Sephy’s Platzish

Another week with up and down weather. Despite the snow, it was mostly up, though spring inches ever closer by the week.

Sunday, 10th February

So, what does the snowmobiler have to do with the other pictures? Well, he was the only one that could actually get anywhere. As you can plainly see, there was a huge snowbank in the middle of the driveway - add in to that the fact that the temperature was ranging around -5°F (probably a few degrees higher, but I’m not sure) with winds, it made it a hard time to walk around. I got down to the bank and came back.

Distance - 743 steps, 0.59km

Monday, 11th February

What’s the story with this picture? Well, this is what happens when you get a car stuck - someone has to do a lot of work to get it unstuck. Fortunately, I did manage to get it unstuck. If you look at the full-size picture, you’ll see the flattened area between the tyre tracks - that’s where the car was scraping along the ground, which was the primary cause of it getting stuck, as far as I can tell. I was quite tuckered out after digging out and didn’t go back out later in the day to walk, at least with the pedometer on.

Tuesday, 12th February

More snow fell, but this time it was only around an inch or so - heck, not even enough to bother mentioning on the news. Oh wait, this is TV news, so it was the top story.

Distance - 639 steps, 0.57km

Wednesday, 13th February

It wasn’t really until after the Tuesday snowfall that the pack started to form on the roads. This is because of the towns and cities running critically low in their supplies of salt. However, the road isn’t that slippery to walk on because of all the cars and trucks that have solidified the pack.

Total distance - 1480 steps, 1.18km

Thursday, 14th February

What happens when you run out of salt? See that brown line in the snow? There’s your answer - you replace the salt with sand. While it doesn’t have the melting capabilities of salt, it is a good source of creating some basic traction on the road. Fortunately, the amount of snow that fell was only about 1/2 inch or so - a mere pittance compared to what fell elsewhere in the state.

Distance - 823 steps, 0.65km

Friday, 15th February

Here’s a great shot of the packed snow that formed on the road after the latest fall. You can’t see any of the road, and it was a bit of a crapshoot to figure out where you were on the road - keeping right was a good idea in any case. I didn’t do the regular walk as I went volunteering.

Total distance - 3018 steps, 2.41km

Saturday, 16th February

Once again, I take a look at some of the antics of snowmobilers who don’t quite know where the trail is. Obviously, the side of the hill is not on the trail, but it doesn’t stop them. The last shot was taken a bit later when I went on another excursion down the driveway. This time, the only snow that is there is what fell overnight on Thursday. Unfortunately, there was still a layer of ice under it - and it will be playing a role my world the next couple of days again. The distance walked includes some walking in the grocery store, just so you know.

Total distance - 3476 steps, 2.78km

In other news, I had a couple more sessions of the HMR therapy with trying to handle the fear of the unknown. So far, I think it’s working, as I haven’t had that fear as much (or really the other stuff we handled in the past), but I know that I’ll probably be relying upon that in the near future. Really, what it will take is having some more real world experience with regards to the things that have been worked on.

An interesting thing happened to me on Friday when I was over at the DMV (no I’m not in trouble, I was not the reason that we were over there - there was a renewal that needed to be handled). I caught up with a friend from high school who I’ve seen around at doctors’ offices because she works as a Medical Assistant. I told her about getting my license, and I have to say that I kinda feel cool when I mention it to people, because as I mention it, I then mention the car by showing the key and keyfob for the remote unlock.

If there is any one major change that I think I’ve noticed through all of this so far is that I’m more willing to actually talk to people, because as we were sitting there waiting for the number to be called, I heard some discussions about a driving test, and spotted what was obviously an under-18s Learner’s license, and I opened my mouth and said, “Ah, got your license?” - I wasn’t prompted to engage conversation, but I did anyway.

I think I’m allowing myself to be more open than in the past, and that is something that I think is really cool.

Though in this case, “the like” is probably more filed under “I can’t wait until spring”.

I love having a washing machine upstairs; I really do. However, there is one slight problem - in the winter, we have to be extremely careful to make sure that the outdoor discharge pipe isn’t frozen so that the water will actually drain out of there. I still remember the first time it failed last year - there was a large mess of water on the floor, and I then said “right; I’m not bothering, I’ll just go ahead and finish my clothes tomorrow”.

So, we get to this winter, and we have a plan all in place for the washer - run a bit of hot water through the washer to make sure that the pipe is clean, and if it isn’t, then the hot water will thaw the pipe. That worked all winter until last week when the temperatures got well below freezing - to the point that even running hot water didn’t work.  We had another spillover with the floor getting a bit of water over it, but fortunately the washer had stopped before all of the water went onto the floor.

The course of action then was to just let the water flow out on its own course. A few hours later, we tried another water run, and it didn’t go through, but this time we did a small amount of water so it didn’t run onto the floor, thankfully. Eventually, the water did flow out, and we made a bit of a bad assumption - that the water had actually flowed out.

We get to today, and time to wash clothes once again. Run the hot water through the washer, and it doesn’t drain. We decide to remove the hose from the outside, and find out that the pipe that leads into the house has ice in it! Not a good thing at all, obviously. After some work with a screwdriver and a hammer, the ice is still not all the way gone, so I come up with a silly idea - take some of the water that’s near boiling in the tea kettle and put it on a towel, and drape the towel over the pipe.

Magically, within a few seconds, it works and the water is flowing out of the wash tub.

We went ahead and did some shopping - including getting a new food which will be talked about on here in a couple of days, and it wasn’t too bad of a price either.

We get home and run a load of washing; everything runs fine, but I noticed something - there was a kink in the hose, which could lead to the washer running over once again. I go out and fix it, but didn’t realize that I caused more harm than good in doing that.

The next load of washing goes in, and upon it draining out, the water gets stuck and there’s a ton of water on the floor.

Some days you can’t win them all I guess.

Also, some more bad luck - I went to a shop to see if they had some double-choc Tim-Tams, but they only had original. I didn’t get anything from there, but I did notice that they had some more Aussie products - like more Arnott’s products, along with some more Cadbury bars including Time Out and Flake, along with their drinking chocolate (but not Milo…)

Not the greatest week for walking, especially with the bitterly cold weather the last couple of days, but spring is coming closer every day.

Sunday, 13th January

I just didn’t walk, except for a quick trip outside; the pedometer didn’t count much - 214 steps, 0.17km.

Monday, 14th January

I noticed this as I was walking - you can see some tracks that were left by someone else (possibly me for all I know ) before the latest layer of snow covered this area. I don’t think I’d have noticed something this unusual, but I did.

Total distance - 2462 steps, 1.96km

Tuesday, 15th January

When I saw this train coming along, I was wondering why it was going so slow - it only had one engine, but with a cargo of Intermodal containers, I would have figured it would go faster. However, it turned out that they had a bunch of car carriers on the end and, apparently, one of them had been to the Rodeo

Total distance - 2580 steps, 2.06km

Wednesday, 16th January

One of the problems with being a part-time vampire who can’t wash clothes at night because of the pipes freezing is that you just have to do things when you get the chance - so my walk wound up being down to the mailbox and back…

Distance - 615 steps, 0.49km

Thursday, 17th January

It wasn’t the greatest weather - the precipitation started out as rain, then quickly changed to snow, freezing everything that hadn’t cleared off of the road. The thing about where I live is that we don’t believe in having plows go out until quite a while later. Even then, they’re not the most effective anyway, as I can attest after following one going on my road - I didn’t get why they had the blade down…

Total distance - 1931 steps, 1.54km

Friday, 18th January

Here’s the reason why it’s gotten so cold - arctic air + clear skies == temperatures heading well below 0 degrees Fahrenheit. This was sunset on Friday, when I went out to walk - another of those “mailbox and back” jobs - I have to say that I love how the picture came out though

Distance - 799 steps, 0.67km

Saturday, 19th January

As I mentioned, the temperature outside was -8°F (-22°C), with a brisk wind causing wind chills to go down to the range of -20°F or lower (even lower if we were still using the “old” wind chill calculations). At these temperatures, frostbite can happen within 15 minutes to exposed skin. Although you keep the amount of skin exposed to a minimum, it made more sense to walk around the store, hence no picture.

Total distance - 1638 steps, 1.31km

In other news, this week’s therapy session is going to focus on doing the first session of Holographic Memory Resolution. I don’t know exactly what to expect from it, and I have to say that the weather isn’t working in my favor for experiencing it - the weather bureau says we could have upwards of 6 inches of snow (15cm) tomorrow. However, why should I let the snow stop me from therapy?

Aside from that, not much else happened - I’m a little bit down from the Packers losing their game tonight, but life goes on, and race season starts right around the corner, along with the cricket continuing and all the other stuff I’m involved in.

One of the indicators that the summer has really arrived is the first issuance of a severe weather watch or warning. In fact, in my state, we’ve had tornadoes in every month except February, and have had severe weather (thunderstorms, not snowstorms) in every month. I can still remember one February afternoon when we had a really strong thunderstorm - I was in school and we were practising for an event that was coming up in the next couple of weeks. The next thing we know, there’s thunder and lightning outside. In the middle of February.

Anyway, when we get an alert for severe weather, it almost always starts with the issuance of a watch - either a Severe Thunderstorm Watch or a Tornado Watch, depending on the severity of the storms that are expected over the affected area. Generally, this will be for a large swath of land, covering hundreds or thousands of square miles - sometimes even including the better part of a state. Then, as the weather develops, warnings are issued for specific storms. In fact, as of October 1st, the National Weather Service is only issuing warnings for specific storms, instead of for whole counties. Typically, the warnings are issued for an area of about 100-200 square miles (I might be underestimating that, since a township is considered to be 36 square miles).

In this case, we’re afforded the opportunity to have (at least in my opinion) some of the best forecasting of severe weather in the world, despite the media going all out crazy when there’s a warning issued (if you read the HDTV forums for this area, you can read about people getting annoyed at stations for crunching the widescreen picture into a 4:3 picture to put the warnings on the screen - they do the same thing for the snow closings as well).

Now, let’s do a bit of compare and contrast. First off is a current radar image from the National Weather Service office in Shreveport, LA - the only office in the nation that has severe warnings out for their Forecast area. The yellow squares are the boundaries of the severe thunderstorm warning, issued for some parts of Texas.

Contrast that with this picture, from the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia, who have issued a severe thunderstorm warning for parts of Victoria. Again, the warned area is in yellow. Note that the warning covers about 2/3 of the state.

What is baffling to me is this sounds very much like a watch - because they issue these warnings for hours at a time, and for such a large area. Interestingly, they do have a page intended to guide you as to the conditions for a severe thunderstorm warning, but there isn’t much in the way of specifics. Also, they say that these warnings have very little lead time for their issue - To try and issue warnings with a greater lead-time would lead to a flood of false alarms, thus rendering the service ineffective.

Interestingly, if you look at the Melbourne Radar loop, you can see that communities that are part of this warning appear to not have received any rain at all, for example, Colac. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they haven’t gotten storms already or won’t get them in the near future, but to have them under a warning seems to, especially if they don’t get any storms, be counterproductive to their statement of avoiding false warnings.

Our warnings aren’t perfect either - we have quite a few tornado warnings that are issued for the possibility of a tornado - however, those are not over issued, so they are still taken very seriously; I’m surprised that those warnings aren’t a source of further controversy actually. I think part of that is that a tornado is one weather event you do not want to take a chance with - even a weak tornado has the ability to kill people, especially in a mobile home park.

If you are curious, the guidelines for issuing a severe thunderstorm warning are if a storm has a measured or estimated wind speed of 50 knots (58mph, 93km/h), or hail in excess of a certain diameter. It has nothing to do with a lot of lightning or heavy rain. There are a dedicated group of people who volunteer to watch for storms and report on their progress to back up data that is gathered on a radar image - they are the storm spotters and I know that I’ve listened to them many times when it’s been stormy out; in fact, if you read local storm reports during severe weather, you will see a lot of entries from amateurs - that means amateur radio operators who have gone and submitted a report via the radio which is relayed to the forecast office on a separate channel.

Aussies, I’d like your opinion - would you like to keep having warnings issued as they are now, for large swaths of states for long periods of time (like our watches), or separate the warnings into watches and warnings, with watches being the current warning product, and warnings being issued for specific areas of states?

Ah, yes, it must be winter, eh? We’ve had snow for just about every other day since the first of the month. Today was the second “major” storm of the season. At first, it was looking like it would be a big ice storm, but then it wound up being just a lot more snow on top of what we already had on the ground.

Nevertheless, it didn’t stop one local TV station from having 12½ hours of continuous coverage of the storm. Their companion radio station was soliciting people to SMS comments about the storm, and in between discussion of the issues of the day, people were calling in to comment on the size of the snowflakes that were falling. I had a chance to see some of them up close and personal, and I have to say that they were quite large, possibly the largest I’d ever seen myself.

The most ridiculous thing about the TV coverage is that the station sent their reporters all over the metropolitan area to cover the conditions at various intersections and interchanges on the main roads. The best part though was when someone working at a McDonald’s restaurant decided to bring out some food and coffee to the TV crew as a thanks for giving them a free plug by having them (and the Citgo station) in the shot whenever they went to that corner.

I have to say, though, that an award has to go to the local TV columnist, who did a video mocking all of these reports that they do on the TV. Fortunately, it was put on YouTube so I can post it here, because it is something definitely worth watching.

However, there was a lesson that I’ve learnt as a result of this storm - we do not live on a “major” road in the eyes of my town. While listening to the scanner today (as you do because honestly, that’s the best way to actually get real information), I heard on our town’s channel that the snow plow drivers had gone over the “major” roads twice. The road I’m on? Once - and that was before the snow had restarted about mid morning. This is, quite literally, what the road looked like at about 3:30pm, around an hour after the snow had tailed off:

The plow didn’t go through for at least two more hours, which was after we had our driveway plowed out - so that means I have a bit of work to do to get the entry cleared out again. It shouldn’t be terribly bad, I just have to pace myself.