No-wax, easy maintenance, bacteriostatic, and anti-slip.
Friends,
Our gal, The Idyllwild Weather Clam loves a good celestial event and she couldn’t be more excited than she is for today’s solar eclipse. In fact, she’s been splashing around in her tide pool all morning listening to this cheery little number.
Have fun folks. Stay safe and don’t burn your eyes out, okay?
Your best pal,
– bob
It’s going to rain today. Our gal, The Idyllwild Weather Clam, and I are giddy.
Your best pal,
– bob
As you are no doubt aware, our gal, The Idyllwild Weather Clam, works tirelessly to bring you the most accurate weather forecasts possible every single weekday when she gets around to it. She does this by dispatching teams of scientists from her tide pool to the four corners of the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains and use the latest scientific techniques to tirelessly gather data for her prediction models. Yesterday was no exception.
Teams of highly trained meteorologists fanned out from the Secret Alpine Laboratory and collected a breathtaking amount of weather and climate data. These figures were used to compute The Idyllwild Weather Clam’s prediction that it would rain yesterday in Idyllwild, California.
It didn’t.
We apologize for the error.
Your best pal,
– bob
Friends,
A big Pacific storm is headed our way today and will bring us some rain. In some places, like my piney paradise, quite a bit of rain. Then this idiocy happened on Twitter (about 500 times from a series of like-minded nitwits)…
Storms soaking California and bringing snow, but they’re far from ending the drought http://t.co/BB0TvPo7Wq @RobHopwood @MyDesert
— Ian James (@TDSIanJames) February 28, 2014
Gee, really? The two inches of rain today aren’t going to turn our arid desert into a tropical rainforest? How about shut the hell up?
I blame how we’ve come to understand the word drought. Since we live in a mostly dry place, shouldn’t what we now think of as drought be considered normal? It seems like the times when moisture falls out of the sky are extraordinary, not the dry spells.
And before you raise your hand to mention climate change or poles shifting or coronal ejections, yes, it’s always been this way forever. Dry deserts are not new.
So let’s reset the measurement and get rid of the D word. That way most of us, perhaps with the exception of Ian, can enjoy the rainfall as it was intended. Spoilsport.
Your best pal in the whole world,
– bob
Friends,
Some days you just want to press on through your commute as fast as you can. Year in and year out you look at the same landscape. You change the channel on the radio to mix it up. Have another sip of coffee to stay alert.
Today, on the eve of a minor precipitation event (which would be a grandiose way to hype the promise of some rainfall this afternoon) I found the sunrise so spectacular, that I had to share. My iPhone’s High Dynamic Range (HDR) setting only begins to capture the depth of the colors on display, but it wasn’t too far off.
We’ll see what today’s sunset offers. Maybe another reason to stop.
Your best pal in the whole wide world,
– bob
Friends,
Yesterday, the fine folks at the South Coast Air Quality Management District (an obviously overwrought name designed to create the too cute by half acronym, SCAQMD) issued a No-Burn Notice for Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside Counties due to anticipated high levels of particulates in the air. This means that you’ll need to put out the tire inferno still blazing in your backyard (no, seriously, you should get right on that), but more importantly, it means that the fireplaces and wood stoves heating a touch under a third of California homes must stay cold this evening. You’ll notice that our gal, The Idyllwild Weather Clam says that it’s 27° outside right now, but overnight lows tonight are predicted to be at or a little above freezing. In other words, despite this steep warming trend, it’s going to be pretty chilly tonight and for a lot of people, particularly in the mountain communities, a fireplace may be the only source of heat in their homes.
I’m lucky in that even though my furnace has been broken for a couple years, I have several different sources of heat for my house. They’re inadequate on their own, but when combined can make the Damp Dog Lodge a pretty cozy place.
The notice went up on Facebook and my neighbors lost their minds trying to figure out how they’ll stay warm tonight. If you simply went to http://www.aqmd.gov/ and put in the ZIP code of an affected region, or use Idyllwild’s 92549, you’ll see that burning is banned today. If you read further down into the press release linked on that page, you’ll see that residents living 3,000-feet above sea level or higher, like our friends in my mile-high burg, are exempt from the order. You’ll see lots of exceptions, some economic, some born of necessity, so why did people freak out? Was it because their way of life was threatened by an arbitrary governmental agency but they didn’t want to take the time to do simple research, like clicking a link, on exactly how the order might affect them personally?
Maybe!
Your pal,
– bob
Friends,
Quite a lot has transpired since the last post in mid-September. Well, it’s the last post that you can see. There are a bunch of posts hiding in a tin, buried in the basement of this blog that we can never talk about if I wish to remain employed. Sort of screedy, kinda stabby. The less said about them, the better.
What I do know is that a bunch of things just aren’t working right now. The webcam is failing to upload due to a server configuration issue (bad certificate?) so the last picture you see is from the morning before the earliest snowfall I can remember. No snow pictures for you, I’m afraid. There are plenty on the internet though, just do a search. You’ll be okay.
Also, for some damn reason, The Idyllwild Weather Clam is unable to update her spot on the Blogger clone of this site. Maybe it’s time to finally pack it in over there and redirect to Squarespace. They were great when we started this hot mess, but it seems that functionality is slowly falling away. Maybe Google’s losing interest in Blogger. That wouldn’t be surprising.
More later today…
– bob
Friends,
Yesterday I noted that our resident psychic weather forecaster was alarmed by The Weather Channel prediction of an overnight low of 20° which seemed far too low. Today it seems that their forecast didn’t go low enough, but I’ll let our gal, The Clam explain what happened herself
Good morning everybody. It’s pretty chilly up here this morning—currently 18° before sunrise at 6:59 AM. The remaining snow had turned to slush yesterday due to afternoon rainfall that was fairly light, but persistent over several hours. That slush is now frozen, along with any runoff streaming across roadways.
I just wanted to let you know that the models I’m looking at did show the arctic flow rushing over Southern California, but I missed the intense winds that brought the temperature down very quickly yesterday afternoon. In fact, this flow pattern is very similar to the atmospheric river event from last week, but the ocean temperatures seem to be too low for another significant period of precipitation. Sorry about missing it by such a large margin, but I’ll try to do much better next year.
Hugs,
The Idyllwild Weather Clam
Hugs?
– bob
P.S. Happy birthday to both Mike Nesmith AND Davy Jones!
Friends,
It’s been raining pretty steadily here since last Friday (or as I like to call last Friday, The Great and Terrible Head Cold Epoch) with rainfall totals breaking records all over Southern California. On my way to work this morning, tumbling off of the hill as I am wont, I had to stop and try to get a shot of the view. you may not be able to see exactly what’s going on here, but it’s a top-down shot of storm clouds hovering over the Coachella Valley at around 5:30 AM.
The camera did warn me that I was shaking it too much…
– bob
P.S. Happy birthday Mike Watt!
Friends,
You’ll notice that The Idyllwild Weather Clam has settled on a temperature prediction this morning that’s pretty much in line with Accuweather (for once. -ed) and the Town Crier, but Weather Underground has chosen to stray pretty far off the reservation today. It’s difficult to know why, but they tend to march to the beat of a different drummer (that’s racist. – ed). We’ll let you know what happened tomorrow, but as for right now I think we can agree that the science is settled (you’ve all settled on wild guesses? – ed).
– bob
Looks like the snow plows have been busy.Friends,
On this, the 22nd of April, I have half a foot of snow in my driveway. As you can see from the webcam picture above, the county snow plow crews were hard at work pushing that snow into my driveway this morning. Too bad they didn’t actually plow the roads last night. The twisting, winding mountain roads that snake down to the Festival of Dirt. I know times are tight, but in my little town we don’t want or need too much from county government. Just patch the potholes and keep the roads clear. That’s about it. Sadly, it seems that they can’t even manage that.
But I lived (barely) to gripe about it! So that’s something…
– bob
[This Jaunty Weather Update is brought to you by the Idyllwild Weather Clam who is setting her clocks back an hour to protest the revocation of Spring.]
Friends,
If you’ve been following our very own Idyllwild Weather Clam over the last week, you have no doubt thrilled to her spot-on, no nonsense prediction of the weather in Idyllwild and environs without the internet delivered and constantly updated “now-casting” that you get from the mainstream media. Even though she’s been close to perfect lately, she can’t make out what’s going to happen with the Pacific storm approaching today. It’s nearly guaranteed to release some moisture, that’s a given, but is it cold enough (and will it stay cold enough) for snow? Some outlets say yes, while others say no.
All I know for sure is that if a lot of snow falls and kills her new pet tulip, I may need to stay away from the office for a while.
Your pal,
– bob
Friends,
As you know, I’ve been railing against the idiocy of Groundhog Day for years and years (forty four of them? -ed Not quite, but nice plug.), but now that Alaska has got into the act of rodent-based Winter weather prediction festivals, I think we should just place a moratorium on the whole practice. After all, those kleine vrachtwagens vol van hondsdolheid as the Dutch might say, aren’t slaving over a hot weather map every day like our dear Idyllwild Weather Clam. What do they know?
– bob
[This Jaunty Weather Update is brought to you by the Idyllwild Weather Clam who is taking some personal time to knit a sweater this morning.]
Friends,
Our very own Idyllwild Weather Clam constantly checks all of the weather reporting agencies and when she stops laughing, becomes disgusted at how wrong most of them are. This morning, for instance, the Yahoo! Weather Widget for the iPhone (which draws from the notoriously dim Weather Channel who are currently reporting that it’s 22°, which is also wrong.) said that it was a balmy 40° Fahrenheit at 4:30 this morning. The actual readings from the Idyllwild Weather Clam Mega-Skyview Ultra Doppler 8000 Super Computron in HD thing showed that the temperature was actually 26°. Quite a difference, and another reason why you shouldn’t trust anything that you read at all, unless you read it here. (and it’s written by a clam. -ed)
Your pal,
bob
Friends,
As you know, clams do not have hands, but our very own Idyllwild Weather Clam manages to get you the latest forecasts nearly everyday. Typing. Without hands.
We presume here in the offices at Jaunty Central that the folks at the paper of record actually do have hands, but that didn’t really help them yesterday:
It is cold and rainy this morning. It ha hailed a bit in twn adn looks as if some of th ehigher areas received some snow. Today, it is predicted to be cloudy with scattered showers and highs in the low 50s. Tonight is predicted to be partly cloudy with lows in the low 20s.
Bless their hearts.
– bob