weather

More Icy Adventures

Maybe this weather is a fluke, and as one who’s read The Little Ice Age more than once, I certainly hope that it’s a fluke, but it would be no more than a fluke save for one inconvenient truth: Carol had to be on a plane to Chicago this morning at 8:30 AM. In normal October weather, we would simply have set the clock radio for 4:30 AM and gone down the hill early. After yesterday’s lesson in automotive ice skating, we changed plans.

I figured that by 4:00 yesterday afternoon, enough cars would have gone down Broadmoor Bluffs to melt the black ice, so we reserved a room for Carol at the Homewood Suites on Powers and set out. People were being very careful after seeing news reports of Interstate crowd-scene crackups, and I was right: We felt no ice on the trip down, nor any on the roads eastward toward the Colorado Springs airport. Normal caution was sufficient, and the usual nutcases either stayed at home or were already in a ditch somewhere.

We checked her in about 4:45, and I hung out with her awhile, but then about 5:30 we noticed that it had begun sleeting again after a five-hour respite. So after a few goodbye kisses she shooed me home. Alas, I had waited a little too long. There was plenty of water on the streets already, and with new sleet and failing light added to the mix, things started to freeze and get ugly again. There was a minutes-old serious injury accident at Powers and Proby, and as the police waved us carefully past the scene, I saw a mashed-up Jeep Liberty lying on its roof, with the fire department trying to cut some poor guy out of it, and a nondescript minivan with one whole side caved in and two people on stretchers with paramedics bending over them. One’s leg was exposed, and it was bloody.

We were being careful, but there’s only so much you can do. As they taught us in driver’s ed 42 years ago, bridges freeze first. Academy Boulevard at its southeast corner is more Interstate than boulevard, and it has numerous bridges. At the bridge over the BNSF tracks I felt the 4Runner start to slither, but fortunately there wasn’t the usual crowd sharing the road. I saw the sedan in front of me swing a little to one side, but then he cleared the bridge and recovered. I coasted the rest of the way to solid asphalt, heart in my throat, and kept going. I felt some slippage again on the bridge over 115, but the city had put down some sand and nobody had any serious trouble. That was not true elsewhere in the city.

The sleet continued long after I went to bed. I got up to potty Dash at 2 ayem and it was still coming down, by then more snow than sleet. The light fixture on our back deck bore what looked like a half-inch coating of solid ice. At 7 this morning morning it was still overcast, but nothing was coming down. However, the driveway is now a sheet of ice, and when Carol called me from the airport a little while ago to say she was about to board, she made my intuition imperative: I was to keep my butt inside the house today until we had at least two hours of sunshine to melt things out a little. No argument there.

Currently (at 8:45 AM) there’s no indication of the clouds breaking up. The newly-golden leaves of the scrub oaks in back are coated with ice, and we lost some branches. I am clearly not going to church this morning. I pity the poor squirrels: I can see pieces of pine cone stuck in the ice out on the deck, but they’ll need jackhammers to free them up. Hurry sunshine!

Black Ice!

Oct 10th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

I feel like a swallowed a boom box. Carol and I had signed up to work at our church’s craft fair today, with me coordinating the used books table, and although it was 27 degrees outside with a heavy frost, we set out about 8:30 AM. Stanwell was not especially slippery, but once we got onto Broadmoor Bluffs, I knew in seconds that I was up against black ice. We got less than a block downhill when the grade increased (and must be close to 10% in spots) and our wheels no longer held the road. Even in 4WD and going no more than 10 MPH, the 4Runner spun 180, narrowly missing a mailbox and stopping just short of slamming into the curb. We just sat there for a few minutes, until we saw a 4WD Beamer backing up Broadmoor Bluffs from further down. (There was nowhere for him to turn around.) He rolled down his window, and told us not to go any further: There were several cars stuck on the steepest part of the road, and although he hadn’t gotten close, it looked like there had been some vehicle-vehicle contact.

So we called the rector and gave him our regrets, at least until the sun comes out, as it is showing absolutely no inclination to do. We crept back up Broadmoor Bluffs, and after we got home (without further incident) just sat on the couch for awhile, hearts pounding.

I ducked out on the front porch just now for a quick look, and see freezing drizzle descending. The sidewalks are now skating rinks. And our little roads are not the worst of it. This is the gnarliest driving weather we’ve ever seen in the six years we’ve lived here. The mountain views are nice, but yikes! Getting here–or getting out–can be a challenge.

Fall? Fall? QTH Fall?

Oct 10th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

We set a cold record for this date last night, after several days of sleet and snow. Tonight it may get down to 18 degrees here and set another record. This morning we heard that there is now 15″ of snow in North Platte, Nebraska, a favorite town on our well-trodden route from here to Chicago.

I asked the local squirrels what they thought of all this. The squirrels pointed to the well-chewed pine cones all over the sidewalk and scattered across my back deck and said, “Long, cold, and early–cantcha read the signs?” Carol and I have never seen so many gnawed-on pine cones lying around; QBit has brought a few into the house to stash for later. (So much for Evo dog food.)

Summer ended early here, and fall lasted about two weeks. I’m going to try and wake our snow blower from hibernation tomorrow, as we may need it sooner than we thought. Our garage is insulated, and I’m going to try and sort out my fire alarm conflict in the next couple of weeks (before it gets too damned cold to work up in the attic) so that I can start using my attic dipole this winter. Cold nights mean good, quiet propagation on the low bands, even when there aren’t any sunspots. That done, I’m gonna QSO party like it’s 1974, because when I go outside, that’s sure as hell what it feels like.

We’re going to rent Ice Age and Ice Age II to appease the Climate Gods: Hey guys, we’re sorry for claiming that we’re controlling you now. Some of us know better. And…Tennessee would be that way…

Odd Lots

Aug 25th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

I just missed seeing a nice article on the current sunspot dearth before posting my entry for August 20, 2009. The longest stretch this solar minimum is 52 days back in 2008, and we could well exceed that come early September with no additional spots. (We’re now at 45 consecutive spotless days.)
I’m practicing rolling my eyes for the latest showing of the Mars hoax. On August 27, multitudes of people who are rumored to posess something close to human intelligence are claiming that Mars will appear the size of the full Moon. (This does the email rounds every couple of years.) Note well that if Mars were the size of the full Moon in the sky, we’d be living a disaster movie, so be very glad it’s a hoax.
Stanford University reports that media multitaskers do not in fact multitask very well. I liked this refreshingly straightforward quote in the article: “We kept looking for what they’re better at, and we didn ‘t find it.” More details here from the Beeb.
ZDNet reports on a virus, named Win32.Induc, that pulls a trick I’ve never heard of before: It looks for the Delphi programming environment, and infects Delphi such that any apps built by that copy of Delphi will carry the virus. I can’t quite see how this manages to propagate in a herd as thin as the Delphi programming world has become, unless Delphi programmers tend to use a lot of Delphi utilities obtained from places like Torry’s. (I know I did, so that’s my theory.)
Maybe you had one: A die-stamped thin steel rectangular lunchbox, usually (but not always) with completely inane artwork, often branded to TV shows, toys, and other pop-culture phenomena. The Denver Westword has a “10 worst” feature on tin lunchboxes that’s worth a look. I never carried a tin lunchbox to school (we used paper bags from Certified) but I have one now very much like #1, purchased at a hamfest years ago, filled with FT-243 ham-band crystals. I’ve always wondered why the boxes always had little vents punched in the short end sides.
Here’s an interesting 2-tube minimal broadcast-band superhet, using 12V space-charge tubes. It’s interesting enough that I might even build one, though my own holy grail is a 2-tube FM receiver. I’ve got the schematic (courtesy John Bauman KB7NRN) and lack only the time to hack it together.
I’d never heard of morning glory clouds, probably because they mostly happen in a certain part of Queensland, Australia. The bigger question is why they get all the truly great Weird Stuff down there, and we have to settle for minor-league weirdness like Michael Jackson.

Notes on the Journey

Jun 1st, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

We rolled back into Colorado Springs at 4:30 PM this afternoon, right into the thick of a whompin’ thunderstorm that was rapidly flooding streets on the west side of town. When we left, there was snow on the daffodils. Now summer is in full roar. I wonder sometimes where spring went. No matter; we’re back in our own house, and tonight I can sleep in my own bed. In the meantime, a few notes on the trip that admittedly may be a bare half-notch above sock-drawer reports:

Trucks were not speeding on I-80. In fact, they were often going 5-8 MPH below the posted limit in states where speed limits apply identically to all vehicles. (This has not been our experience in past trips.) One wonders if trucking companies are strapped enough by the flagging economy to tell their drivers to back off on the lead foot a little and save on Diesel.
There were an appalling number of deer lying dead on the side of the road in central Iowa. In fact, I’m guessing that the nation’s deer held their village idiots’ convention just east of Des Moines this year. We saw twenty-five or thirty in a fifty-mile span of Interstate.
Near Lincoln, Nebraska we saw a convoy of six or seven black SUVs marked “National Severe Storms Laboratory” with a rack of the damndest geegaws on top of them, and a mobile radar unit bringing up the rear. I took some notes, and found out once I got home that this was part of the Vortex2 project, which has been getting much coverage on the Weather Channel. The vehicles in question were part of a “mobile mesonet,” which gathers data on winds out where tornadoes happen. Even the weirdest Texas Bugcatcher never had anything on those!
I must be getting really old. Faced with paying $9.95 for one night’s Internet access at the Sheraton Iowa City on Saturday night, I said “no thanks” and went to bed.
And you know what? Nothing of value was lost.
Lake McConaughy was higher than we’ve ever seen it. In fact, the lake is starting to put feelers back into the upper reaches of Martin Bay, where the less-than-half-full lake hasn’t been in over eight years. The dogs romped in shallow bath-warm water between low dunes, and we ran them along the beach until they dried out. The flies haven’t come out yet, and a wonderful time was had by all.

There’s much to be done this week, as there always is after five weeks away–and we’ve got the Colorado Springs dog show next weekend. Quite a few bichons are entered, enough so that the show will be what they call a “major.” Aero needs a second major win to get his championship, and this may be the one, if we can spiff him up sufficiently and get him to behave in the ring.

And I have a book to finish. But “finish” at this point really means putting the icing on. The cake itself is done.

Odd Lots

Jan 12th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

Don Lancaster sent me a link to the Draganfly, a mighty cool RC/GPS guided helicopter for
aerial photography or police/military applications. MIT has worked out an algorithm for swarming these things, which isn’t too
mind-blowing when you have three or four…but how about a few thousand?
On the other end of the scale for flying machines, Wired
reports the opening of the Jumbo Hostel, a pulled-from-service 747 jumbo jet that was gutted and fitted out with (small) rooms for Stockholm airport travelers who simply can’t get enough claustrophobia.
And if you’re looking for something that will not only fly but fly high, there’s the unfortunately named Skylon, to which I call your attention because it reminds me of those Bonestell drawings of the canonical 50’s three-stage orbital rocket, particularly the nose section. Alas, we won’t see it for ten years, which is about how far into the future such things always are. (The only thing farther out is commercial nuclear fusion.)
Here’s another very spooky atmospheric phenomenon described on Spaceweather. This is not a sundog but a subsun, which is much brighter and I’m guessing a lot more startling.
Fractal woodburning, anyone?
While American technical and scientific magazines seem to be cratering right and left, Steve Moulding writes to tell us that Elektor Electronics , a longstanding European publication catering to hobby electronics, will be launching a printed North American edition. It’s unclear how this will differ from the UK edition (which is the only one I’ve ever seen) but anything that helps promote hands-on electronics here is welcome. (There’s not much left on the home front but QEX and Nuts & Volts .)
And if the loss of paper magazines depresses you, consider that just a few days ago, the last paper player-piano music roll came off the assembly line in Buffalo. Interestingly, brand new player pianos of this sort were being sold well into the 1960s; the family down the street where I grew up had one when I was tweve or so.
A Japanese chap built himself an automated book scanner using Lego. (!!!) It’s a delightfully Goldbergish contraption that basically holds the scanner upside down and presses an opened book up against the inverted scanner glass, dropping the book between scans to turn the pages. (Watch the video!) Big Pub seems excessively worried about ebooks and feels that their refuge still lies in paper. Maybe not. (I’ll bet I could do up something like this in Meccano, of which I have much. Just another three hours in the day, fersure…)

Sliding Into Christmas

Dec 24th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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I’m not even sure I’ve mentioned that Carol and I are in Chicago for Christmas, though it’s a shorter trip than most and (as always) nothing has happened quite as quickly nor as well as we had hoped. This is worse weather than I’ve seen on a trip here in years: bitter cold followed by three days of more or less continuous precipitation. (As I was saying while shopping the last few days to anyone who would listen: “So much for global warming.” Let’s see if we can make it a meme, or at least a contrarian tagline.)

Yesterday was unusually bad here in Des Plaines. Our condo is only a few minutes from Randhurst Mall, the oldest enclosed mall in the Chicago area and at one point in the mid-60s the second-largest enclosed retail space in the country. So I decided to head up there, hit Borders on the outskirts, and then prowl the mall for some last minute gift ideas in the smaller shops. It took me half an hour to get there in our rented Camry, slipping and sliding down Rand Road at ten to fifteen miles an hour, dodging whackos in their CJs who didn’t seem to grok important things like the reduced coefficient of friction. And when I got there, egad: They had closed the mall three months ago. (One downside to being an out-of-towner is being out of the loop. Hey, you coulda told me about that! This is my hometown! That was my mall! Most of my underwear came from Randhurst when I was a teenager!) When the snow melts (if it ever does) they’re going to tear the mall down and build a “lifestyle center,” which is code these days for “more damfool condos.”

Well, they’re certainly going to tear it down. Whether the condos actually happen or not, we’ll see. In any event, some of the outlying big-box stores were open, and I picked up some odds and ends at Borders and Bed, Bath, & Beyond. Spotted a book I had heard about and meant to grab for some time: Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, (reviewed briefly here) which is a polemical history of the battle over whether fat or carbs make you overweight. You’ve all heard my opinions on that, and with some luck Taubes will have organized the research into a form that I can digest and cite to the carbohydrate deniers when they dive down my throat for eating bacon and eggs regularly and yet having the temerity to weigh less now than I have in 20 years.

I barely got home intact after threading the ice ballet back along Rand Road, and (having nabbed a reasonable night’s sleep) will shortly be headed off to Crystal Lake (a 35-mile slither out Highway 14) to pick up Carol, visit her mom, and then mid-afternoon head back down to Des Plaines for our Polish Vigilia supper at Gretchen’s. Vigilia is Polish for “vigil,” and it’s a Polish custom we observed on Christmas Eve when Gretchen and I were kids. In short, the family gathers for simple foods from the old country (ok, augmented by some odd Americanisms like Hawaiian salad) sweet red wine (the first Gretchen and I had ever had) and a blessing ritual I didn’t appreciate until I was much older: Breaking oplatki (a thin white wafer like Roman Catholic communion hosts) with one another and offering a blessing and a wish for the coming year.

Do read what I wrote back in 2001 about Vigilia and oplatki. It’s as true now as then, especially with our nephews grown men with ladyloves of their own, and Gretchen’s girls becoming interesting individuals in their own right-and at top volume. After a run of years when it seemed like every Christmas there were fewer hands across the table to offer oplatki, life is reasserting itself, and reminding us that renewal happens. Bidden or unbidden, recognized or unrecognized, God is with us, and (as slippery as things get at times) life is good.

Sunrise Surreality

Dec 12th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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When the sun comes up, the eastern horizon is sometimes clear while the rest of the sky is overcast. This can make for some interesting color effects, especially on the tall pines immediately across the street from us. The photo here was snapped perhaps five minutes after the sun broke an unusually clear horizon.