First snow

We had our first snow, not very much but enough to see. Someone told me that they had seen on TV that the snow was 20 days early this year. A while back there was an article in the newspaper that said that, although or because the world is getting warmer, the area around Sendai is getting colder. The path of the jet stream has changed just enough to move the boundary between the cold north and the warmer south to the north of Sendai, instead of to the south.This was the view out our kitchen door, just as the sun was coming up. It was snowing although you can not see the flakes in this picture. The green building on the left is part of Seiyu, a department store in which the food section stays open 24/7.This is looking down off the balcony outside the kitchen. There is landscaping around three sides of our building: a paved path and various kinds of flowers, shrubs, and trees.

This was taken out a window Miyagi Gakuin University at about 9 a.m. It really was not much snow but definitely enough to say that it snowed. There was more snow up in the mountains, as much as a few inches in some places.

The long-range weather forecasts are predicting a cold, hard winter this year, which may make our Henro Pilgrimage more interesting.