Sure you do. You've seen it enough from the photos I post here. It's the western Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
And what kind of weather are we famous for in the winter months? Here's a reminder: looking out my front door last March ...
Wow! Looks like I had a lot of work ahead of me.
And let me remind you of a high school football game
I still remember that awful drive home, through the storm.
So now that we're closing in on Christmas Day, I bet you're wondering how white of a Christmas we will be having. After all, here's The Weather Channel map that depicts our odds on having a white Christmas. ...
But it's ain't necessarily so.
Since that mid-October storm (which, by the way, mostly passed west of us), we have had hardly any snow. Temperatures have warmed this month after a frigid (but snow-challenged) November. Today, the sun was out, and temperatures were about 40. Same thing is forecast for tomorrow.
But it didn't melt our snow. Because, as you will see from this photo of the local golf course last week ...
... there's hardly any snow out there to melt.
The only snow around are in the remnants of snowpiles that were plowed up when we got a few inches in November, or else in areas that are very shaded from the sun. There's been an inch here or there since then. But the bottom line is that my back yard looks like the shoulder of the road here ...
The local municipal ski hill, which relies on natural snow, currently looks like this ...
The tourism/resort-type ski hill nearby does make its own snow, and lucky for them. Otherwise, their slopes would look like this. It's this way in Europe, too. There's so little snow in the Alps that some World Cup skiing events have been canceled.
We were getting a gloppy mix of rain, snow and freezing drizzle when I was out getting these pictures, and the sand truck passed by while I was at the ski hill.
It has been cold enough that the lakes are starting to freeze up. For instance, tonight and tomorrow night, our lows will be about 20F (-7C). Ice is forming ...
But ice-fishing is still a long way off--you need at least three inches of ice simply to walk on the surface safely. That's a long ways off.
Speaking of icy ponds ... I drove down to visit my mom last week. On the trip to her house, I saw these mallard ducks in a pond near a rural intersection ...
What? These ducks are just going to bob along passively, allowing themselves to get frozen in ice? How dumb are they?
My wife laughed. You see, these ducks are always on this pond. Every single time. In exactly the same position. And if you take one of them and cook it for supper ... you're going to wind up with a lot of melted plastic.
No wonder they didn't fly away when I got close to them.
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