CoolHandMike

So I got one of the snow blowers working. I had to kludge together a linkage for engaging the auger, which then immediately broke. The only thing I could find last minute was a lawnmower throttle cable, but the actual lever is made of the cheapest plastic known to man and almost immediately shattered under load. Oh well. Ordered some correct replacement parts, and with any luck they'll be here on Tuesday... We shall see. But I was really happy to get it running after sitting neglected for who know how long. It's a 1996 Craftsman, FWIW.

Just now, ChasingFlakes said:

"Maybe it’s time to tune up that old snowblower that’s been sitting in your garage" - First line of this NJ.com article.

Plus if we bust, its likely to be sleet and heavy snow so you'll probably still want the blower.  

Truth. Planning on doing it today while smoking a pork shoulder.

Welp, one of my neighbors fired up his snowblower yesterday... I think I might have to see if I can get one of mine working since I won't have any free time between this evening and Wednesday. As much as I'd like to be superstitious and not jinx anything, it's looking like a pretty credible event is going to happen at this point.

Not sure what I'm going to do about work though. I have a 1.5 hour commute to southern NJ all this week, for which I leave at 4AM. I know they're not gonna be happy if I call out Wednesday morning, but I don't want to get there and then be stuck down there on Wednesday. My wife certainly would not appreciate it.

24 minutes ago, Birds~69 said:

Put new fuel in, change the spark plug (or see if you're getting spark) and spray starting fluid directly into the carburetor/ throttle housing. It's inexpensive and many times does the trick. Definitely a nice weekend (temp-wise) to be outside... 

Oh, I'm fairly comfortable with small engine repair. I just haven't had the time yet, what with all the other new house stuff that's been needing doing. I told my wife that if it does end up dumping on us, that's when I'll try to get one of them working.

I tell you guys what. My wife and I bought our first house this past October, and it came with not one, but TWO non-working snowblowers, one from the 80's and one of a much newer vintage. (Dunno why. The previous owners were a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.) I've been itching to get either or both of these bad boys up and running, but with the colder weather fast approaching, my wife recently turned to me and said "don't you dare". She's superstitious like that.

So there they sit, in my shed, in all their un-working glory. It would be awesome if our first major storm dumps enough to warrant the operation of such a machine, and I would not complain one bit having to shovel it all out by hand. The first time, at least. So there you go. I'm doing my part, everyone.

On 8/29/2020 at 12:34 AM, Uncle Bobby said:

For a national synopsis I like

http://www.spc.noaa.gov/compmap/

or

https://www.spc.noaa.gov/exper/mesoanalysis/new/viewsector.php?sector=19&parm=pmsl

Visible Satellite for PA:

http://mp1.met.psu.edu/~fxg1/PSUGOES_NE/vrecent.html

For other flavors go here:

http://mp1.met.psu.edu/~fxg1/PSUGOES_US/index.html

You're in PA and didn't know what an awesome met site PSU has?

You should have GRL3 for local radar.

Here we go again. :/ http://content.wdtinc.com/imap/imaplite/ is 404 again, probably for good this time as the host domain has a Redhat test page up. Sorry I didn't see this until a year later! I've known about the PSU E-wall for quite some time, but I miss the interactive nature of the old WU map, in which you could zoom in and pan around just like Google maps. I've been using https://www.windy.com/-Weather-radar-radar?radar,39.950,-75.784,8 lately, and while it has a lot of functionality, the radar imagery is not very well defined and you can't overlay weather warning boxes on top, for instance.

Anyway, thanks for replying from "the before times". Cheers~

So when's this rain supposed to start? 1-2" that wunderground is calling for seems a little far-fetched imho...

Caught those crazy roiling clouds on camera right before the gust front went through. That was wild.

I've been outside working in this heat for two weeks, and today it finally broke 90°F. However the strangest thing is that I think I've become acclimatized to it! Sure, you still sweat a lot, but I don't feel nearly as wiped out right now as I did after last Wednesday. Then again, my job isn't particularly strenuous and my company looks out for us by providing plenty of breaks, water, and shade to escape to. Sure feel sorry for the guys working on our apartment complex's roofs this week though... Looking forward to a 3-day weekend kicked off by our coastal!

That was a fascinating storm to watch develop last evening! Got down to 68°F by ~9pm and has stayed there pretty much all night. Hoping today won't be as oppressive--working outside in that heat is not fun for long imho.

23 hours ago, Hurricane Agnes said:

Wish the program had a function to save an animation of it (too much work to try to string the snapshots together to manually generate one although do-able).  The feature dropping down from the NE was moving pretty quickly (with an associated cell moving SE out of NY and into the open Atlantic) compared to the sea breeze front that was slowly drifting towards the NW and inland.

COD Meteorology has the capability to download animated gifs, but it runs in flash, which is apparently being discontinued at the end of this year in Chrome. I'm hoping they update before this happens.

45 minutes ago, Hurricane Agnes said:

Just missed 90 here today (got up to 80) and currently 83. Have been looking at some cool sea breeze movement on radar (pretty cool).  There appears to be 2 fronts - one the more "traditional" moving due west across South Jersey but at the same time, there is another (maybe trough or backdoor) coming down from the NE from the North Jersey vicinity. They were definitely 2 distinct waves and sortof  smashed into each other in Central Jersey.

First shot from ~8:00 pm and 2nd from ~8:30 pm.

That's so cool. I love catching stuff like this on radar.

Humidity and temps creeping back up here. Was 82 and 60% an hour ago, now up to 83 and 63%... Whole heck of a lot of activity to our SW, I wonder if it'll make it here by this evening.

Just had a cell "erupt" over us, for lack of a better term. A handful of pea-sized hail, to boot. So much water, it's like somebody turned on a faucet!

Got absolutely dumped on about an hour ago. Also, I think our storms might have taken out several cell towers because my signal was all over the place when I went out earlier...

Lost power from round two last night until about 1:30am. Was all set to finally have to drag out the genny this morning but glad I didn't have to. PECO's original estimated restoration time for us was 11pm tonight! Those guys are awesome.

Downpoured for a few minutes and only heard distant rumbles. Probably didn't need to put the car in and take down all the hanging plants, but you never know. Wonder what the rest of the afternoon is going to look like--it's still pretty juicy out there.

saw a small bit of purple in the returns near Pottstown, and saw there was an 83mph gust in Reading, PA.

Power was out for almost 12 hours, making it the longest outage since the summer of 2016. I was all set to break out the genny this morning since we have a fridge and freezer full of apocalypse food.

Is it unusual to be consistently hitting the low 40's / upper 30's overnight this late into April? I was wondering if the vastly reduced amount of chemtrails er, airliner emissions might be having any effect on diurnal heating and dissipation.

Not liking the look of that line just about to cross the Susky. Large rotation indicated just about to cross the MD line, headed NE...

I think if you look really close, you can spot the trail of hail left on the ground after this cell blew through WV in the infrared imagery. Neat!

Me: checks models for the first time in days

GFS: 18" of snow on the 12th

Me: *blows raspberry noise* Ok back to not checking the models again until November

Long flash and rumble just a few minutes ago. Wow.

Anybody got any bets on thunder and lightning tonight? I'm seeing some, but not much, out west. HRRR and NAM show a strong but skinny line moving through around midnight. Thoughts?