Today marks the Winter Solstice. It's that day on which the Sun reaches its furthest point south of the Equator and begins to turn around. It's that day on which we have the fewest number of daylight minutes and the largest number of nighttime minutes. From now until June we will have more minutes of light and fewer of darkness in our part of the world.
In a counter intuitive manner, it is also the day that marks the beginning of Winter here in the Northern Hemisphere. The Earth works on a bit of a time delay in regards to the seasons. It takes time to store heat in the Spring/Summer and to lose that stored heat in the Fall/Winter. That's why the coldest days are yet to come--usually late January or early February despite the lengthening daylight hours. It's also why the hottest days of the year are usually late July or early August when the number of daylight hours are already decreasing.
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The cats--Shadow in particular--seemed unhappy with the alignment of the Universe last night. They--she especially--started to howl at the door at 4 AM and got very serious about waking us up soon after. She succeeded. I got out of bed at 4:45 AM when I couldn't ignore the caterwauling any more. Of course, they are all snoozing with full bellies now (8 AM) while I'm looking for a second (or is it third) large mug of coffee.
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The wind switched around to come from the south last evening and that brought slightly warmer temperatures as well as a fine misting rain. Cloud ceiling must be around 1800 feet and only the swirling wind coming over the mountain has kept us from being completely engulfed in fog.
4 comments:
funny, thats when I woke up this morning, I must have heard your cat...
She was loud enough.
I couldn't hear your cat(s) over the sound of those belonging to my daughters.
Didn't think you would. But I blamed the wind.
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