Tom12309

Ah, no. People don't go to hospitals seasonally. You really think people say hey it's fall, let's go to the ER? Please. What you need to look at are the ICU capacity numbers. Places like Texas, not good. You got a heart attack or something there, you're pretty much on your own. Beds taken up by Covid patients. Hey, but the economy.

Schenectady got whacked pretty good. I am really surprised the old maple in front of my house and the giant poplars in back stayed upright. Stuff was banging off the house for about ten minutes there. We were lucky, our neighbor had to move her elderly parents down to their friend's house because the big oak that was in front of their house is now on top of it. Trees snapped off all over the place, my wife came back in from her walk this morning and said she was zigzagging down different streets because trees and wires are still on the usual ones. There's one pretty big branch a few houses down that looks to be about six inches in diameter at the base that is all the way across the yard from the tree it came from. It was howling for about ten minutes there. I'm really surprised we have power this morning considering what the outage map looked like last night but there's still power out all over the place around me. I think it also took out cell towers for a while because last night I had about no service and this morning I'm back to four bars.

When I was a kid what I can remember is being on the tail end of the dry years in the 60s and watching the only rain around being the thunderstorms channeling down the Ottaquechee Valley two ridges north. It happens.

64 degrees on the bike ride this morning. Downright chilly.

Farmers. Ow.

I have to figure the ADK park rangers had an over/under bet going on how many frozen unprepared hikers they'd be rescuing today. Cotton kills....

That tornado warning east of Saratoga is right where they got a foot of snow, what like a week ago.

Looking at the observation thread makes me wonder how much of this region got pretty much all of their seasonal snowfall total in fall and spring with nothing to speak of during winter?

Depends what direction the camera is pointing, it might simply be pasted over. Snowing horizontally at the moment. Went out to fill the bird feeder and in three minutes I was completely coated on the upwind side.

Ah, that's better. Just flipped over to snow about five minutes ago in Schenectady. Was some freezing rain there for a little while, the pines are a little bit glazed.

So close... 30 degrees and raining in Schenectady

A few years ago my brother's kids were at the Nordic JOs in Truckee and we went out to yell encouragement. It was like 70 degrees out. I was standing talking to my nephew fretting about whether the snow would survive. He laughed. He said see how we step off this deck down about six inches on to the snow? This deck is about 12 feet off the ground. He said the biggest problem was figuring out what wax to use at those temperatures plus how not to fall over from heat exhaustion while racing...

I had to drive to Cleveland for work a couple of Januarys ago and in Pa. was pretty sure I was going to die. No visibility with trucks blowing snow if you passed you might suddenly have taillights 15 feet in front of you if you stayed behind all of a sudden you had headlights 15 feet behind you. I think in places they got 18 inches that night. The one big laugh was the rest area I passed where they couldn't fit one single more vehicle in there, it was solid cars and trucks packed in tight. It was going to take hours to unwind that.

And on April 25 when I'm down in Arkville riding the Cross Mountain gravel ride it'll be snowing, graupel and rain like last April 22!

So Karen and I schedule a weekend in Lake Placid... hoping for a little wintry appeal. Karen's thinking fondly of strolling in 'snow globe flakes'. Ha ha ha. 50 degrees and rain... I picked a bad month to quit drinking. Not to mention it'll be shorts and jersey weather for outdoor riding back here in Schenectady. Eesh. If I leave town we get a foot and a half. If I go where it usually is winter, we get early May. On the bright side, my niece and her husband in Underhill started tapping their maples. They do have like 40,000 taps or something ridiculous so it isn't as nuts as it sounds.

Wouldn't mind having an idea what the mean is these days because if this weather returns to the mean in the long term I might be needing my galoshes.

I've been checking out the Ontario Feeder Watch cam from Cornell Labs partly to see cold temperatures and snow on the ground. The birds are OK, too. Only thing is today the people that host it are taunting me.... I can hear a snowblower going in the background. Bastidges!

Can't complain over this way... snowed all day yesterday but didn't accumulate on bare pavement until last night, I cleared maybe 4 inches off the driveway this morning and that's not counting what added up on the existing snow from the all day light to occasionally moderate stuff. Not bad for a storm where the good stuff was way off to the east.

It is logarithmic from one class to the next, linear within the class.

When I was a kid we went up to the Gaspe Peninsula and being on the south shore of the St Lawrence watching that wall of dark come down the river is in the top half dozen or so coolest things I have ever seen. Imagine seven people in a Pontiac station wagon driven by my 18 year old brother with seven heads stuck out the windows alternately all looking at the sky trying to find a hole in the clouds and our unsynchronized watches until we as one yelled "STOP NOW", screeched to a halt and jumped out of the car maybe five minutes in front of it. Also the silence as all the birds stopped singing.