Fwoomp
When I woke up this morning at about 9:00 a.m., it was raining hard. Big puddles of water outside. Very wet.
About a half hour later, the rain turned to snow, as predicted in the weather forecast.
Within an hour, there was more than an inch of snow on the ground. I took Ponta for a walk, and it was already white everywhere you looked. By now, 3:00 p.m., it must be more than 6 inches. We have to go outside every hour and shake the snow off our small cypress goldcrest trees or else they’ll be crushed under the weight.
This is the view from our door, just a few minutes ago when I went to do the shaking:
The neighbors are also keeping busy, shoveling and keeping the card cleared.
The snow accumulation is pretty amazing—we are really getting socked here.
You just know this stuff is going to stick on on the ground for another few weeks…
Train lines in the area are severely affected, and road traffic is jammed. On the JR, Chuo, Sobu, Saikyo, Keiyo, Joban, Nambu—all lines completely shut down.
Up to 40 or 50 cm is expected today.
Soon after I posted that, the snow stopped—but not the precipitation. Nothing worse than rain after a snow…
50cm!
Being a California kid I didn’t know what a PITA snow was if it is allowed to stick around and turn to ice.
My first winter in Tokyo I FROZE MY ASS OFF, since I had arrived in August and didn’t arrange to have anything warmer than a raincoat shipped over — no gloves, scarves, etc — and didn’t expect Tokyo, being at the rough latitude of Bakersfield — to get THAT cold. Little did I understand that weather moves from west to east, and west of Tokyo is F-ING SIBERIA (well, continental Asia at least).
IIRC Tokyo in ’94 had a good snow (~4″), and so did ~1998.
Gonna be 65 degrees in central California later this week! Winter’s going to last only one week here apparently. Many of the trees that should have lost their leaves in November still have them.
If we can still get rain here, global warming’s going to be great!
Fwoomp, indeed!