Category Archives: weather

Sometimes you win …

 … and sometimes you lose. Meeting tonight was canceled when one of the other committee members could not make it. So we put it off a week and adjourned to go watch football.

Speaking of football, does anyone else find this year uninspiring with the possible exception of three teams. Even the Broncos are so inconsistent that one is never sure which team will show up in any given game. Fortunately they play in a division where the other teams seem to have self-destructed early and often. So barring a really odd occurrence, they are in the playoffs. The three teams I find interesting this year? The Giants, the Jets, and the Titans. Oh well.

I love the odd weather this time of year around here. Today breezy and overcast, tomorrow up to the mid 60’s, followed by Wednesday when it is not supposed to exceed 30 degrees all day. It could be worse, we could already be buried in snow and the temperature could be in the teens.

Back to the salt mines. The Monday Night Football game is not interesting enough to waste the time watching.

Blustery Saturday

Today the wind was howling and the weather was cool. Our compatriots to the northwest in Wyoming and to the west in the Colorado mountains got snow and ice, but no snow here. Just cool and blustery weather that made you wish it would get over its pique and just snow already.

For some reason I also couldn’t get inspired by the football games on TV today. Maybe it was a sense of “I don’t carism” for the dregs of what the BCS is becoming this year. Maybe it was just that none of the games involved a team near and dear to my heart. Maybe it is just sadness that my alma mater had a perfectly disastrous season this year – they went 0 for. They got beat by every team they played. You have to understand that during my youthful years we were often 11-0 and vied for the Lambert Trophy for football supremacy in the east. Now, … I hope that the current coach (who was a player during my last year) can bring the program back to its former levels.

Maybe my blahs for today are due to the fact that my lovely wife will be leaving early tomorrow and I’ll be batching it again. On a strange note, she will be back next Friday because she has a jury summons for … wait for it … municipal court for next Friday. Just to be clear – I didn’t do it. The municipal judge may indeed be one of only three direct employees of the Mayor and City Council, but I have nothing to do with jury selection. (For the curious, the direct employees of the Mayor/City Council are the municipal judge, the city attorney, and the city manager. All other city employees are indirect and report officially through chains headed by the aforementioned three.)

Oh well – time to go see if there is more of the Thanksgiving pie hiding out in the refrigerator. And maybe the Oklahoma versus Oklahoma State game will heat up a bit more.

Seasonal Drear

Today is one of those dreary late fall days when the weather can’t decide if it wants to be winter or fall. The sun was hidden and the breeze was just enough to make it feel cool. The lonely retreating feeling of the world at this time of year coupled with the change back to standard time makes the days feel miserable and short. At least I have the honor of knowing that I m not alone in feeling this way. Molly and I saw no one out walking when we went to the park late in the afternoon. Most days we see an assortment of people when we mosey out for our trek. I guess they were all buried inside bemoaning the drear of the day.

Having lived where there were minimal or no seasons (hot and not-so-hot or sunny/rainy don’t count as seasons), I prefer the seasonal change of Colorado. There is something about the renewal of spring with its explosion of green, the days of summer when daylight lasts forever and the nights are warm, the crystalline beauty of winter when the imperfections of the earth are periodically buried in white, and even the early part of fall when the leaves are changing and the harvest is ending. However, I could live without parts of all those seasons. I don’t like the mud season of April when the rains come and the mud sits, I don’t care for the drear days of November and early December when fall is kicking its last. I could happily avoid the couple of weeks in January or February when temperatures fall below zero and stay there for days at a time. And I could happily miss the days of late August when the temperature can hit 110+ during the day. But overall, I’ll live with the parts I don’t like to enjoy the parts I love.

I guess I’ll just have to hope it is a sunny day tomorrow and make the most of it. Time to curl up with a good book for the evening and escape to a different world.

Wind

Either the National Weather Service (NWS) has a new found desire to scare warn the population or it is going to be really windy out here on the plains today. For the first time in my memory, the NWS activated the early warning system to issue a high wind warning for the area.  The warning extends from 5am MST to 6pm MST, so it sounds like a windy day.

On the plus side:

  • I will have an excuse to stay indoors
  • I won’t have to rake that last batch of falling leaves
  • I might collect another metal snow shovel (see below)

On the negative side:

  • Internet access will slow to a crawl as the wires sing
  • The wind driven ionization will impart that edgy feeling all day long
  • The windows will rattle and the chimneys howl
  • The patio furniture is still out and will likely fly and move about
  • It will feel colder than it is

I wonder if it will be as windy as it was early in the spring? Then it was windy enough that I gained a new (heavy) metal snow shovel when the wind blew it into the back yard. Of course, I also lost a patio table when the wind sent it tumbling across the yard broke its cast iron legs.

It will be interesting to see if the wind energy facility will have to stop production. Wind turbines depend on a steady wind that does not exceed 40+ mph. The area around here is host to one of the largest wind energy facilities in the world (the ranking depends on whose figures you use). This article in Wikipedia is a bit out of date as the facility is/has been expanded beyond the original size of 267 turbines to 450 turbines and will be expanding even more in the next year. So we see a number of these in the area.

Just to give you a sense of scale, each tower is 237 feet tall and has a 170 foot diameter blade on it. The full assemblage is more than 160 tons. If the blades turn too fast (i.e. the wind is to brisk and the turbine is left in operation), the tips of the rotors go supersonic and the turbulence kills the power generation. Not to mention disturbs everything from wildlife to people with the sonic boom.

Enough boring you to death, on with battening down the hatches.

The Return of Nice

Today is one of those oddities of fall weather on the plains – when it goes from cold and snow flurries to warm and sunny for a day. Unfortunately, it is predicted to be a one day warm spell followed by a return to standard fall weather. Gives a whole new meaning the phrase “enjoy it while you can.”

The change in weather brings to mind the coming of Halloween.  It is now less than a week before the little munchkins show up at the front door. Why does it seem like Halloween is always on a day with utterly miserable weather: cold, wet, and windy? It can be in the 70’s and lovely the day before Halloween, but the weather always seems to get worse right at Halloween.

We get between 30 to 100+ trick or treaters here at the house. The total number seems to depend on the press being given to the big local parties and the weather. The city sponsors a Halloween party at the rec center so that kids don’t have to go out trick or treating. The downtown merchants feature trick or treating in the stores. One of the local nursing homes sponsors a big Halloween party so that the residents can enjoy seeing the kids in costume. So if the weather is bad, the kids tend to be at the nicely sheltered parties. If the weather is good (i.e. just cold or blowy) then they show up at the house.

Given the variability of head count, it is hard to get the right amount of candy to give out. Get too much and you have candy around for ages. Get too little and you run the risk of tricks. Such a dilemma. This year it is even more problematic since I will be forced to eat all the leftovers by myself {*grin*}.  I guess I might be able to save some until my wife gets home for the weekend!