snow – A Jaunty Little Blog

February 28, 2014

Sometimes The Glass Is Mostly Empty

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

February 21, 2011

Storm Watch 2011! – Motor Racing Edition

Friends,

I was supposed to head to the desert early this morning to see the vintage auto racing at the new Chuckawalla Valley Raceway in Desert Center. Unfortunately, something happened overnight…

A foot and a half of snow fell on my little town and buried the cars. This wouldn’t be too tough to deal with except the local government hadn’t yet plowed the road, so I called off the trip.

With the ice and snow on the ground and the new brakes I installed only yesterday, I wasn’t sure that traveling off the hill was a good idea.

Was watching the Daytona 500 on teevee a good substitute? Not at all.

But the neighborhood is very pretty today.

Your pal,

bob

January 11, 2011

Sunday In The Park

Friends,

Governor Moonbeam II has released his first/next budget for this here golden state and he has laid down some painful cuts extending over the next few years. Here in America’s Very Finest (and cleanest!) Forest, we’ve lived with a lack of services for quite a long time, so this is really nothing new to us. This is the street in front of my friend’s house and her neighbors, who live there full time, managed to get somebody in a truck with a plow to run down the middle of the street once a week ago. Not the county, just some guy.

And now it’s all ice.

She’ll not be driving down there into the Fern Valley holler anytime soon.

I continued into town and took a shot of the fire station. Oh look, some fog…

Then I turned around and shot the other way.

Visibility could be slightly diminished! Good gravy! Noooo!

– bob

January 3, 2011

Programming Note: Sometimes A Chain Is Just A Chain Edition

Friends,

Now we start getting into the good weather stuff at this time of year. There should be almost a foot of snow on the ground at the Damp Dog Lodge by now (my tracks out of the driveway this morning are nearly filled in, as you can see) but the bitter cold from last week hasn’t materialized. Of course, the denizens of the Festival of Dirt would strongly disagree with the latter…

– bob

December 30, 2010

And Now A Word From Our Gal, The Idyllwild Weather Clam

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!

December 23, 2010

Storm Watch! 2010! WTH!!11!one!! – Honda! Discord! Edition!

Friends,

I think we all know that during inclement weather events (again with the event. really? -ed) there might be some value in exercising caution while navigating the byways of this here metropolis. However, as I approached my driveway coming home from work this afternoon, that calculus seems to have been flawed. Revised:

(we all) – 1 = most of us except for person trapped in her car laying on its side in front of my house

Mme. Puppy Dog was losing her mind as the fire chief pulled up in the driveway, the CHP parked behind that guy, the ladder truck (for double-decker Honda Accord rescues [sadly, they only have double-decker honda accords in england. -ed]) next to Ponch, and the wrecker parked nearby. The nice thing is that the rain stopped and it started snowing. I would hope that this is much more pleasant for the people rescuing said sideways person than a torrent running down their collars.

I don’t know the circumstance that led to someone pulling a half-Chitwood in front of my house, but I can guess. Too fast. Road too slick. Somebody pulling out from the back of Chez Noisy across the street. Bing, boom, bam, and there you go. Mister or Missus Accord gets taped down to a board and earns a trip to the hospital.

This year really hasn’t been dangerous enough, right?

– bob

May 23, 2010

Snow!

Friends,

Today is the 23rd of May and it’s been snowing here in my delightful Alpine village all day. It snows, it sticks, it melts, it snows some more, repeat. It’s chilly, of course, but it’s absolutely lovely.

The Highway Patrol is requiring chains or snow tires from Pine Cove to Lake Fulmor this afternoon, which seems like an alarmist reaction, but I guess it weeds out the kids on racing slicks? Hard to know.

– bob

February 12, 2010

Idyllwild Photo Blort – Winter 2010 Edition

Friends,

Hey, lookee here. I took some shots last Sunday before the latest snowfall and forgot to get them off the camera. It’s a quiet time in my little burg, early in the morning before the shops open and people wipe the syrup and pancake crumbs off the corners of their mouths and get out in it.

The automatic locks at the post office clicked open and let me in to get my mail, but the market was still closed. Only minutes remaining to buy beans and tomato sauce for Super Bowl chili. Plenty of time for another shot…

The cloud layer has changed, foretelling the snowfall later in the day. Maybe. Or they’re moving in the wrong direction.

Much prettier than a drive to Hemet, at any rate. Just saying.

– bob

January 28, 2010

Storm Watch 2010! Gravity! Edition!

Friends,

Just a quick note about ice on walkways: it’s pretty slippery. C’mon, ask me how I know.

– bob

P.S. Brother, can you spare an elbow? And a hip? And some spinal joints in the neighborhood of L5 and S1?

January 26, 2010

Storm Watch 2010! Photo Blort! Edition!

Friends,

You may have heard that we had a little storm up here in the gateway to America’s Cleanest Forest (more on that later). A modest amount of snow fell…

And now that I have a set of snow shoes, I don’t get a lot of frozen, wet intrusion in the top of my boots. That makes getting nice shots much easier…

I found that this was important to get quick snaps before the next storm rolled in…

What better plan than to work from home last Friday? The roads weren’t plowed regularly, but when they were, the ice sheet was exposed. Forget it, I thought. Time to light a fire and use my bandwidth instead of the failed network at the Festival of Dirt.

My DSL stayed up at this Secret Alpine Laboratory, but the genius monopolies of AT&T and Verizon combined to allow the big pipe at work to fail. Oh, and they decided to take the weekend off and got around to working on the problem today. Towards the end of the day, the connection came up but they didn’t tell us. “Just figure it out yourselves. By the way, we really value you as a customer.”

Of course they do.

– bob

January 20, 2010

Storm Watch! 2010! OMFG!!one! Edition!

Friends,

This storm thing has been pummeling Southern California for a few days now and it’s been a joy. By joy, of course, I mean that we’ve seen everything you want to see in a winter storm. You want your hail? Squalls? Snow? Rock porridge? We’ve got it all.

We’ll even have something that I’ve never heard before. I’ll let the National Weather Service breathlessly blort it out in all-caps…

POST FRONTAL INSTABILITY WILL RESULT IN WIDELY SCATTERED SHOWERS TONIGHT…WITH SNOW ABOVE 5500 FEET. SOME RAIN AND SNOW SHOWERS COULD BE HEAVY. PERIODS OF SNOW OR GRAUPEL ARE ALSO POSSIBLE DOWN TO 5000 FEET OR LOWER DURING HEAVY SHOWERS.

Graupel? What is this thing? Jewish wontons? No, dear reader, it’s simultaneously more bizarre and more common. It’s the balls of snow that seem like styrofoam rolling off your windshield. Weird? Not so much, but I’d never heard the term before. It’s almost like we English speakers have hundreds of words for snow or something.

Chilly, but fun,

– bob

January 18, 2010

Sloppy

Friends,

A series of storms are set to pummel my little town (and to be honest, the rest of the state) all week, but I’m taking no chances. I’ve created a series of channels and ravines to divert water away from my back door, I’ve laid up enough wood in the house to last for a week, and I’ve had a chat with Mme. Puppy Dog about how the moisture falling out of the sky is harmless and shouldn’t deter her from using the facilities. The latter argument has fallen on deaf but pricked up ears, which suggests to me that she cares that I’m speaking, just not that concerned with the content. Before you suggest that dogs are perky, bounding idiots incapable of recognizing human speech, why must we then spell out w-a-l-k and c-o-o-k-i-e? Yeah, I thought so.

So once again, in the consequence- and largely history-free mind of my dog, I’m to blame for this downpour. These storms, clearly, are my invention, having conjured my very own El Nino current in the Pacific, for as far as she knows, this hairless ape is all-powerful (I do control the light, heat, and food—my power knows no bounds), so why not the skies?

After we get our two feet of snow (!) this week, I’ll think about letting it dry out for a while, but in the meanwhile, go outside and stop looking at me like that.

– bob

December 8, 2009

Speaking Of Weather…

Friends,

Head on over to SnowCrystals.com for some fine photography from the very clever (and well funded) folks over at Caltech. They have galleries, a new book, and other nifty stuff to download. Sure, sometimes big snow falls like one today can be inconvenient, but you must agree that it’s sure pretty.

– bob

from SnowCrystals.com via TreeHugger. Thanks!

December 7, 2009

Storm Watch! 2009! OMG! Edition!

Friends,

The big news today is that the Federal EPA is considering a rule to declare carbon dioxide, the gas that you exhale and that plants inhale, to be dangerous. It’s even been said that carbon dioxide is a main cause of the alarming malady once called “global warming,” now referred to under the more quaint title of “climate change.”

And while we’re constantly reminded not to equate the weather with the climate, I think it’s always interesting to look at what’s happening outside my window while considering the frequent flier miles all of the delegates in Copenhagen racked up to express their deep concern about all this warming.

It’s been said before, but worth repeating; I’ll treat climate change like a crisis when the people who keep telling us it’s a crisis starting treating it like a crisis. Which doesn’t seem to have happened yet.

Your best (chilly) pal,

– bob

March 22, 2009June 13, 2018

Idyllwild Weather Clam Says, “huh?”

Friends,

Our own Idyllwild Weather Clam spent yesterday by the tide pool sunning herself, but today is digging through her wardrobe for the electric blanket. The snow is falling this morning but it’s not cold enough to stick. The wind has picked up and rain gutters have pulled away from their mounts.

She’s provided a couple snapshots stolen from the internet! Don’t blame me, blame the mollusk.

That was this morning. There’s also this from the good people at The Green Cafe.

Closer to town, Georgia’s (which is still around, believe it or not) has a very grey picture this morning. Notice there are no tourists. Bad news for the merchant of rocks and shiny rocks.

Reading the Clam’s late-breaking weather ticker, she also notes that the cloud ceiling has dropped. So if you’re flying into Idyllwild International Airport this morning, it’s strictly IFR. Good luck with that!

Your pal,

bob