What's the saying? If you don't like the weather in Chicago, just wait a minute.
In a speech about New England weather that he delivered in December 1876, Mark Twain said: "You fix up for the drought; you leave your umbrella in the house and sally out, and two to one you get drowned. You make up your mind that the earthquake is due; you stand from under, and take hold of something to steady yourself, and the first thing you know you are struck by lightning."
Yes, the lovely pictures below from November 3 were taken in Pärnu on Friday. Then, it snowed all day Saturday here in Tapa. Unlike the snow of October 20, this snow did not melt by noon. I took this picture Sunday morning.
Mark Twain ends his speech with a tribute to the ice storm, something I am all too familiar with having lived in central Illinois: "...when a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top - ice that is bright and clear as crystal; when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dew drops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond plume. Then the wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored fires...the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence.
Twain might have cursed the Good Lord for the weather in Estonia; Kilmer would undoubtedly have praised Him. I think I will start my own praising in December, when the civilized world generally welcomes snow, and start my cursing in March, when everyone else has bid it adieu.
In a speech about New England weather that he delivered in December 1876, Mark Twain said: "You fix up for the drought; you leave your umbrella in the house and sally out, and two to one you get drowned. You make up your mind that the earthquake is due; you stand from under, and take hold of something to steady yourself, and the first thing you know you are struck by lightning."
Yes, the lovely pictures below from November 3 were taken in Pärnu on Friday. Then, it snowed all day Saturday here in Tapa. Unlike the snow of October 20, this snow did not melt by noon. I took this picture Sunday morning.
Mark Twain ends his speech with a tribute to the ice storm, something I am all too familiar with having lived in central Illinois: "...when a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top - ice that is bright and clear as crystal; when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dew drops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond plume. Then the wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored fires...the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence.
Twain might have cursed the Good Lord for the weather in Estonia; Kilmer would undoubtedly have praised Him. I think I will start my own praising in December, when the civilized world generally welcomes snow, and start my cursing in March, when everyone else has bid it adieu.
