Confusing Weather

This week has seen record high temperatures in my little arctic village. Today it was a high of 34 degrees! It is amazing how quickly my body has adapted to the arctic temperatures. Today I went outside without a jacket because it was just too uncomfortable to wear one! The warm temperatures bring some concerns of a blizzard moving in. The winds have been really high. I got blown across the frozen, icy snow yesterday as I left my building. It was actually a funny moment in time, especially since I didn't actually fall. Just got scooted several feet. This morning I noticed that just a wee bit of increase in temperatures can cause some serious melting of the snow piles out here! The snow here is not normally a slick, icy kind of snow. When the temperatures begin to rise, the snow begins to melt and it becomes slushy and very slick in spots. The thing that surprises me the most is that it is actually RAINING today. It is still so cold that ice is forming as soon as the rain hits the snow, but it is RAINING, not snowing.
The roads have almost cleared in the past 2 days. I think they are chip seal, but not sure. I haven't seen any other color than white on the roads since I got here. I actually saw the yellow stripe in front of a few of our stop signs. It is amazing what just a little bit of warm weather has done! The wind has still been frigid though!
The sun continues to enthrall me. There are days that it makes it over the horizon and other days that it just doesn't. It seems that it "rises" and "sets" almost in the same area still but just a bit farther down the horizon. We are getting about 6 extra minutes of daylight everyday, or so they tell me. Now it is beginning to get light outside around 1030am or so and it gets dark around 530pm. My job allows me to fly fairly frequently into the surrounding villages. I carry my sunglasses with me now because once you move a little either North or South, the sun can come blazing into the plane even if it hasn't made it over the horizon in my little village.
One delightful thing about the suns' continuing confusing travel is that sunrises and sunsets are really long.