Tag: weather

After all the warm weather from a week ago, it was bit disappointing that I had to get back into the fire-starting routine at night to keep the house from getting to chilled. Today isn’t the coldest day, but when I woke up this morning there was a fresh layer of snow on the ground.

As I type this, it’s continuing to snow, albeit at a pretty pedestrian pace. In light of tomorrow’s date, it seemed a bit like Mother Nature has been playing a fast one on us, what with all the warm weather and now having it snow. Yay Spring!

As I type this, the temp outside is 50. It’s not too surprising, really, since the Winter has been pretty mild. An early shot of Spring has been a high probability for awhile now.

Still, it’s a little disappointing to see even the mild temperatures yield so early.

Looks like the furball saw his shadow. 6 more weeks of Winter, supposedly.

It would be welcome if Winter actually arrived for a bit. Perhaps he meant “6 more weeks until Winter”? Even the kids have noticed because there hasn’t been much snow. The boy is hoping for the extended time because he wants more snow. The lass is in agreement.

I guess I am too. Does that mean I’m still a kid at heart?

Well, I guess we can’t complain about “no snow” this year. Something of a surprise as well since none of the forecasts I’d seen indicated as much.

We got a call at 5AM from the town that school was delayed 2 hours. So basically, if any snow falls it’s an automatic delay it would seem. There’s barely 3 inches out there.

It’s supposed to warm up and rain this afternoon, so it will be short lived. Too bad.

As I type this, it’s 6 degrees outside which officially qualifies as cold. Yesterday, the temp never got out of the teens here at the house.

This Winter has been pretty warm, especially when compared with last year. I’ve gone through a fraction of the cord wood by comparison as this sort of cold has been an anomaly rather than the norm. That just makes the cold seem all the harsher since we acclimate to the general temps we’re dealt with and single digits is well outside the norm we’ve been dealing with.

Otherwise, I’ve noticed that the forecasts have tended to be overestimating actual highs and underestimating the actual lows, lately. From my own observations, that means a change in the predominant pattern; whether that means temps more like last year, or temps that are just more winter-like remains to be seen.

It ended up not being the big event originally forecast for our area. The heavy stuff fell well to our West. None the less, it is the “First Snow” of the season (even though it’s still early Fall!) and it was record breaking as well.

The first 2 pics are from earlier this morning before the stuff on the trees had melted.

Seeing as how we’re already 7 or 8 inches above normal rainfall for the year (can’t find a useful link, but I remember seeing it on a local weather report), today’s rain will be very much welcomed around these here parts. What would we do without it? Besides cut the grass that is.

Maybe I should start building an ark.

We’re so far ahead this year on rainfall totals, that we could go from now until the end of the year without any rain and we’d still end up, like 7″ above normal. According to the local weather talking-head, we’re closing in on a record for yearly rainfall. Just another 10″ or so should do it. If the current pattern holds, we should be there by the end of October.

While it’s nice for lawns and such, one problem all that rain has created is a large bug population. In particular, mosquitoes and those little biting flies. Even though the heat of the Summer is gone, the bugs have remained well past their usual time and it sucks to go outside. I’ve been bitten more in the past week-and-a-half than the entire Summer preceding. I guess that’s one thing the Summer heat is OK at- making sure the puddles and standing water dry up so that the bug breeding program is kept in check to a degree. With the heat gone, the puddles remain and the bug thrive.

Clearly, we need a frost or two to take a machete to the problem. Luckily, we may get just exactly that a little later this week. Though it’s supposed to warm up again for the weekend. Still, I’ll take what we can get at this stage. I’m tired of breathing bugs.

I think today has to be the unofficial first day of fall. Temps this morning were in the low 40’s and temps right now have fallen below 50. It was cool all day. All we need is some color in the leaves and we’re good to go.

The boy got good news today. His teeth are holding the correction and the orthodontist should be able to take them off during our next visit. He took a panoramic x-ray of his jaw (very cool technology BTW- all the incoming adult teeth are visibly obvious) just to make sure there weren’t any obvious problems with the incoming adult teeth. I think he’ll be happy to have them off, but sad he doesn’t get to choose the colors that cover the braces.

Our new couch arrived today. The kids were so excited it’s hard to describe it appropriately. While they were in school I moved the old couch into the basement; leaving a big open area in the family room. When the lass came home, she ran around the space just because she could, squealing with delight. You’d think she’d never been in the room before. Or any room period for that matter. When I picked the boy up from school, the first question out of his mouth was whether the couch had arrived. When he got home, he also ran around the room. When the couch finally arrived, they were the first ones on it. Who knew couches were such a hit?

Both kids have soccer tomorrow. It’ll be the lass’ second practice and the boy’s first game. It’s supposed to be a beautiful Fall day.

I’d seen this earlier, but I hadn’t seen any follow-up until now. There appears to be decent evidence that “Hurricane” Irene was never, in fact, a hurricane. At least, not at any point where she made landfall. In fact, it appears that once it cleared the Carolina’s, it was barely a tropical storm.

The theory also does a neat job of explaining why the storm surge failed to materialize as expected: the winds weren’t strong enough.

I’ll be curious to see if this gets any traction from the likes of The Weather Channel or The National Weather Service. It doesn’t change the fact that Irene did do damage once she made landfall. But it is important from a decision making standpoint, allowing the people in charge to determine the appropriate actions to take in preparation for the storm, as the above link points out. It’ll also be a serious blackeye for the “over hyping” of weather. As such, I expect this to be quietly swept under the rug, if it’s dealt with at all.

One more thing: if the storm really was as weak as the evidence suggests, I’d say it’s even more damning for our local power company, whom seems to be pretty hamfisted in terms of getting power back on in a timely manner. They’ve already cost a lot of kids an entire week of school, in addition to all the other frustrations being without power entails. Makes me shudder to consider the results if Irene really had been a hurricane when she got here.

Yesterday was just fantastic weather wise, high 70’s and dry with nary a cloud in the sky and today’s supposed to be more of the same. The only thing marring it was my annual late-Summer allergy affliction which finally reared its ugly head late yesterday. A bummer to be sure, because it was so late in coming this year I started to believe I was going to get a free pass.

But checking the longer range forecast, highs are forecast for mid-to-upper 70’s for the most part, with a couple days of low 80’s. Even for late August, that’s highly unusual. More typically, this has been mid-to-late September kind of weather.

My sense tells me that we’re gonna get another round of heat because, well, we always do. But there’s a niggling doubt telling me the Summer has packed it in. That’s because, even without a lot of rain, it’s really been an unusually cool Summer to my mind. The pattern this year has been for a few days of heat followed by many more days of relief. In recent years, the relief has been brief while the heat has stuck around to make life very uncomfortable. The humidity has sucked, like always, though.

As with any amateur weather forecasting, I reserve the right to be wrong. But I’ve still got my cord wood and pellets on order. Best to be prepared.