Global Weirding

Monday night was one of those nights that I thought my house was going to blow off of its foundation. The wind is hardly uncommon up here. My house is located at an elevation of about 6,000 ft. (kids stuff by CO standards), but it sits on an exposed hillside in the foothills of the Rockies which just gets pounded by the prevailing NW west sweeping down towards the Plains.
Usually after a night like that during the month of December I would expect to wake up and either start a fire in the woodstove or go outside and try to find the newspaper which is somewhere in my driveway under 8" of snow. However today was not your usual day, it was 70 freaking degrees...in the shade! Now the record for Fort Collins is 70 degrees, but I am located almost a 1000 feet above that. Just to be sure my cheap little thermometer wasn't wrong I crosschecked my data with a rather reliable weather source - a NOAA weather station located on top of Horsetooth Mountain only a half mile away and about 400ft higher. Well it turns out my thermometer may have been a little off after all, the NOAA site said the high was actually 72 degrees!