per what I saw on the news that night). And, I've passed every car on the highway in great weather, when I was doing 72 mph (the speed limit is 70), and the others were doing under 70, some probably as low as 55. Go figure!

Capt. Paul, speaking of Texans, and if for some reason someone doesn't like this joke, please email me and not poor Mary Drew, okay?

While enjoying an early morning breakfast in a Ft. Worth cafe, four elderly Texas ranchers were discussing everything from cattle, horses, and weather, to how things used to be in the "good old days."

Eventually the conversation moved on to their spouses. One gentleman turned to the fellow on his right and asked, "Roy, aren't you and your bride celebrating your 50th wedding anniversary soon?"

"Yup, we sure are," Roy replied. "Well, are you gonna do anything special to celebrate?" another man asked.

The old gentleman pondered this for a moment, then replied, "For our 25th anniversary, I took the misses to San Antonio. For our 50th, I'm thinking 'bout going down there again to pick her up."

Yup, we're in a heat wave here in Milw. Was only -6 when I went to work, and I think it warmed up to 7 or 8 above....just in time for some snow showers. I think we picked up 1-2" depending on how far away from Lake Michigan you were. I dragged out my sheepskin hat that I bought with my waitress tips in the late '60s. Really keeps the head warm when it's sub-zero, and still looks quite stylish.

Sounds about right!! ;-)