Fall 2024 was so warm that our daffodils sprouted in November. They grew to almost 4 inches tall before it became cold enough to discourage them from getting taller. At the time, I assumed they were a lost cause for spring blooms. “If the bulb has sprouted and then the weather becomes too cold for it to keep growing,” I reasoned, “it probably won’t re-sprout in the spring.” I resigned myself to missing our cheerful row of daffodils in Spring 2025. Happily, I was wrong. When the weather warmed up, the daffodil leaves started growing where they left off in November and produced full-sized plants with full-sized blooms. Conclusion: Daffodils are extremely hardy!
While we always look forward to the daffodil blooms, Ted and I are tired of deadheading and pruning the many roses a 2010 landscaper planted around our property. Last fall and this spring, Ted dug out all but four of those rose bushes, ran them through his wood chipper, and replaced most of them with annuals. The remaining roseless area was a large. empty bed at the garage corner of the house. We had curbing and landscape rock put into that bed several years ago, and we didn’t want to remove it, so we needed to replace those prickly roses with something big to fill that space. We chose a lilac bush. It won’t need nearly as much care as roses did, and the blooms smell wonderful when we walk near them. You can see in the photo that it has lots of room to grow before it will need pruning.
The redbud tree we planted a few years ago started dying late last summer and gave up the fight over the winter. The nursery folks were greatly surprised to hear that a redbud tree didn’t survive, since redbud trees are indigenous to Missouri. We like seeing the redbud blooms in the spring, so we decided to try another one. We had a few blooms from it this spring and we look forward to lots more in the coming years. The new redbud is the little one behind the landscaper on the right. It has some growing to do to catch up with its dead predecessor.
On May 16, I needed to do some shopping at the Galleria in the Central West End area of St. Louis. There were some weather watches posted, but the storms were not expected to reach our area for another two hours–more than enough time for me make the trip and to be home before the storms hit. When I finished shopping, I checked the radar again to see if I should run some errands in our home area or if I should go straight home. It looked iffy, so I decided to make the call when I was closer to home.
The skies were gray when I left the Galleria, indicating an impending storm, but the weather didn’t look dangerous. As I drove farther west, the sky became very dark for a while but then became lighter when my route turned to the north. About halfway home, the rain hit. It was pretty heavy, so my wipers were working rapidly. I made the call to go straight home and to finish my errands after the storm. When I was about two miles from home, the wind hit, blowing sheets of rain across the roads. About a half mile from home, the hail started falling. It was pretty small hail–about 1/4-1/2 inch in size–but I didn’t want hail damage on my new car. With no other cars in sight, I admit that I exceeded the speed limit for the half mile from that point to our garage, where I could put my car under a roof, safe from the hail. It was a good call to skip my home-area errands!
Here’s how the hail looked in our pool. It fell hard enough that some pieces of hail bounced when they hit the surface of the water, then fell back down into the water. It looked like white jumping beans. Our largest hail was 1.5 inches, in flat pieces. Hail covered our lawn, but not completely.
After the storm, I went to Target (I had a lot of errands to do that day) and I overheard a lady and her husband telling a salesperson that they lived only a few miles south of Target and had an 18 to 24-inch accumulation of hail on the ground! The lady said she had gardening buckets outside that were filled and then covered with hail! Their 5- or 6-year-old daughter piped up and said, “It was really deep!” Their largest hail was baseball-sized.
When the hail stopped falling, the wind became apparent. Fortunately, we live in a valley between two hills–one behind our house and one across the street from the front of our house, so we tend to be sheltered from wind. Today, however, the wind blew the pool water surface as if it were a lake (without the whitecaps).
Meanwhile, east of us, a tornado struck very close to the Galleria Mall, where I had been shopping 30 minutes earlier. Looking at the radar when I got home, I saw that I basically drove around the tornado development area (where the skies became very dark) and, thankfully, didn’t need to take cover during my drive home. These are photos of the wedge tornado that struck St. Louis, taken by a camera in the Gateway Arch. The lower photo is darker because the tornado is closer and the air is filled with more debris. The red arc-shaped structure in the lower left corner of the photo is Busch Stadium.
A wedge tornado has a width equal to its height. This one was an EF3 tornado a mile wide, moving at 55 mph, with winds of 152 mph. It traveled 8 miles through the Central West End of the St. Louis area, destroying a 20-block area and damaging roughly 5,000 buildings. It struck along the north side of Forest Park and caused extensive damage to the St. Louis Zoo, which is temporarily closed as a result. The tornado initially touched down in Clayton, then tracked 23 miles to the northeast into Illinois. Sadly, there were 5 fatalities in St. Louis due to the tornado.
An EF4 tornado struck Lambert Airport in April 2011, and the damage in that area was visible for years. This tornado struck a more densely populated area, so the recovery will, again, be a lengthy process. FEMA officials called the residential damage the largest-scale the organization surveyed since the 2011 F5 tornado in Joplin, MO. St. Louis city officials estimated the tornado damage at $1.6 billion, among the highest figures for an individual tornado on record. It was the first deadly tornado in St. Louis since 1959.
A few weeks ago, Jeff wrote a mission letter suggesting that we all look for the small miracles that occur in our lives each day. Today, my pretty big miracle was leaving the Galleria Mall when I did and arriving safely at home.
As I was talking my daily walk on May 5, I saw this pretty cloud. Someplace east of us, thunderstorms were forming.
On May 15, I was driving to the mall to do some shopping and saw this huge cloud. I stopped to take a picture of it and to call Ted, telling him it would be worth his time to go to the top of the hill behind our house (less than a half-mile away) to give his meteorological heart a thrill.
From near our house, the above cloud looked pretty amazing but when I got to the mall, which is on high ground with a big parking lot and no trees to block the view, I was awestruck. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! This cloud extended 180 degrees from north to south on the eastern horizon. I have never seen a cloud that covered half of the horizon! Obviously, a line of thunderstorms was developing–probably in Illinois.
About an hour later, when I finished shopping, the sun was setting and it cast a rosy glow on the same cloud formation. The cloud still covered 180 degrees of the horizon and the thunderstorms were still developing. When I got home, Ted and I checked the radar and saw a solid line of severe thunderstorms stretching from just southeast of St. Louis to Chicago. Wow!
During the last week of December, the St. Louis National Weather Service Office issued a special weather statement advising the area of an upcoming major winter storm, beginning January 5 and bringing the likelihood of freezing rain, sleet, snow, and even thunder snow, followed by a period of extremely cold weather, with temperatures 20-30 degrees below normal. One of the friends I saw that week knows that Ted worked as a lead forecaster for the NWS. After greeting each other, she said, “I’m so glad to see you. I want to know what Ted says about this storm they’re talking about.”
Well, usually Ted tells me it probably won’t be as bad as it sounds, and a week out is hard to forecast for specific areas because air currents can move a weather system north or south a few miles, making a huge difference in which area(s) will get rain, freezing rain, or snow. This time, I told my friend, Ted started major storm prep six days in advance of the forecast storm. (1) He started the snowblower to make sure it works. We haven’t used it for at least two years and, if it needed repair, there were a few days to get it fixed before the storm arrived. It worked fine, so (2) he filled two one-gallon containers with gas for the snowblower. (3) Then he filled the gas tanks on both cars. Our main supply of firewood is outdoors, but we keep a pile of firewood in the garage so it will stay dry and be ready to use in the fireplace. (4) Ted hauled in as much wood as we had room for into the garage so that we could (a) enjoy a fire on the cold evenings and/or (b) heat the family room with the fireplace and stay warm if freezing rain broke the power lines. (5) He and I planned menus and made up a grocery list; then (6) he offered to go to the grocery store to stock up before everyone else went on the weekend. (7) We dug out our boots, heaviest jackets, and thickest gloves, and then, . . . we waited.
Our first snowfall of the season (November 30) was pretty, but minor. Neither we nor our neighbors needed to shovel our driveways, because the ground was warm enough to melt the snow on them. We had an unusually warm November (23 days above 55 degrees) and December (10 days above 55 degrees). It was so warm that our spring daffodils sprouted and are about 3 inches tall. In the photo below, you can see that some of the trees on the far left and far right of the photo still have leaves on them, and the bushes growing at the edge of the woods across the street are still green. You can’t see the grass, but it was still green too.
On January 5, just as predicted, we had thunder snow, and the major weather event that inspired all of Ted’s prep work looked like this. We saw some lightning and heard some thunder, and the heavy snow fell rapidly.
The snow stopped falling by mid-afternoon, giving us a break before the back edge of the system circled around to hit us with another punch later. The smart people (only we and two other neighbors) took advantage of the break to clear Part 1 of the storm. The yardstick is hard to read, but it says 7.5 inches of snow. The photo looks like the snow slopes downward into a valley-like depression in the center, but it was level, just like it looks at the road across the upper center and in the foreground of the photo.
I enjoy using the snowblower, so I cleared the driveway. It took both of us to find it. Ted helped me identify the edges of the concrete and I pushed the snowblower as he directed. You can see my boundary paths on both sides of the driveway. Then I cleared the middle.
When I finished clearing the driveway, Ted took over with the snowblower and cleared the sidewalks and the patio, then used a shovel to clear the porches and the corners. When he finished, he told me he was still having fun (like a kid playing in the snow), so he cleared two neighbors’ driveways–first Claudia’s (our age, widowed, and doesn’t have a snowblower), then Peggy’s (93 years old). Peggy hasn’t driven for a number of years, so Ted cleared only one side of her driveway to allow her family–most of whom live nearby–to get to the house when they come to visit.
It was really hard for me to clear the driveway, especially on the upward slope going toward the road. My feet kept slipping while I pushed the snowblower, and I had to fight it to keep it moving in a straight line. This is the reason.
I broke up some of the icy bottom layer and examined a chunk of it. No wonder my feet kept slipping–I was walking on a layer of frozen rain topped with a layer of sleet! In NWS-speak, Ted would say, “The forecast verified.” That means it was right on the money. We had everything in the forecast: freezing rain, sleet, snow, and thunder snow, followed by extremely cold weather.
Everything is clear. Or as close as we can get to clear. It was time to go inside to wait for Part 2 of the storm.
Part 2 (the back side of the storm) arrived overnight and dropped another 4.5 inches of snow on us.
Because we had already cleared snow once, the snowbanks made it easier for us to see where the edges of the concrete were this time.
This storm dropped a total of 13 inches of freezing rain, sleet, and snow on our neighborhood. (If you’re doing the math from my measurements above, the “error” is because the yardstick didn’t penetrate the ice/sleet at the bottom, and I took this measurement in an area without that layer.)
I cleared our driveway again. It was much easier than yesterday with roughly half as much new snowfall. Ted cleared the sidewalks and the patio and shoveled out whatever the snowblower couldn’t do. Then he cleared Claudia’s driveway again. Someone else cleared Peggy’s.
As I said earlier, the smart people went outside during the break in the storm and cleared the first 7.5 inches of snow–plus some of the freezing rain and sleet. Unfortunately, two of our neighbors did not, and they both had a hard time trying to clear 13 inches of ice, sleet, and snow.
Kevin (foreground) doesn’t have a snowblower, so he was using a shovel. I noticed him struggling while I was working on our driveway, and Ted said while he (Ted) was clearing our sidewalks, Kevin was lifting and dumping a shovelful of snow, then stopping to catch his breath before lifting another load. Ted took our snowblower to Kevin and let him use it instead of his shovel. (I didn’t want to put boots on to go outside to take a picture. Pardon the window screen.)
When Kevin finished, he took our snowblower across the street and helped Larry (blue jacket) and Maxine (partially hidden by Larry’s blown snow) clear their driveway. We don’t get enough snow in our area to make it worth a super-size snowblower, so this storm was hard work for everyone. Even MoDOT is understaffed and has many new, inexperienced plow drivers. In spite of MoDOT employees working 12-hour shifts for 6 days, the road in front of our house wasn’t cleared until the third day after the storm started. Meanwhile, our snowblower cleared five driveways: ours (twice), Claudia’s (twice), and Peggy’s, as well as part of Kevin’s and part of Larry’s. It’s a trusty little machine!
Needless to say, countless businesses were closed for several days and schools were closed all week–Monday through Friday. We didn’t even have mail pick-up or delivery for 6 days–Monday through Saturday. I guess the USPS does stop for (freezing) rain, sleet, and snow! Maybe not for dark of night.
We had a few days of very cold weather and some sunshine before Storm #2 struck. Looking out of an upstairs window on one of those days, I saw these icicles.
While he was outdoors, Ted took a picture of more icicles.
I went outside too and couldn’t resist a photo of our fluffy-looking lawn furniture.
The weight of the ice, sleet, and snow really stretched our pool cover straps. When we close the pool for the winter, we drop the water level below the circulation jets–about 16-18 inches below the pool deck surface. A pool antifreeze is added to the remaining water when we close the pool. The pool cover sank under the weight of the ice, sleet, and snow. The dark splotches on it in the photo are ice–the result of unfrozen pool water that soaked through the sunken permeable pool cover, then froze in the cold air, adding more weight to the cover. The cover will spring up again when everything on it melts.
Storm #2 arrived on January 10, four days after Part 2 of Storm #1 left the area. If you compare this photo to the first one in this post, you’ll notice that all of the trees are now bare and the bushes at the edge of the woods are no longer green. The extremely cold, and sometimes windy, weather was too much for them to hold their fall leaves any longer.
Storm #2 didn’t bring much snow–only 2 inches. Still, we had 15 inches of snow in six days, an unusual occurrence in St. Louis. Interesting fact: Anchorage, Alaska has had only 2 inches of snow so far this winter.
Sometimes, we can leave 2 inches of snow on the ground and let the sun melt it in a day or two. This time, it was so cold that the snow wasn’t going to disappear any time soon; it would just get packed down by the cars and freeze. Ted used the snowblower to clear our concrete for a third time in less than a week. This is not typical of St. Louis snowfall!
With a clear driveway, and clear roads at last, Ted made a quick run to the grocery store for a few items. We didn’t need bread (remember that we stocked up a week ago as part of storm prep), but it looks like a lot of other people did.
After all our work clearing snow, we had time to relax indoors. While the temperatures dropped, we spent every evening with a cozy fire in the fireplace.
Here’s the good news for those like me who look forward to spring: March 20, the first day of astronomical spring, will be here in just 56 days. Meterological spring (March 1) will arrive in only 37 days. Come on, Spring!
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Note: The heavy snow and cold weather prevented the snow from melting as quickly as usual. We had at least one inch of snow on the ground for a consecutive 16 days, the 16th-highest number of days on record.
St. Louis’ all-time record for at least one inch of snow on the ground is 66 days in January-March 1978. At that time, the NWS gave daily live weather reports as a service to KMOX radio. When Ted’s boss gave one of those reports in February, he was asked how long the cold and snow were going to last. His answer was, “I hate to say it will be awhile before it warms up, but five of our forecasters went to Florida this week.” Our family included one of those five forecasters. We were vacationing at Disney World during the kids’ cycle break from their year-round school schedule.
I suspect we had our last near-80º day of the season earlier this week (78º). When November 1 arrived, the weather turned gray and cool, and it looks like it’s going to stay that way. We had the furnace checked, the irrigation system turned off, and the pool winterized and covered a few days ago, so Ted and I decided it was time to put the lawn furniture away as well. Ted had already cleaned out the storage shed and washed it down, inside and out, so it was ready for a seasonal change of contents. Everything looks so bare now. I guess I’ll start counting down the days until spring returns.
We always leave a few lawn chairs out all winter for firebowl seating and for the few days of 50- and 60-degree weather we get each month when it’s nice enough to sit outside in the afternoon. Everything else is in storage.
We were planning to rake/blow leaves as well, but we had nearly two inches of rain in the past two days, so the leaves and ground were too wet for that job. Now we have something to do when things dry out after the next two days of forecast rain.
I love the centerpiece Kathy created for me, using my favorite flower pot, and the table runner Kari made is a perfect backdrop for it. At this time of year, however, both look out of place (or out of time) on the table–too much like spring. Ted and I went shopping and found some pretty fall things for our November table.
Finally–warm weather! We’ve had highs in the upper 70s and 80s and no rain this week for more than 1-2 days in a row, and it feels so good! Wherever you meet people, the talk is about how good it is to see the sun, how much more energetic we all feel, and what a treat it is to be above 50 degrees for a change.
“In the spring,” Tennyson wrote, “a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” Love is a year-round (not a seasonal) thing for Ted and me, so in the spring, our thoughts turn to opening up the pool. This week, we’ve been cleaning up the yard and the lawn furniture–since it’s finally warm enough to sit outside and enjoy ourselves.
The cover is off the pool, the furniture is out of the storage shed, and I’m ready to go with my trusty power washer.
There was a lot of rain in the past few months. The water level was at least 16 inches lower than this when we covered the pool last fall.
Everything is cleaned up and put in place. I love seeing all the trees in bloom wherever I go.
This year, we’re going to have a new pool liner installed, so we don’t have to clean up the water. A technician will be coming early next week to put the pump back in working order. Then we’ll drain the pool and a crew will spend a day removing this liner and installing the new one. The warm weather makes me eager to get back in the water to swim some laps.
The normal high and low temperatures for St. Peters at this time of the year are 61 and 42 degrees. The weather forecast, however, is predicting high temperatures between 28 and 49 degrees for the next ten days and lows below freezing for six of those ten nights. Up to two inches of snow is forecast for tomorrow.
So today we bought a new liner for our pool and set up a pool opening date to have it installed. . . . And that’s how you define optimism.
Since Ted and I came home two days early from our Southwest trip, we got an early start on some jobs we had to do. Number one: Ted gave the car a good, hard scrubbing and took off the grit that car washes don’t. He vacuumed, dusted, and detailed everything, including putting on a coat of wax. Meanwhile, I unpacked a month’s worth of stuff and put it away.
Things looked a little different than when we left home in early October.
When we left, the trees were still green and flowers were still blooming. Temperatures were in the middle 80s.
When we came home, the peak of fall color was already a thing of the past. Temperatures are in the middle 40s.
I went out to lunch with friends today (a lunch I thought I’d miss because we’d still be in Kansas), and Ted spent that time raking leaves. When I got home from my lunch date, I finished blowing the leaves in the back yard so Ted could go to buy gas for the chipper.
A lot of leaves had fallen in the yard!
Every year, when we rake up a big pile of leaves, Ted and I say we should jump in the pile, but we never do. This year, we did it. We stood on the edge of the pile and just fell over backward. The pile was soft and we fell deeper than we’d expected. We were completely buried and had to dig our faces out.
You can see a little bit of the pink sleeves on my jacket. Look between them to find my sunglasses. My legs are buried in the foreground. The dent on the left is where Ted jumped in and climbed out.
That was fun! We’ll have to do it again next year. Are we getting older, or reverting to our childhoods? First, sand sledding and now jumping in a leaf pile. After the fun, Ted started up the chipper to get rid of the leaf pile and I started dinner–a real, home-cooked meal. No hunting for a restaurant tonight.
It took about an hour to make the leaf pile disappear through the chipper.
The trip was fun, but it’s always good to come home.
It’s April, so we opened our swimming pool. When I mentioned to several people that we would be opening the pool on April 25, they asked how I knew exactly which day we’d do that. I explained that a crew comes out in the fall to shut down the water system and the pumps, blow out the pipes, and winterize everything; then they come back in the spring and reverse the process. As a result, we need to schedule the day they come.
We take the winter cover off the pool the day before the crew comes and the concrete is always dirty around the edges where dust, dirt, leaves, etc. collect over the winter months. Ted set up the power washer and I got busy cleaning the concrete.
The concrete to the left of the red brick trim is clean; the concrete I’m standing on is still dirty. Can you see the difference?
After the crew leaves and all the mechanical stuff is running again, we need to kill off algae that’s grown over the winter, re-stabilize the chemicals in the water, and vacuum the dirt off the bottom of the pool. It usually takes about 4-7 days to finish the cleaning, stabilize the chemicals, and heat up the water. This year we learned that some of the pool-opening work can be greatly reduced and/or avoided.
Vacuuming the bottom of the pool.
We usually open the pool when the air temperatures are warm enough to consider swimming, and we close it when the air temperatures are too cool to have fun in the water. While they were here this week, the pool crew (the same guys who come every fall and spring) told us that algae cannot grow if the water temperature is in the low 60s or below, so if we close the pool after the water cools down to about 60 degrees and open it before the water gets above 60 degrees, it won’t be nearly as dirty. (Our water was 68 degrees when we removed the winter cover.)
The obvious question: Why didn’t they tell us this the first year we had the pool??? We’ll definitely try that idea next fall!
Today was Ted’s and my annual Applesauce Day. We started with a bushel of golden delicious apples and made this.
Cooked applesauce cooling
While the applesauce cooled, I made our annual Applesauce Day reward: an apple pie. By the time it came out of the oven, we had the applesauce packed in freezer containers and the countertop looked like this.
Applesauce headed for the freezer and a pie for later today
The only things left to do are to have a piece of pie in a little while and to enjoy homemade chunky-style applesauce for another year.
The sun is shining, the air temperature is in the upper 80s, and the water temperature is heated to the low 80s. Ladies and gentlemen, we are “go” for swimming!
The daytime high temperatures are finally in the upper 70s and low 80s, but the pool water temperature is only 64 degrees, so it’s time to turn on the pool heater. We did that today.
