Always in Zugzwang

That's awesome, @MillvilleWx!! Best of luck to you with the interview, and I hope you land the position! You'd definitely be a great asset there. I go to the NCWCP building now and then (still know a few people there even though I've been at HQ for many years now!), and would be glad to stop in and say hello if you get there! Maybe you can lead one of the WPC map discussions sometime!

And this was perhaps my favorite..looks like a flame! It looked cool in silvery black-and-white as well!

Happy Easter, happy Spring! @mappy, some TULIPS for you!! I took enough tulip photos today that I'm practically Dutch! LOL! But there were so many good ones people had planted. Here are some of the better ones I got: Close-up of the inside of a tulip: Purple tulips: Tulip among some white daffodils:

From the past week...a foggy night (last Saturday, on my birthday no less...note the spider web on the branch near the one light), and a cherry blossom back-lit by the late day sun.

@mappy, that is stunning!!! Love the light and contrast!!

Start a thread, PSU! Start a thread! Go on...DO IT!!

To @vastateofmind...wishing you Happy Birthday, from a fellow March 25th-er!! Not sure about you, but strangely, I've found my birthday to be either kind or cruel some years. March in general seems to be that way to me. Something fun or good that day, or something unpleasant or downright awful. Kind of a strange contrast! On the lousy end, I've had chicken pox over my birthday, I have been mugged on that day (still a very vivid memory), and I saw Purdue (in 1988) get knocked out of the tournament in a year they were widely thought to go to the Final 4! But...I've had some very fun times with friends and family that I also remember, people who helped make it a good day for me, took me out, etc. I guess because of all that, I have always felt that everyone should be entitled to enjoy something special or fun on their birthday. Doesn't have to be anything big, but just to have a great day! So...have a great birthday and a fun time for yourself! I actually wrote a sort of free-form poem in 2020 about when I got mugged, 30 years before. I had been meaning to write about the incident for some time but never got around to it until then, thinking that "30 years" would be a good time to do it. I completed it appropriately (and purposely) right on March 25, 2020 after working on it for a couple of months. Though I don't think of it so much anymore, I was amazed how much detail I still can remember about it. It was actually a bit cathartic to put it all into words, a bit of closure in a way.

Hahaha, yes it was! Definitely Oscar-worthy! Whereas this winter was more like the quality of an Ed Wood film!

Yup, pretty much my sentiments, @stormtracker. Screw it, awful winter, nothing worthwhile. But it's done, so whatever. We do have the best subforum in that we can laugh and joke about our failures and just make light of it all. We also have some very good posters too, of course. I'm the same as you, will be in the "summer hibernation" for the most part but will check in here and there for fun and to see what's going on. You have a good spring/summer, too! And yeah, we'll get back at 'em next winter. ETA: Your Youtube "Hitler's Rage" video will be a classic forever! I've saved the link! Now that's how gallows humor is done right! Posting here again for everyone:

We'll refer to those as "FU" storms.

Coals to Newcastle, as it were...

Yup...March 5, 2015. We had rain overnight and into the early morning on the 5th (and had icing a day before that). Then there was a lull as temperatures dropped with a cold front, and the main low then tracked along the front. Snowed from about 9AM through 4PM, I got 6.5" snow from that and it was quite cold through the afternoon that day. Following day on the 6th it also remained below freezing.

Such mood swings over frozen water that falls from the sky!

Oh darn...I thought that was the fall foliage outlook (lots of reds and oranges and some yellow)!

I think that's a follow-up tropical system!!

I say he should just take his journal and toss it into the fires of Mount Doom!

Can't say I've really ever seen a primary in Lake Superior and a redevelopment off OBX before, but whatever. Doesn't matter in the end, the thermals are a wreck.

But unfortunately the last 3 straight have dug that damned shortwave well into the southwest to varying degrees. And the Euro has done the same.

Haha! I figured it was from December sometime but honestly couldn't recall if you or Ralph said it first (it just became an incorporated description of a deep vortex ever since!).

And 6 of the bottom 10 are in the 2000s (5 of those after 2010)!!

Interesting how 2009-10 is "only" ranked #5 and "only" an A-. But upon further thought, the first top 4 were pre-DCA measurements and I guess it was colder overall and more days with >1". And as expected 2009-10 has the highest "big storm" bonus, but in thinking of it, that's pretty much all we got that winter, big storms. A little surprising, 2013-14 is lower than I would have thought at #31 and a mere C+. Seems that so far the only thing that kept this winter slightly better than the all-time worst of 1997-98 is that DCA got just a bit more snow (0.4" vs. 0.1").

LOL!!! But shouldn't @Ralph Wiggum get the royalties?

Egg on avocado toast, maybe?? (ETA: I actually got one of those Squishable avocado pillow things for my daughter years ago, she thought it was overly cute! And it is. She named it "Guaqui" LOL!!!)

All this avocado and egg hate today, I swear!!

Right. Those means at this range, can be highly influenced by one huge solution or a few really bad ones (i.e., zero), so it washes out. The ops GFS essentially was an extreme "ensemble" member itself, in a way.