I've known for a while now that I'd have to eat some crow.  Time to take my medicine.  I predicted very heavy snow and generally an extremely rugged winter this year in the northeastern portion of the United States.  It didn't happen.  In fact the exact opposite happened and we had one of our most mild winters in history.  I blew it.  For the past few weeks I've been hearing bird songs.. Spring bird songs that I shouldn't be hearing for a month and a half.  Today I saw Robins.  Rat Man can be wrong but Robins never are.  I expect to hear the Peepers (small night  peeping frogs that are another SURE sing of Spring) very soon.  A very early Spring  is upon us and for all intents and purposes we didn't have Winter this year.  
  This is unfortunate for at least one reason.  The ticks will be awful this Spring.  Our vet has told us that when the ticks are extremely abundant in the early Spring it's OK to apply the dogs flea and tick treatment (Advantix in our case) every three weeks instead of every month.  
   I like Winter, snow, the feel of icy cold on my skin, etc..  I'm sorry we had a fake Winter this year.

Our winter usually consists of very heavy rains throughout most of the three month time period. We also missed it completely. I don't think we had a single rain the entire month of December, which is both unheard of and really bad for us since we grow a huge amount of food people eat across the country. FWIW though, you are not the only one who predicted a bad winter. I've heard it from several places.

My prediction also failed. I thought it should be much snow and cold like last winter.
But we had almost no snow at all our new snowshovel was in use just one or two times.
I would say it was a very short, mild winter, if it was winter at all  :-/

I wear sandals all year round.  I have to keep an eye out for rattlesnakes all year round.  One of my dogs jumped in the pool on Christmas day.  It doesn't really get that harsh here in the Winter...........................

Normal snowfall here in St. Louis is 25+ inches.  We got just over six.    The trees are budding and the early flowers blooming...

Crazy weather.. first record breaking snow one winter then shortly afterward record breaking mildness.  Global warming or not our weather is broken.

Central/South East America was devastated with 14 tornadoes this week. The death toll rose from a few injured to around 45 yesterday. RIP.

Rat Man wrote on Mar 2^nd, 2012 at 10:16am:

I predicted very heavy snow and generally an extremely rugged winter this year in the northeastern portion of the United States.  It didn't happen.

Me too.  I lose.  The curious thing is that I based my prediction on how thick my dog's winter coat was, and he usualy starts shedding as soon as it gets warm, whenever it gets warm, but he hasn't started shedding yet.  'Sup wit dat?

We didn't get much of a winter here either. We also had a record breaking summer heat with I think 70 some odd days over 100, and drought. Rivers here are way low, crops are suffering, and I am not looking forward to having another summer like the last.

Droughts are the pits.  Some people complain when it rain a lot, but I almost never do.  Rain is life, unless it's extreme amounts.  Droughts are ugly.  

You should have gotten a load of the swarm of tornadoes that came through here last Friday. Fortunately for me, we missed getting hit, but I saw debris falling out of the sky that must have been picked up somewhere southwest of here. Spring is in the air!!!

As I type this I am sitting in Delaware over near the coast and it is snowing. Temp is about 33 degrees farenheit. Two days ago it was 60 degrees Farenheit here. I don't know how to dress anymore. Shorts and sandals or boots and parka? :-/

kentuckythrower wrote on Mar 5^th, 2012 at 4:34pm:

You should have gotten a load of the swarm of tornadoes that came through here last Friday. Fortunately for me, we missed getting hit, but I saw debris falling out of the sky that must have been picked up somewhere southwest of here. Spring is in the air!!!

As I mentioned before, I was stationed at Ft. Campbell on the Kentucky/Tennessee border for seventeen months.  Though we were never directly hit by a tornado while I was there, they hit all around us, one as close as Hopkinsville, directly to our north in Kentucky.  That area has some of the wildest Spring weather one can imagine.  One day while I was doing a twelve hour gate guard shift I saw it go below freezing, snow, we had a thunderstorm with tornadoes nearby, we had hail, rain, and it was sunny and went up to eighty degrees.  Again, this was all in one twelve hour shift.  
  Anyway, you can keep your tornadoes, thank you.  We get very few of them here in New Jersey and that's fine by me.

Ha ha ha...the day after the tornadoes, we had about two inches of snow on the ground. Welcome to Kentucky!!!

bigkahuna wrote on Mar 5^th, 2012 at 6:15pm:

As I type this I am sitting in Delaware over near the coast and it is snowing. Temp is about 33 degrees farenheit. Two days ago it was 60 degrees Farenheit here. I don't know how to dress anymore. Shorts and sandals or boots and parka? :-/

For me, 33 is still shorts and sandles weather.  ;)

We had a pretty great day today that ended with some clouds but I kind of live in a spot where I just catch the edge of the mountain weather and the edge of the shore weather, so it's usually pretty mild.