Show of Hands

Are you experiencing an unusual cold front this weekend?

Not that I'm aware of! I actually think we're supposed to be getting back to pretty normal weather around here. Should be in the mid 50's

It’s been cold here in Wisconsin. Got down to 14 degrees last night! Suppose to warm up back to the 40s next week.

Come to Wisconsin and find out! Haha

Pass. =)

I'm a total wuss when it come to cold. 'Cold' for me is sob-60s....

*sub

You wouldn’t like it here then. High of 37 today and a low of 24 tonight.

Yeah, I'd be crying like a little girl, curled up in the fetal position...

Nah. You just drink tummy warmers, turn the heat on and dress in layers.

Do you enjoy a lot of activities in the snow?

Mostly camping, hiking and getting out to enjoy the scenery and the quiet. We don’t usually get enough snow down this low to need skis or snowshoes very often or for very long. A layer of snow changes the ambiance and makes it feel like a whole different place.

I love the fresh snow, white trees, everything is so pure it sets a calming tone. I feel a sense of peace and slowing down. Then we plow, drive, it blows around, melts and freezes, etc. and it gets drab.

But it only takes a light dusting to make the grey all clean and sparkly white again.

Yes! I love sparkling white snow! You get me! 😺

I hope you have a safe trip to the dentist and home again.

Thanks! It shouldn't be too bad unless we get 8" or more, although the buses will be delayed a bit.

Since I wrote that I remembered that I have to drop off my ballot tomorrow (at least we have mail-in ballots here so the whole town doesn't have to figure out how to get to a polling place! - I procrastinated and didn't mail mine but there are dropoff places) but I can do that either at the county court house in between buses if the snow turns out to be light, or at a supermarket near the dentist if it's heavy. And my doctor called and said one of the results of the blood tests run on the blood I had drawn this morning means that I have to have more blood drawn, but I don't think I'm going to be able to work that in tomorrow... We'll see.

Isn't snow fun? It was so much more fun when I was in the foothills and I was just watching the deer outside.

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Snow can be fun until you have to drive in it. Especially when the roads are a mess and people are careless. I know what I’m doing but have to be aware of what others are doing. It can be very exhausting.

I’ve never voted with a mail in ballot. I live nearby my polling place. I have always voted on Election Day. I would hate to change my mind and have to change my vote. You never know what can come up.

I can only imagine, since I don't drive. I've been in cars that went out of control because of snow or ice, though, and it was a horrible feeling. I was thankful to be alive afterward.

They usually take care of the main streets here, at least, pretty well, after a snowfall. Residential streets take longer, but traffic is slower there anyway - they are purposefully mostly laid out to be rather meandering, and at least to this passenger it feels safer, at least in town. My son-in-law is a rural mail carrier. The mail truck he has to drive isn't well suited to rural roads, and I worry about him in bad weather.

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I don't like to take my ballot in too far ahead of Election Day, myself, for that reason. (I've only actually mailed it once, when I was up in the foothills housesitting and couldn't get into town. For some reason I prefer to hand carry it, and right to the courthouse if I can make it there.) But I do like that we have the option of casting our vote on other days, in case that one isn't convenient. It seemed weird to me when I moved here 6 years ago - I always liked standing with people who lived in my neighborhood on the same day to do it; it felt more like a community kind of thing. But it just doesn't always work out, and I'd rather have more people able to vote. I'm so used to it now that I love it.

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The snow and ice in Wisconsin can get bad in rural areas. Last winter we had a lot of freezing rain. Some rural areas were so thick with frozen, uneven layers you couldn’t drive much faster than 35 to 40 mph. I can’t imagine delivering mail to them. I’m not that brave! I can only imagine how much more snow you get than I do.

I live in a small rural community. The little old ladies that organize my polling location are fun to see. Everyone is very friendly there. We have to show photo ID to vote now. I wonder how that even works with mail in ballots?

I can only imagine winters in Wisconsin. I lived in Michigan for 15 years and we had some fairly brutal ones, but surely not as bad. We did have lots of snow - especially the first 5-10 years I was there - and a few pretty memorable ice storms.

Here in Colorado the snow is, surprisingly, usually less troublesome, at least down in the cities along the Front Range just east of the Rockies. It's usually not terribly deep and it almost never lasts really long, unless we have a rare spell of protracted really cold temps. Usually we have enough temperature swings that the snow is gone in a few days at most - long before it gets dirty & ugly and everyone is sick of it. We'll be in the mid 40s tomorrow, 50s by Friday, so it won't last. I really dreaded winter much more in Cincinnati than I do here.

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I guess they rely on comparing signatures (you sign the return envelope, not the ballot itself; they compare with your registration form) for mail in ballots, plus the fact that it's been mailed to the address where you're registered. When you sign you're swearing to being the registered voter identified on the ballot envelope. I suppose there's some wiggle room there for fraud but I don't know how much. Anyone who just stole ballots from mailboxes wouldn't know signatures. But there could still be issues with people voting for relatives or housemates who had died or moved and not left a forwarding address (triggering a return of the ballot by the mail carrier, probably not a forward).

Thursday is going to get brutal. High of 25 and low of 13. I won’t be going anywhere Thursday haha.

Warm up Saturday with mixed precipitation. I hope it’s not an ice storm.

This past winter was more ice storms than snow. We did get some snowfall but nothing like we have in the past. A few years ago I had a 7 foot snow drift in front of my front door. It was layers of snow and ice. I chipped away at it for hours. I had to take breaks to warm up and rest. Thankfully I have a garage and a side door or I would have had to call for help to leave the house. That winter we had so much snow that we got 17 inches in May! Yes May! It was the winter that would never die!

Nothing last week?

Haha

Say what?

It's snope. Snow soap. Fake snow. They shoot it out in FL. It's white stuff falling in the sky 😂. It's FL's version of snow. Snow soap. They do it in the towns and at the parks.

Weird. I did not know that. Come to Wisconsin and see the real deal someday.

Finally a tolerable temperature there for me. Haha