Juliancolton

That offshore system has been showing some hybrid characteristics over the last 30 hours or so, at times developing a ring of convection around a relatively clear eye-feature. Forecast phase diagrams foresee the warm core becoming a little deeper and more symmetrical as the storm retreats southward toward the relatively warm waters of the Gulf Stream. I doubt the NHC will acknowledge the potential for subtropical transition, but it's fun to watch as we wait for more unambiguous tropical threats.

A rather intense lightning show visible to my NNE from the line of storms in Columbia/Rensselaer counties. Dry here. Edit: little cell cycled up and moved overhead, nice early spring thunderstorm.

Absolutely. It's already starting... some guys I know are having a party tonight in the back room of a local bar. There are literal speakeasies taking hold. It's a total joke to many and something to be defied for the sake of defiance.

I remember going on road trips as a kid and after stuck in unexpected traffic for a while, my dad would always say "There'd better be dead bodies on the road after all this!" That's not far from the actual sentiment rapidly gaining traction among the good citizens of this country.

A mutation isn't always bad though, right? As I understand, a virus can mutate into something less deadly just as easily as into something horrific. But maybe I just made that up.

Ticks scare me more than all the bears, bobcats, and coyotes combined that I see out in the woods every year. Freakin' abominations.

Sometimes I turn to Mark Twain's writings for comfort when I get the heebie-geebies about dying. One good quote... "Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born - a hundred million years - and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together." Maybe it doesn't give you the warm fuzzies but he has a point.

Still all sleet here. I suspect it'll flip when those heavier echoes move overhead

0.9" from round 1 here.

This is my take as well. Retailers throw out an unfathomable amount of food 99% of the year to make sure supply is there at crunch time. Most people did their big wholesale hauls two weeks ago and are getting back into a normal-ish grocery buying routine, so with pantries full and money increasingly tight for just about everyone, you probably won't see folks singlehandedly clearing out entire aisles from this point on. The food supply chain is resilient. If certain items start running low, reasonable facsimiles will quickly take their places. And while I'm obviously a big home gardening dude, I'm under no delusions that I'd be able to sustain even myself for very long just on home veggies. Potatoes are one's best bet considering yield per acre and nutritional value - you could survive for 6-8 weeks just on potatoes before mineral deficiencies caught up with you. That said, they aren't fool-proof to grow and can be rather unreliable from season to season. Plus, if we ever get to the point of all-out famine in this country, there'd be a lot of other problems that few of us would be equipped to deal with.

Cool wx stuff could be ok pretty soon, but I never plant anything tender out until May 1st with strong consensus for a warm pattern at that juncture. Not wise to bet on no freezes in April, even in the torchiest winters. Even if I were confident enough to plant annuals a month early, I'd still rather wait until the traditional mid-May with how many pests and diseases we have to deal with these days. Impatiens and tomatoes are ravaged by blight before August even with a normal planting schedule.

Bastard.

It seems like our window for climbing into the 70s is closing. Maybe a brief shot of mugginess just before the fropa.

There was nothing left OTG here by around 8. The cocorahs observer down the road logged 0.7", so I guess I'll use that for my records.

Where are you seeing this?