powderfreak

Still there has to be something more to it. I'm waitlisted on a guy who's company is over an hour away. Most of the trade jobs are located/live in much more rural areas that feed into the tourist spots, but I'd still like to see a further breakdown on that judging by how hard it is for anyone between here and Montpelier/Burlington to get any work done.

Yeah that makes no sense to me. I have two friends who have bailed on the service industry, one is going to trade school then an apprenticeship to be an electrician after he saw how much demand there was for that job throughout this whole thing, and another is becoming a welder. They know they'll have to suffer for a few years of low pay but hope for a more stable payoff later. Like getting an electrician or plumber to your house right now is maybe even months if it's not an emergency call. Also the strong real estate market state-wide (from down near Mass border straight to Jay Peak) right now that has people gobbling up places just days within being put on the market, many of those folks are all making upgrades or changes to their new properties and are providing a never ending line of work for construction/electricians/plumbers/etc. -30% just makes no sense in that line at all.

I agreed. Bolded is a huge plus. I honestly am surprised to see manufacturing and construction as the big changes in VT...maybe they haven’t rebounded yet? I’m not kidding when I say a day doesn’t go by on my short drive to the mountain that there’s an ad for manufacturing jobs on the radio and if I wasn’t attached to what I do those jobs sound pretty damn good for someone unemployed. And wait times for any residential or commercial construction is significant right now. Service industry makes sense as essentially they need 50% of the entry level staff to handle 50% of the guests... or even less as many places are trying to do it with only their year round staff. But construction and manufacturing are surprising, not sure what’s going on there.

Talk of that got real quiet after that last 90F at BDL.

Yeah weird, there are ads on the radio all day long for manufacturing jobs... especially 2nd and 3rd shifts with extra shift pay, $500 sign on bonus and Monday-Friday with weekends off. Ha, the ads always sound appealing but guess no one is filling them. Construction is also surprising given the boom seen with stimulus payments and commercial additions and all that. We’ve been waiting for 4 months to have $10,000 of work done on our place. The owner gave me the impression that industry has been flat out with work, but guess that doesn’t show employment numbers. Be interesting to see how foreclosures go in a few years. It’s not a rosy picture, but it could just be that the hit is coming next year as Will said.

Yeah that must be it because despair is not something you hear about up here despite those numbers Ginxy commented on. Maybe down the road it'll really hit hard. Some 22-year-old who is a bellhop that's out of work right now is mostly just mountain biking waiting for winter seasonal jobs to ramp back up, lol. But that's life in these towns, it just so much different than normal places. It would be interesting to see an age breakdown of those out of work. And also in the seasonal service sector many are used to skirting the edges anyway but when I think of despair, I think of folks who were making $75k but now find themselves without a job, with a house and family that can't support themselves. Now that's scary. Not the 20-somethings in ski towns who seem to just survive regardless and can exist on $300/week. I remember those days for sure.

It did get better for sure in summer... There are certainly a lack of the lowest level service jobs and that's probably it for sure in the percentages. There's a distinct lack of $12/hr jobs right now that come with full hotels (say having 40 housekeepers instead of 12 right now) and stuff like that... most that are back at work were supervisory or higher levels but also quite a few high school kids working as well, so who knows.

Ha yup, I dishwashed at a local Italian place through high school on like Thur/Fri/Sat nights... that operation had the two owners as cooks, one other line-cook, me as a dishwasher, and like a handful of servers. The owners easily worked 80 hours a week and always seemed to barely be making ends meet every month. And it was like a "fancier" Italian spot in town.

Ha people have been mailing in ballots for decades, I used to do it in college for NY state. But I agree, go to the polls.

Yeah for sure. That entire industry is incredibly tough. No on is getting rich off a restaurant it seems. When I go home to visit my parents in Albany, they are always talking about a new restaurant to try out that is located in the same buildings as the ones that failed before, it's almost comical at times. Like oh that building was an Italian restaurant for 4 years then went under, then someone thought they could make a run of it as a Thai restaurant and then it lasted 2.5 years, and now there's a BBQ style joint in there, etc.

45F to start Torchtember.

Yeah restaurants are like humans with pre-existing conditions... doesn’t take much to push them over the edge. I’m always surprised at how many restaurants that seem “popular” but yet still struggle mightily and even close in normal times. Some areas it seems the restaurants turn over every 5 years if they are independently owned and not an Applebee’s or Olive Garden type chain.

Midnight hike start? Awesome dude. Props.

Every great summer thread ends with a few pages of winter memories. I love it.

Even that event though was expected to be big nearby in the mountains...retrograding low and spinning moisture back southwestward. Of course the crazy terrain blocking put the band of snow out in the Champlain Valley but that event was still within a larger synoptic background with high POPs for snowfall...just not those amounts. That event is basically a mesoscale version of a surprise deform band that goes to town and turns a 4-8” event into 30”, which I guess is exactly what you said, lol. Norluns are probably another sort of event that can surprise...but they are usually signaled on models, you just never know when to believe it. But didn’t something crazy happen in Jan 2011 in SE CT with that type of mesoscale surprise?

Yeah really hard to get that sort of bust now. Especially with models running 4 times a day. I guess maybe on the western side of a nor’easter you may think you are getting dim sun and end up in some mid-level magic band with hastily issued Winter Storm Warnings for another block of counties to the west. But the true “Didn’t know it was coming and then bam big storm!” is probably gone thanks to modern modeling.

I read medical distress as like a cardiac event.

I love that plan. My first season passes were to Gore/Whiteface with the ORDA pass back in High School... I washed dishes for two years in high school at Alteri's Restaurant, coming home smelling like red sauce and pasta to pay for it. Those years were simple. Gore's a very underrated spot. Whiteface was scary steep at the top as a kid, but Gore's got some pitches too. I broke my wrist as a 10-year-old on the Rumor Headwall, ended up in the trees on the right side. Learned lesson was sometimes you can't stop when you fall, and slide a long way. Ski Patrol crushed it, that's a steep sled ride down to a waiting snowmobile ride down the old Tannery Trail. I was just another kid from the Albany area to eat it hard off the Straightbrook Quad.

Those photos...ha

That's nuts. Even the trail runners decked out with water-bottle vests have had masks on up here even on the work roads where you have plenty of space. Overkill to me, but they probably think I'm the inconsiderate one if I don't mask up when 10+ feet away in quick passing outdoors. I do think it's a nice "team humanity" gesture if you are on a close tight trail with thick high elevation vegetation allowing for a close pass, even outside. Not necessary in my opinion still, but a nice nod to humanity. Most hikers seem to be extremely respectful at the least.

That's like a masked ACATT member swapped out the sensor in the middle of the night.

Ha! What the hell happened there?! Yeah their numbers make no sense. ALB's monthly temp on the F6 is 3.4 degrees COLDER than the monthly temperature at ORH, ha. No way a place at 200ft in the Hudson Valley averaged 3.4 degrees colder than 1,000ft in the Worcester Hills.

The most surprising station departure in the month of August though is ALB.... they are -1.0 for the month of August. For ALB to be -1.0 for the entire month, compared to the torch in SNE? ALB only hit 87F for a high temp in August, which seems low given the torchy conditions in valleys along I-90 and south. Another comparison: ALB... -1.0 max temp 87F POU... +3.6 and exceeded 90F on 10 days. Does that pass the sniff test? Or was there some crazy gradient in the Hudson Valley? I can't figure out if the F6 data is just straight wrong or from another month.

Guess this illustrates it pretty well... the last two weeks have been two different worlds between NNE and SNE. Pretty evenly delineated right there. Aside from BTV's background warm anomalies, NNE was below normal past couple weeks on average for sure. Meanwhile SE Mass was completely torched, as Bob has experienced. Not only is climo starting to get more stark between NNE and SNE during the transition seasons, having normalized departures that much different over that gradient leads to some very real sensible weather differences.