Bob Chill

Could you imagine being air air molecule south of the Aleutians? It's trip to the US includes a retro trip NW, arctic circle pass, and free fall due south thru Canada before pulling Gs around the base in the US. Seriously, wild upper level setup. Something big should happen somewhere

It's all subjective but common interest forums are the real power of social media imo. Niche hobbies or any unusual serious interest (we all have at least 1) are usually hard to find others to share thoughts and ideas with. There's not a person on my street who gives a F about tracking snowstorms. I know that for sure. Lol. For those reasons, and the way I personally use social media, it really is enriching, rewarding, and increases my knowledge base of things that are important to me. When I have free fun time I like to joke around and have fun. That's satisfying too. But I watch myself and keep myself in my lane. There are more rabbit holes in social media than actual rabbits on earth. And very few add any value to your life or help you in any way. The absolute strangest part of socal media to me is how many millions of people are rabidly interested in other people's problems. We all gotz problems man. Maybe instead of caring about other people's problems and spending hours a day on them it would be smarter and far more rewarding to work on your own instead. Eta: I'm OT'ing the F out of a wx disco thread. I've looked around at the next few weeks and there's enough cold moving around to get it done with some luck. That's all I got.

Sad? You're doing it exactly right. I no longer spend any time on time suck social media. Even here it's not wasting my time. Sports groups are just shouting matches and egos. I mean it's fun if you have time for it. Tik tok may be the greatest time waster ever invented. My 25 year old daughter disconnected permanently for that reason. I'll bet you spend a lot of time outdoors and working with your hands to drive satisfaction and reward in your life. Not 100% sure but I get that vibe. I'm exactly that. I don't even watch network TV at all anymore. I'm done with that dumb stuff. I have bigger plans and they all include the natural world. Not a 4x6 rectangle screen looking for people to make fun of.

Exactly. Giving up means you are no longer interested in playing. Not that it's actually over. Not a person or computer here can get sensible wx right beyond 5 days or so. If you know enough to be certain that it's over, then it's different. But nobody does. Prob not even the wx itself. I always keep a casual eye open during dead space because I know for certain I don't know much. Lol. Big boy climo near the cities generally ends by mid March. Once that window is clear, it gets much easier to give up because climo is closing the door whether I like it or not. Lol

Ultimately, there's only 1 way in niche forums.. And it is very bumpy and bruisy. It's super fun at first getting involved with storms in at any level. Then you slowly get battered and bruised by the sadistic nature of winter wx here and old timers like messing with new people. It's painful really but a rite of passage. You'll get made fun of along the way to add insult to injury. Only once you reach capitulation can you become a good poster top to bottom. When your expectations start lining up with the type of event regardless of what models say, you're halfway there. I'm not talking about schleprock downer expectations. Just reasonable ones that have a high probability of being in line with ground truth. Model watching alone will set you up for failure nearly every time. You have to apply what the models shows to the brutal honest reality of where you live. Until you capitulate there, it's hard to have fun. Very. And if you're never having fun here, everybody that can read a room knows/sees it and it's not a good look. The harder part of becoming a good poster in any corner of the internet is being able to read a room. I mean read it for real and do it quick and accurately. If you're not getting the results out of the experience you think you deserve, the answer lies within. Blame cannot be pointed outward. If it is, the solution is getting further away and not closer. I got beat up pretty good at eastern and rightfully so. You earn everything in forums like this. Million different ways to do it. It all starts with reading a room properly and adding value. Value comes in all shapes and forms. Technical wx analysis is only a piece of it. All posts can't be good. I've made 1000s of crappy ones. But I added a lot of value to more than offset that. Value comes easy when your primary goal for participation is to have fun no matter what the outcome. Think about that.

The original owner of my house had property width concrete and brick terraces built in the back yard with large beds. Would take 10 sticks of dynamite to remove then. I absolutely love them but they used to get away from me all the time with weeds and overgrowth. To the point that I started hated something I loved... I made a pact to never ever let it happen again about 5 years ago. Come to find out, I only needed to make one minor time adjustment.... mulch weekend... Like the entire country, I used to mulch during the big sale in April. Too late! And we all do it! Now, I knock out full spring cleaning and mulch mid March. Also lay down some Preen before spreading and I only have to weed maybe twice tops during prime grow season and it takes maybe a half hour. The difference is unbelievable. I feel so dumb for not doing it back in 02 when I bought the house. My neighbors on both side have talked to me about how I'm keeping it so tight so I told them it's as simple as mulch weekend date. They BOTH said that mulch is too expensive in March. LOL! I mean what? A buck a bag extra? Most of us get away with 65 bags or less. So 65 dollar savings to create multiple hours of extra weeding, sweat, and frustration? Is that really a grand bargain?

On another note, your posting style has changed last few years and I personally love it. I'm so over cheerleading parties. Around here, with our copious problems getting things to work, it's like having a pep rally at a school with no clubs or teams. Just rah rah. Lol You have been straight calling it like you see it. Good, bad, or ugly and condensed/to the point. I've def been part of the rah rah over the years but not the last 4-5 years. Brutal honesty and mindfulness of bias is a powerful way to to look at anything really. You saved me a lot of time this year and it is much appreciated.

Its exceptionally tuff to feel a lick of good about any event that approaches downhill from the west. Almost always a phantom as it's a fight instead of a dance to create lift/precip. I know you know this. General comment. I'd gladly take whatever but this is a really bad way in general to get anything done

One of the reasons we're so late to the party is relentless deer grazing in my neighborhood. Our neighborhood backs up to creek and park systems so there are deer highways everywhere and they aren't nearly as picky at eating as they're supposed to be. Lol. I used to think I needed a full 6' fence plus whatever else to keep them off the veggies but I had it wrong. You can live alongside deer no problem if you make it inconvenient and uncomfortable to access. You prob know a helluvs lot more about this than me tho. They ran thru our yard all year last year and never got into much. Some of which had no netting or anything like that.

Now that 2 of my kids are on their own and my other 2 are almost on their own, wife and I started OUR life in the yard last year. Lol. I always stay on top of my yard in general but we've never put the time and sweat into the mini-farm we've wanted. That changed last year. I didn't post pics because we were only half done with infrastructure. This year will be fully functiona by the end of May and it's going to make some people laugh I think. Short list of produce: tons of greens, tomatoes, hot and mild peppers, garlic, onions, cukes, squash, zukes, and potatoes last year. This year were adding pea and bean trellises and fruit towers along with general bed expansion. Lol. I'm so excited I've been working outside every day over 45 degrees.

I'm absolutely not in cancel mode. I just flipped the switch to show it to me inside of 5 days (heights, blocking, cold, storms, doesn't matter). Every encouraging look this year beyond d5 since Jan cold set in has generally deteriorated. The further out the good look, the bigger the deterioration. The sucky part is it hasn't been a collapse with the good looks. Just that we don't have a lot of wiggle room and heights have just refused to cooperate enough to get the job done. I'm a bit doubtful that personaliy trait this year is going anywhere. I like the AO height trend too. Let's see what it looks like when it counts. I'm not going anywhere but I'm not tracking phantoms and ghosts either

Def wasn't a personal dig. I can literally feel his transition this year though and I haven't been active much. We've all been there. It's a rough hobby for results. If you are an instant gratification or efficient results oriented person, you're in the wrong corner of the internet. Lol.

Just an observation this year... feels like MA winter wx chasing has turned you from Weather Will to Weather Won't. It's a brutal game. Ji's therapist ended up needing therapy after trying to fix him.

We had a lot of winters like the last few in the 70s and 80s. Especially the 80s. I don't disagree we are losing on the margins because of avg temps. That's obvious AF. Ive been used to compressed cold, boring winters, and early springs since birth. Lol Still not a shutout pattern or early spring. The struggle for snow has been real all year up and down the east coast except for the postage stamps and 50 mile wide stripes that hit south of us. At this point, I strongly doubt that changes but dumb luck can never be ignored around here. At least not completely

Gfs is incrementally ticking the confluence to our N/NE northward last 4 runs. Still a long ways away but run over run adjustments show the gfs backing away from really pressing down on us.

These types of storms like the gfs is showing don't really need a carving setup in advance. Those are when cold approaches from the west. When something is pressing on top, it can bully its way down as cold air is very dense and confluence keeps pushing and pushing. It's completely reasonable to entertain the possibility of winning next weekend as it's not a huge stretch. That said, I wish we lived further north.

Time kill periods suck and why I don't post much during them . Things look half decent in general after next weekend but that's a long ways off and nothing is getting locked in for a while if there is anything to lock. Emotional drift takes over and gut feelings become more important than actual data. So flavor of the day mood create new realities every morning until the overnight reset.

Ignore cmc temps. GEPS as well. Always way cold in mid/long range. Don't know why but if the cmc is the only model showing cold enough to snow, your shovel will gather dust.

It hasn't been dry in my yard. Over 5" of precip in Jan alone. And with avg highs pushing 50 shortly, cold is exceptionally important versus Jan. We go back and forth on this a lot and it's fun but let's be honest here, we need both and considering 80-90%+ of our winter precip is rain year after year, if it ain't cold we ain't snowing. Maybe in the mountains by you but not for 95% of our sub.

Exactly man. I stopped watching numerical indices. I'll check them now and again but the real story is always embedded in h5 plots and not nao/ao/pna/epo numbers. We can have a completely useless -2sd nao block. We just had it last year. Lol. Take it any way you can get it here and we're in the game for now.

Pretty interesting and completely unexpected for me. I had a hunch that the epo and or pna would visit at least one more time before season ends but I def did not see this setting up. Shades of FM 2014&15 but even those tpv intrusions didn't set up like this. Maybe one or 2. Can't remember. We did quite well timing stuff but we didn't have a prolonged stretch where the tpv parked like ens are showing now. Hope it's real man. Lol

Yes, our Atlantic "blocking" in an anti-atlantic blocking regime is the PV itself. I posted about this sometime last week if you remember. The tpv drops into the US often so that's not rare. But it usually drops south then pulls north. Without a -nao or -ao, the only thing that can "block" the tpv from a quick pull north is ridge extensions from either the EPO region or Scandinavia. Looks like both are showing up now. This forces the tpv track more laterally and ultimately squishes heights in the 50/50 general area. That's blocking regardless of what any numerical index says. In the panel below, the tpv itself is the block and it could end up being a good one. Lots of time to kill tho... Eta: blocking for our purposes is anything and everything that keeps a storm from tracking northward with ease. In the panel above, any storm that tracks north into that confluence is going to get stopped in its tracks. That's a legit upper level wall and if it's real, it will become quite distracting. Lol

Said it once... I'll say it again... I really really like what I'm seeing. It's a really convoluted way to get blocking but we'll take it any way we can get it. The types of storms that happen with compressed/confluent flow don't need a sub 1000mb slp for a big hit. It goes back to what I talked about when the fake bowl pattern was showing. Get the hose from the W-SW pointed at your yard on the cold side of the boundary and a foot+ is possible without a big synoptic event. We could use an "easy" one lol.

It's an honor and respect thing. Something I personally take seriously. There's joking around and then there's something else. That line is subjective but I know exactly where my line is and I don't take S from anyone acting in bad faith or "looking to F with people". This isn't Twitter or TikTok. It's a very niche common interest group. More like a family than broad social media like reddit/fb/Twitter etc. When I call someone out here, it's for the benefit of the board, not me flexing on a power trip. Location matters on the internet. I've personally ripped some redditors a new one in ways I would never ever do here. I agree that thick skin is 100% required to participate on any internet forum. But imho, rules are not universal. I don't care what any internet stranger thinks of me either but that doesn't mean I'll let anything fly whenever. This board isn't about me. Its about a group of common interest people looking to share and learn as a group. Post quality effects 1000s of people here. Many of which have never posted a word here. I always keep "them" in mind when being active here

Prob an age thing my friend. You grew up connected. Many here did not. For the older folks, words carry more meaning in general because we grew up in an era of face face face communication. It's a psychology thing. Not good or bad. It just is what it is and something to be mindful of