Snow 2006

Did I mention that it snowed on Sunday? This is my third winter here, and for the third year in a row we had some snowfall.

The first year we had about an inch just after Christmas. This was in the daytime, and our yard, olive trees and palm trees were nice and white. It all melted within an hour.

Last year we had almost four inches on New Year’s Eve. But this came down around 3am. For some reason we looked out the window and it was snowing! It lasted until about 10am, so I was able to get some nice photos. These are some big olive trees in my neighbor's yard.


I’ll have to dig out some of the shots. I think I tried to post last year but found that the pics I took were all fuzzy (no, not because of the snow, because of the operator)

Yes, this may not be exciting to most of you, but after seventeen years in San Diego where we did not get any form of frozen precipitation it was amazing to me. I try not to remember Rochester, land of the freeze (probably not as bad as Sweden or Minnesota, though). My time in New Jersey was as a kid, and then snow meant days off from school (snow day! Yea!) and playing, not getting into a cold car waiting for the heater and sliding on the packed roads.

So it looks like there was no snow in 2005. This came down in the middle of the afternoon on Jan 15, 2006.


It sounded like hail out on our steel patio roof. I walked out and enjoyed the sound – it’s nice out there when it rains, listening to rain on the metal roof. Can’t hear it inside, our house is too well insulated. The stuff was about bb size – maybe a quarter of an inch in diameter (6 mm). When I picked it up the pellets were more like little snowballs than icy hail. I don’t know how the weather service classified this stuff. It wasn’t snowflakes, yet it wasn’t hail really. But it came down pretty hard for about ten minutes, leaving the yard about a half-inch deep. And it was all melted within the hour. Our first precipitation for the year.