Mid-February, longing for the summertime

The winter itself doesn’t hack me off that much, sooner or later (the more probable scenario) it will end, but what it spoken about winter begins to hit my nerve. A councillor from Słupsk says policemen should not help clear the snow from city streets, because they are trained to do other duties in their service. As far as I’m concerned police is to help the citizen, so if the comfort of living in Słupsk has a negative correlation with amount of snow lingering on the streets, they should help remove it.

The next thing is saying this is a normal Polish winter. Alright, February is absolutely normal in terms of temperature and precipitation, but I don’t understand how January could be normal if the temperature in Warsaw last month averaged out –8,2C, when a long-term average for January is around –2,5C. Within the last fifty years January was colder only in 1963 (-12,9C), in 1985 (-9,2C), in 1987 (-13,0C) and four years ago (-8,4C). And we haven’t had such amounts of snow (currently over 40 centimetres in Warsaw) since 1979.

So if the last weeks were normal I postulate that everybody should earn above the average!

What the weather forecasts say is even more confusing. In the coming days the temperature should be slightly sub-zero, but then the air oscillation is about to alter, a mild thaw is expected to come around Thursday or Friday and the winter might end in the first days of March.

I wonder when the last snowflake (the one fallen two months ago) will disappear from my garden. Since moving to NI, I’ve taken down the days when it had happened, and it was respectively on: 30 March 2006, 5 March 2007, 27 March 2008, 26 March 2009. Note that this day can be recorded only with hindsight. Almost the whole March 2009 was snowless and on 25 day of the month Warsaw saw a heavy wet overnight snowfall.

In the meantime it’s nice to remind oneself how some place looked in July and how they look now, during the most snowy winter in my lifetime – see comparisons below. These are basically the same places, I tried hard to snap exactly the same view but waddling in almost half-metre snow in the blizzard was kind of tough. Aren’t these huge snow heaps stunning? I can’t wait to see the dirt they’ll uncover after they melt…