24-Hour Turnaround

Yesterday's funk has passed...

1. I've got a bunch a houses to look at tomorrow.
2. Nothing to be done about this, but at least I'll get back to The HBG in a few weeks.
3. The pageantry is over, now the real battle begins.
4. "It's merely a flesh wound!"
5. Times of clouds and sun, high 71 degrees.

Plus the draft of the report is almost done, I've got good new music to listen to, and the office closes early today. I am, to quote Dan Wilson, feeling strangely fine.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Rough Day

1. That house we thought we were going to buy? Not so much. There are good reasons why, but it still means we're back to square one. I'm looking at more houses in the same neighborhood on Saturday.

2. I'm here; my wife and children are here, 682 miles away; given #1, it's likely to stay that way for a while longer.

3. Turns out Sarah Palin can give a great speech (even filled, as it was, with distortions and half- and un-truths) and energize the base, making McCain's gamble pay off. It would have been so much easier over the next two months without an articulate, intelligent candidate in that slot.

4. Five losses in a row and an injured ace (or two). They're still a lock to make the playoffs and odds-on favorites to win the division, but after a season that was remarkably free of bumps in the road, this is a big one.

5. Two straight days without seeing the sun, with no end in sight.

It's An Inch of Snow, People

When I moved to central PA, I had it in my mind that the weather here was similar to the weather where I grew up (outside of Chicago). I expected snow through most of the winter and cold (teens or lower) temperatures semi-regularly. I also figured that people here would know what to do when it snows. As Rick Blaine said, "I was misinformed."

The good folks of central PA are freaking out a little bit about the 1-2" of snow we've gotten so far today. A ton of elementary schools closed today and now the afternoon/evening closings are coming in and every college and church in the Harrisburg area appears to be shutting its doors. All the Penn State campuses, HACC -- the public library closed, for chrissakes! For an inch of snow! This is ridiculous. I expect the shelves at the grocery store to be devoid of milk and bread when I stop by there after work, too.

God help us when a real storm shows up -- three or four inches might bring the total breakdown of society.

Weather Geekery

We start a week-long vacation tomorrow (going to the shore! woo!) and in advance of the trip I've been obsessively checking the weather report. After all, when you're planning to spend an entire week at the beach, you want it to be warm and sunny. Especially when ou have a three-year-old, because if it's raining we're going to doing an awful lot of coloring, DVD watching, and off-the-walls-bouncing.

So I've been hitting Accuweather.com daily and checking out the forecast for Lewes, DE. It's been fascinating (to me, anyway) to see how the forecast high has changed for next week as the days go by. For example, on Tuesday the forecast high for Friday the 17th was 77 degrees. On Wednesday, that jumped to 94, but by Thursday that had been reduced to 78, and today they're saying 79. Obviously, the closer you get to the actual day in question the more accurate the forecast is going to be, and expecting a forecast to be accurate 10 days out is a fool's errand.

Weather Forecast | Weather Maps | Weather Radar

Still, they offer the forecast, so I look at it. And, me being me, I also enter all the data on a little chart and will keep track of the actual high when we're there so I can see just how accurate (or inaccurate) the forecast was. I bet you all can't wait to see that, but you're going to have to, since I won't be posting anything over the next week. See you at the beach!

That's Nice If You're With A Lady, But It Ain't No Good If You're In The Jungle

"The weather out there today is hot and shitty with continued hot and shitty in the afternoon. Tomorrow a chance of continued crappy with a pissy weather front coming down from the north. Basically, it's hotter than a snake's ass in a wagon rut."

Yes, the weather has addled my brain to the point where the only thing I can do is quote from 'Good Morning Vietnam.' Why did I ever leave the Bay Area?

Oh, right.

 

Crazy From The Heat

OK, maybe he was crazy before the heat, but I'm sure it isn't helping. AccuWeather meterorologist Jim Kosek give the weather forecast for the Harrisburg area, and this is not your father's weather report:

Weather Forecast | Weather Maps | Weather Radar

"We get CRANKED!!! on Thursday! You want a round of severe weather, you STICK AROUND FOR THAT!"

Apparently I'm not the first to notice this guy's particular style. One commenter in the Eastern US Weather Forums referred to him as "the little weather nerd with a truck driver's vocabulary." That sounds about right.

[UPDATE 6/27]: As noted in the comments, this forecast automatically changes every day, so you don't necessarily get to see exactly what I was talking about. But today's forecast includes a spit-take, something you don't see very often from a meteorologist, so it definitely worth checking out regularly.

Geocaching, The Susquehanna, And The 1996 Flood

I was surfing around for some geocaching links today -- I've never done it, but I'm thinking I might give it a try this summer. After all, it involves walking around outside, and gadgets. What more could you ask for? For those who are unfamiliar with it, geocaching is an activity where you use a GPS receiver to try to track down a "treasure" which has been hidden somewhere. It's like orienteering crossed with a scavenger hunt and it looks like a fun way to spend a weekend afternoon.

Anyway, when I went looking for geocaches in the Harrisburg area, I found one cache that appears to be hidden in the Sunken Garden, which I walk to almost every day either with Zo or the dogs. It includes a bunch of photos of Riverfront Park during the 1996 flood, which saw the Susquehanna River rise 15 feet in 14 hours and eventually tear the Walnut Street Bridge off its moorings and smash it into the Market Street Bridge. This one is my favorite:



The river has been rising and falling over the last few weeks, but of course it hasn't gotten close to that height. The first warm spell took it up over the walkway along the river, and when it receded, it left giant chunks of dirty ice along the walkway. It went back down, and then after the next rain, it was back up over the walkway, leaving a giant bathtub ring of mud along the side of the river. It was back down for a few days but as of this weekend it was up again, due to Thursday's rains. Here's the graph of river height from the USGS website:



(That's measured at the Market Street Bridge, by the way. And kudos to Mapquest for being the only mapping site that allows you to easily map by latitude and longitude.)

Have any of you geocached before? Is it fun? I figure I could take Zo along on the hunt for some of the easier treasures, especially ones like this which are walking distance from my house.

Harrisburg: The City That Doesn't Work

So we got home at the end of the day yesterday, after trekking up from Middletown and picking up Zo at the JCC, ready to enjoy the snow. I love snow, and now that I have a kid it's great to have an excuse to play in it. I was looking forward to this snow because, unlike the Valentine's Day storm (known around our house as The D-Jo Doesn't Get A Cupcake For Her Birthday Storm), this looked to be nice, fluffy wet snow that would be good for snowballs, snow angels, and the like. It was shaping up to be much better than the icy mess that we dealt with last month.

We're driving down Front Street (where, shockingly, people were still behaving as if it were a three-lane street) when I wondered out loud if the city would be plowing our street. We live on a narrow one-way street in Midtown, one that doesn't see much traffic at all, and as a result we're pretty far down the plowing priority list. Like at the bottom. Like we're still waiting for a plow after last month's storm.

After we finished having a laugh about the possibility of the street getting plowed (it's good to laugh), we turned onto the street, where we greeted by this:



Nice, huh? Apparently someone (I'm guessing it was a city worker, but who knows) started to plow the street, got about 1/3 of the way down the block, and then...who knows? Maybe his shift ended, or he got distracted, or maybe that was the exact moment that the storm bankrupted the city. For whatever reason, the plower just stopped, leaving a big wall of snow in the middle of the (only) lane of the road:



Now honestly, it could have been a lot worse. All I had to do was hop out of the car, grab my shovel, and spend about 10 minutes clearing the snow. But really, I should have had to spend zero minutes doing that -- that was 10 minutes I couldn't spend playing in the snow with my daughter.

I've been living here for just under two years, and I guess it's time for me to stop thinking that this city has some baseline of competence, like every other city I've lived in. This is, apparently, a city where the streets don't get plowed after major storms, where the members of the City Council get into fistfights with each other, and where the mayor can pretty-much single-handedly prevent a smoking ban from going into effect. Now that I know these sorts of things happen, I guess I should work on changing my attitude, and thinking of local governance more like a spectator sport than like the underpinning of society it's supposed to be.

Ah, well. The afternoon wasn't a loss, by any stretch -- we still got some prime snow-playing time in:

I Think I Saw Tobey Maguire On The Train. Or Was It Elijah Wood?

Well the snowstorm we were expecting showed up in a slightly different format. We got about three inches of snow yesterday, and then overnight it turned to sleet and we woke up to a good old-fashioned ice storm, complete with beautiful ice-encrusted trees and impassable roads. Good times!

We stupidly forgot to call the JCC to see if daycare was open (it wasn't) so after driving up there and getting stuck in the middle of the road we turned around and came home. Well, we stopped at the Broad Street Market first to try to pick up a cupcake for D-Jo's birthday but the cupcake lady was nowhere to be found. So it was back home to try to chip through the ice, which I managed to do just in time for the snow to start again.



They're still saying up to 12" of snow today, so I think the decision to not try to drive into the shop was a good one.

Snow Coming

The first big snowstorm of the season is bearing down on Hbg. One to two inches are predicted for later today, with the possibility of six to twelve inches tomorrow.


It could be worse, we could be in Buffalo.

Apparently Blogger will not allow me to insert the forecast HTML from Accuweather, so click here to see the official advisory. The latest forecast actually calls for warmer temperatures, which means less snow and more sleety goodness.

So now here's the multi-million dollar question: do we get our streets plowed, thereby bankrupting the city, or do we get unplowed streets and a solvent Harrisburg? I grew up in the Chicagoland area, and I remember how a snowstorm led to the end of Michael Bilandic's career.

Your move, Mayor Reed.

The Sound Of The River

We've been having a cold snap over the last week, with only one day above freezing and several nights down in the teens. As a result, the Susquehanna River has lots of ice on it. The first time I drove down Front Street on Saturday morning, it looked like it was frozen over, which is far from being the case, although of course it has happened in the past.

I've had a chance to look at it every evening for the last week since we changed our evening routine a few weeks ago -- D-Jo is now on bathe-the-kid duty, giving me time to take the dogs for a walk. It's a responsibility we'd been slacking on, and D-Jo decided we needed to get back into the habit of a daily walk. If you have dogs, you should walk them at least once a day, and if you don't (and one of them is a 4-year-old, 90-pound Doberman), you are asking for trouble. Both dogs seem to be in much better spirits now that they're getting out regularly, which means they aren't quite as needy and annoying during the evening -- they're content to just sit on the couch with us.

Typically I walk the two blocks to the river and then walk for a block or so before cutting back over. Sometimes we end up walking down what I think is the prettiest block in Midtown, the 1600 block of Penn. Other times, though, especially when its as cold as its been, instead of walking on the bike path I go down the steps and right next to the river. When it's this cold, there's no one there, and I can let them off their leashes, take off Jake's muzzle, and let them run around like proper dogs should.

When I did that this evening, I heard a sound I hadn't heard before. It took me a while to figure out what it was, but once the wind died down I realized that the gentle muffled scraping sound I was hearing was the sound of the big sheets of ice rubbing together as the current carried them down the river. It was an incongruous sound to hear in the middle of a city, a little bit eerie, and very cool.