That would be awesome and a good-bye drought!

I really dread the idea of a wet winter. That means heavy snow, ice, destruction,, shoveling our flat roof, leaks, rotted plant roots + winter-kill, and over all misery in getting around the city. How about just a moderately wet winter that doesn't come close to breaking any precipitation records? Each of us has our personal priorities I suppose, not that it makes a difference because its gonna do what its gonna do.

So true, TexasRanger. I don't have any big trees left, oh wait, I do have one. Ugh, I don't need that one to fall down. The tree people tried to convince me to chain it (?). It is a fruitless mulberry and apparently where it forks, it is weak and will one day split. The ice storm in 2000 or 2001, whichever year that was, took out my elm tree. It was diseased and starting to hollow, so obviously it needed to go. I had a silver maple taken out at the same time that was way too close to the house. Then a couple of years ago I had the remaining silver maple removed. I'm trying to keep my trees to a more manageable size :) During that ice storm, I can remember sitting on my porch, listening to the utter silence and then, "crack, crack, crack" across the neighborhood. It was fun to listen to, but not very much fun to clean up! A couple of years before that, we had a huge neighborhood tree (probably another elm) fall because the ground was so wet it just fell over.

How about a moderately warm and wet winter so y'all could just have rain and not ice or snow? I would hope that the record-breaking part of this year's rainfall is over. It certainly seems like the weather pattern has changed.

I don't think anyone wants more record rainfall at this point, but we also don't want for all the rain to abruptly stop falling. All the rain this year has caused an astonishing amount of growth of plants of all kinds down here---tons of green growth that my husband points out to me will be fuel for fires if it dries out too much. There's got to be a happy medium between too much rain and not enough, but we always seem to swing back and forth from one end of the spectrum to the other.

Y'all can come down here and spend the winter with us. The ice mostly misses us and about all we ever get is a thin glaze of ice on the roads that causes tons of wrecks. The sort of tree-breaking ice storms that also bring down power poles and power lines often seen in other parts of OK rarely make it this far south. The last really damaging ice storm in our county was a decade before we moved here. Even when there's been some ice in our county since then, it has been patchy and not at all widespread and stopped several miles north of our place.

We have about 10 acres of woodland so, believe me, an ice storm is the last thing we want or need. It would take us years to clean it all up!

OkieD....Your just more'n welcome to drive up here with your chains on your tires & have a snowball fight on our flat roof while we all happily shovel snow off the side to keep the weight down and so it won't leak so bad when slowly thawing which freezes up the the scupper boxes where the drains are so no water can drain off. There's nothing more exciting than getting the extension ladders out when its freezing cold & slick outside, especially when its the wet heavy stuff.

Frozen trees with limbs breaking is more fun than a barrel of monkeys but that doesn't hold a candle to having your electricity go out for an entire week as you wait for the out of state volunteers to finally get to your power line to hook you back up.....FINALLY. I made some real good coffee for the boys on the gas fireplace by boiling water and pouring over grounds.

Another fun thing is sliding off the road in your car and ending up stuck in the ditch between the two highways leading in and out of downtown OKC on the Broadway Extension.

Scraping windshields----- especially when its a layer of thick ice is nice. Piles of black dirty snow thats stacked up real high along the streets is always a cheerful sight on bleak days especially when looking out of dirty windshields.

If I thought harder I am sure I can come up with several other reasons to keep my fingers crossed for a wet sloppy winter. Oh wait, I just thought of another. How about when we had to cancel Christmas Day Dinner in 2010 due to the blizzard? I remember spending the day cleaning the house instead just to keep from getting too depressed.

TexasRanger....I was in Colorado or Michigan, I can't remember, any way, some place we should have had snow. NONE, but I was getting texts and pictures of all the snow on the ground at home!

I remember hearing on the news that many people around here got stranded in their cars that year due to the sudden heavy snow and a lot of them were wearing flip-flops. Only in the roller coaster of Oklahoma does stuff like that happen.

TR2, Because of your ice storms, we bought a generator even though we've never needed one. We heard so many horror stories of all the folks without electricity so many times over the years that it scared us into buying one so we'd be able to operate a heater or something during an ice storm. So far, we haven't had to use it, but I like knowing we have one if we need it.

The big storm here that did all the sorts of damage y'all see routinely see in an icy winter was a decade before we moved here and it took out hundreds of miles of power lines. I think our entire county was without power, which is so hard to imagine. Of course, it was long ago and the population then likely was lower than it is now. Our rural electric co-op had to spend an incredible amount of money to fix everything and restore power. Then they embarked on an ambitious tree-trimming program that continues to this day. They probably trim back trees from power lines more aggressively now than they did then because they learned a really important lesson about the necessity of keeping trees away from their power lines. Still, lots of people fight them and don't want their own trees cut back. I am the opposite---always telling the guy in charge of the tree-trimming program to feel free to cut anything and everything he deems necessary.

I only learned about the big storm when trying to figure out why there was a pile of decomposing trees 5' tall and about 10' wide on the edge of our woodland, and it ran for the entire length of our woodland, right along the fence beneath the power line. At that point, the trees had been there for almost a decade so were decomposing really well. That's when I learned the contractors hired by the electric co-op came through and cut down trees like crazy after that storm. After a few more years, that big pile of trees finally became beautiful compost that I hauled to the garden. (It's always all about the garden, isn't it?)

We have a great deal of experience with ice on roads because guess who they page out to the interstate to try to help people or, more accurately, to park the fire engines behind the police, medics and tow truck drivers to try to keep sliding vehicles from hitting and killing the first responders who are helping the people who are sliding off the roads. There have been years our firefighters have been out 24/7 if they were able to even make it from their house to the fire station to begin with. While we don't usually get the big tree-breaker ice storms, it doesn't take much ice to render roadways virtually unusable, but that doesn't stop people from getting out and driving on them. Sometimes in icy weather it gets to the point where the tow truck drivers stop trying to pull people out of ditches or medians because it is too life-threatening to be out there. When that happens they leave the vehicles wherever they are off the roadways and just pick up the people and take them to town to a hotel or restaurant or wherever they want to go. I-35 can become treacherous with just a hundredth of an inch of ice on it, and for some reason people don't seem to understand that. It probably was in 2010 that we had to open a shelter in Thackerville for stranded travelers after the few local hotels filled up. Now that the Chickasaw nation has built big hotels at the WinStar Casino, we shouldn't ever run out of hotel rooms in icy weather again.

Often we go nowhere at all in icy weather, not even to the fire station, because our driveway is sloping and hard to use in icy weather. Once you reach the bottom of the driveway you likely end up hitting the neighbor's iron pipe fence if you cannot turn right or left on the ice. If we're out and get home when it is icy, we just park in the bar ditch and walk up the icy driveway. At least that way we have a car at the bottom of the icy drive.

It took me years and years to convince Tim to pack and bag and plan to stay at work in Dallas during icy spells. For far too long, he'd spend 3 to 6 hours trying to get home on icy roads and stubbornly refused to plan to stay at work. He doesn't even have to stay "at work" as co-workers who live close to the airport always invite him to come stay with them, or if he plans ahead he can reserve an extra bedroom at any of the airport's six fire stations. Finally he had so much trouble one year that he finally started planning ahead to stay down there. I feel better knowing he isn't out on icy roads trying to drive almost 90 miles on the ice.

It sounds like 2010 was horrible for y'all, but I loved it. It was the only real White Christmas I've ever had and I had waited 50 years to have one. We had a white Christmas Eve one year when I was very small, but I don't even really remember it. Our white Christmas here was more snow than ice, so our roads weren't that bad down here and we had a huge amount of snow. We also had a white Super Bowl that year, and it was at the Dallas Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, so Tim and Chris worked all week long in ice and snow and on bad roads, and loved every minute of it. I baked endless batches of cookies for them to take to work to feed the extra crews flown in from all over the country to help provide security, fire protection, etc. Nothing makes a happy coffee break even happier than having big platters of home-made cookies. I don't even remember Christmas Day because that whole winter was a blur, but I remember it was a white Christmas, and I remember having to go outside with a broom and continually sweep snow off the flat roof of my potting shed so that it wouldn't collapse. I also worked hard day and night to keep food and water out and available for all the wildlife and for our chickens. My friend, Fred, would drop by with buckets of oats and things for me to feed the birds because he felt like every bird in southern OK was here at our house eating that winter.

Lisa, That was a very well-timed trip.

TR2, I'm giggling over the flip-flops because it is so true. Sometimes it seems things like that happen here all too often. I think 2010 was the year we had very late snow and were below freezing for five days and then, BAM! It was like someone flipped a switch and on the 6th day we weren't just above freezing---it was in the 70s. At least all the remaining ice and snow melted right away, and then we had incredibly deep mud.

For 2015 I want a nice, rainy, warm winter.... not a freezing cold one. I never hope for ice and generally don't hope for snow. It is too messy and too dangerous, and now that I've had a white Christmas, I don't care if we ever have another one. Been there, done that, and except for being messy, it wasn't so different for us from any other Christmas. Did everything look pretty? Sure it did, but you can only stand inside and stare out at the snow-covered landscape for so long....and it doesn't take me long to get tired of it. When the snow knocks out the satellite TV and the wireless internet, being stuck indoors can become pretty boring pretty quickly.

Dawn