After a couple days of steady rain, last night we got some heavy stuff, some good downpours with heavy winds. But by noon today, it had started to clear.
It looks like we’ll get a day or two of sun before the next waves of heavy rain move in early and then again late next week.
The good news is that I’ll probably get some decent weather this weekend when I need to make the time to take the Christmas lights down.
For today, it’s chilly and cold, but it would have been a glorious day to be a hawk and just soar on the thermals.
I’m a sucker for taking pictures of statues, and god knows there were enough of them on this day. Lots of Native Americans, wilderness dudes, cowboys, and so on. But this one of the spouting seal and child was the one that tickled my fancy the most.
Denver, there for Worldcon, fifteen years ago in August, somewhere near the capitol building and US Mint.
One of the key effects of climate change that we’ll see is a change in the historical norms.
More “storms of the century” – every couple of years.
The 2022 calendar year and the 2022-23 winter season to this point both will go down as the snowiest ever in the Buffalo area, dating back to when weather was first recorded for the region in the 1870s. https://t.co/BFgicLTSha
Dangerous cold temperatures & winds will continue to affect and spread eastward through the day from the Rockies, the south, Midwest, Great Lakes & advancing across the eastern seaboard. This graphic is the forecast apparent temperature at 1 PM EST today. https://t.co/VyWINDk3xPpic.twitter.com/trOqw6c6Lt
Here in California and the Southwest we’re in record drought conditions. There are water use restrictions. The Colorado River is so low that it’s almost to the point where a lot of major metropolitan areas (LA, Las Vegas, Phoenix, etc) have to stop pulling water from it, which will REALLY mess things up, not to mention that hydroelectric generation will have to stop at Hoover Dam and other dams along the river.
And yet, seemingly out of nowhere, we’re now getting massive rain storms, one after another. We’re already having street flooding in Northern California and San Francisco.
The Mokelumne River is rising, and Sacramento County urges nearby residents to get out before they are stranded. In Wilton, some roads are impassable. https://t.co/tJFlEDYT1q
Now the rain has started here for tonight, and it’s going to continue on and off for days and days.
Credit: Wunderground
Buckle up, folks! It’s not going to get any better, and we don’t even have any idea how bad it’s going to get in the short term or the long term. Our grandchildren might well look back on these days as a virtual paradise compared to what they get to deal with every day.
And tomorrow most of us go back to work to start catching up on everything that happened while we were celebrating.
I really wasn’t expecting to be able to see anything for the rest of the week as far as sunsets go, given the “atmospheric river” that lining up to dump many inches of (much needed, I know, I KNOW!) rain on California for the last four or five days and the next ten days or more. But lo and behold, we were between rain bands this evening and the sky was clear right at sunset.
Even it’s not far from the Sun, but it’s really stinking bright so you can see it there just below center, to the left of that tree.
Above it was easy by this time to see Jupiter (also stinking bright) straight overhead, and Mars off to the east, reasonably bright and red, over in the neighborhood of Orion. In between Jupiter and Venus you can see Saturn if you know which one it is, and the Moon is also up off in the east, so that’s five of the six naked eye stars visible, plus the Moon. (I’m counting the telephone pole, wires, and neighbor’s houses as a legitimate sighting of the Third Rock from the Sun.)
I hope your New Year’s Eve was safe and enjoyable and your New Year’s Day restful and fun. Tomorrow we get all of the parades and the remaining football bowl games, so I hope you get to enjoy them without having to work. You’ll know how the weather’s deteriorating in SoCal by the weather conditions for the Rose Parade (should be dry-ish) and the Rose Bowl (may or may not get through the whole game without rain).
Meanwhile, 2023 fired a warning shot across my bow in the form of a whole slew of two-factor authentication codes being sent to my phone for my Google and Gmail accounts. I’ve changed the passwords and that seems to have stopped it for now, and I’ve verified that there aren’t any unauthorized logins, but I may end up spending a good chunk of tomorrow updating and changing all of my passwords on all critical accounts. Fun! Just what I was looking forward to.
Let’s not start off this way, 2023. I will not be willing to cut you much slack, just to be clear.
Good bye, 2022. I can’t say that I’ll miss you much.
You were better than 2020 or 2021, what with Biden and House investigations and vaccines vs Trump and January 6th and COVID, but let’s be honest, the bar wasn’t set that high.
Personally, we did finally get to take a handful of trips, but you left a lot of room for improvement for 2023 to tackle.
It’s pouring in Los Angeles tonight, there’s street flooding in San Francisco, and pretty much the whole state is getting one of those 10-14 day “atmospheric river” deluges – the ones we’ve been praying for since the drought was getting pretty desperate, so 2023 is starting out okay from that viewpoint.
We’ll see what 2023 brings. I’m trying not to be hopeful, but the permanent optimism (Pollyanna syndrome) that was beaten into my DNA by the nuns at Christ the King Elementary still is lurking out there, hoping for good things for my beloved Chiefs, Kings, and Angels. There’s the eternal hope that THIS will be the year I get back into the left seat at the pointy end of a plane. There are already a couple of trips planned (barring the emergence of yet another COVID strain and the deaths of hundreds of thousands) and if I could spend some quality time with friends, well, that would be spectacular.
So, with the 2022 Christmas cards all sent (*) out last week, I’ll get on with with accounting and tax returns and financial statements for 2022 but let’s start living in 2023. As a good friend on Twitter was saying tonight, “We must love one another or die.” I like Plan A so much better. It sounds much more fun.
Let’s do that. Happy New Year, y’all.
(*) – If you’ve gotten cards in the past but have moved and don’t get a card this year, let me know what your new address is… If you haven’t gotten cards in the past but want to, I’ve still got a handful left, so send me your address. (pwillett@ix.netcom.com)
New Year’s Eve Eve and it’s raining again. A good thing for our possible drought relief, a bad thing for looking at the planets all lined up, for looking for last night’s SpaceX launch out of Vandenberg, or for anyone planning on camping out in Pasadena for Monday’s Rose Parade.
But it did present a very pretty picture of Castle Peak shrouded in the mists a mile or so to our west.
What I really hate is the fact that I’ve started to have hazy, half-awake, falling asleep, drifting off, stress dreams about Excel. The spreadsheet program. The one that I’m using hour after hour after hour at work and at home, most of the time seven days a week, 365 days a year.
The usual sort of stress dreams, minor nightmares, only instead of not being able to find my car or get my camera to work or find the hotel front desk in order to check out, I can’t get something to work correctly in Excel.
More importantly, I have a serious question. Something that’s bugged me about the program for years and years.
In order to shield certain information from view, you have the option to “Hide” rows, columns, worksheets, and so on. When you want to reverse that and show those “hidden” areas, the command is “Unhide.”
“Unhide?” WTF? Was that even a word before Excel de facto made it one?
Why not use “Reveal?” Isn’t that already a real word that means the opposite of “Hide?”
I’ve seen a Junco sitting out on the Christmas decorations once or twice, but it’s skittish. I finally got a picture from the living room through a break in the drapes.
It was cold and wet, but I’m sure that sitting on the fake, illuminated candy cane filled it’s little heart with joy.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 