Category: Weather

With the beginning of Daylight Savings Time, Powder stays open later, until 8pm. I prefer going later in the day, as it’s quieter. Fewer people, more birds and deer.

Tonight, yesterday’s storm was very evident. I was somewhat surprised to see how many trees were torn up. In some places, half the trees were down. Since Powder is a Conservation area, all the park rangers do is remove the trees from the path and let them lie where they fall.

Already amidst the broken tree trunks, squirrels were running about grabbing what they could for nests and birds were flying in and around the branches looking for food. We forget when we witness the devastation to our homes and businesses that storms are actually healthy for the forests and the plains.

The sun was starting to set and it was getting cooler; I headed back to the car. When there, down the road a short ways, an entire herd of white tail deer were feeding along the edge of the woods. The setting sun painted the bushes around me in shades of raspberry and peach, as I leaned against the car to watch the deer. Two male cardinals chased each other around the bushes and over in the dirt by the road, a robin was hopping about looking for food. Other birds, too small to identity flitted about, enjoying the last of the sun’s warmth.

While I watched, the next song in my “Bittersweet” playlist started playing: the beautiful sounds of Israel Kamakawiwoòle singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Listening to the song, feeling the sun, watching the birds and the deer, as trees still standing, edged with purple and green, were surrounded by trees just ended–the thought came to me that the story of my life could have come to a close at that moment, and it would have been a good ending.

The weather has been extraordinarily erratic: hot, humid, and stormy followed by icy, dry calm, then back to hot, then cold, then back, until I’m exhausted. Seriously, if I wanted to live life alternating between stormy heat and cold calm, I’d date a guy with commitment issues.

We spent most of the weekend under a tornado watch, and the last of the dangerous storms finally look to be leaving the area. Behind them is the dry line, and the end of what could be one of the worse outbreaks of tornadoes to hit this area in a long time. Estimates put the number of tornadoes at over 100; with so many towns damaged, I’ve lost count. Three people were killed. (Update: Nine people were killed in Missouri.)

St. Louis wasn’t negatively impacted, other than flooding from the rain. It’s the Arch: keeps the storms away. (And all this time, you probably thought it was just a monument.) We have been lucky this weekend in that Saturday’s storms went to the south, and Sunday’s went north, splitting to either side of us. Not so lucky for other folks, though. Festus, Kansas City, Columbia, St. Mary, St. Gen, and so on — all have been hit.

Oddly enough, in the midst of the storms, we’ve had beautiful weather. Saturday morning was wonderful–sunny, warm, and though it had rained all night, not terribly humid. I visited the Botanical Gardens to see the first of the spring flowers and the last of the orchid show. Took photos, of course.

Yesterday, as I hovered over the radar at Wunderground, watching every red blob form, I used Lightroom to create a show of the some of the photos from the weekend; with spring flowers, ducks, cardinals, and park photos in the Flash show at Tinfoil Project. I also added a fade functionality to my JavaScript library I’m currently updating, and you can see the early effort to emulate the Flash fade effect (bandwidth intensive, requires JavaScript).

(Note that it most likely will only work with Safari, Firefox, and Opera at this time; I haven’t tested it on my Windows machine yet. This JavaScript library work is part of my new development efforts in PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript that will be housed at Tinfoil. When they’re finished, they’ll all be open sourced. )

I’ve also made a tweak to the Burningbird site design–just in the background. I like the shadow better. Really I can be so productive when a storm blows through. Oh, I don’t necessarily get work done–but I can be productive.

Work also continues in my very limited spare time to create the application that finds Flickr images in my pages, downloads the images, and then updates my content to reflect the new image file location (and removes the Flickr link). I have the part on downloading the files; just need to add the part to update the posts. Once finished, I’ll be deleting my Flickr account. I’ve already deleted my gmail account. Last to go will be Bloglines.

Have no worries on my use of such technology: I have not jumped on to the Web 2.0 wagon; I don’t plan on setting myself up in competition with Flickr. After all, I’m not seventeen, anymore.

I watched the Weather Channel most of yesterday afternoon and evening, and they kept referring to the storm as one of the ‘worst’ to hit the area, and discussed how ‘bad’ they were for the communities. Yet this morning I awoke to a perfect cool, spring day. From Friday to now, the daffodils have bloomed, and so has the magnolias, and especially the bird tree outside my window. All but the tallest trees have hints of green about their edges, and as for the critters, in the park on Saturday you could hear cardinals, mockingbirds, and red-winged blackbirds forming a surprisingly harmonious sound; my roommate saw a fox on his way to work not far from where we live; a bunny is hopping about on the lawn–whether it’s my old friend or a descendant, I can’t tell.

Storms in the fall strip the last of the dead leaves from the tree, to carpet the forest floors and provide home and protection for squirrels and other creatures. They knock the nuts down, to provide food. In the winter they bring snow, and if they bring in ice, they also take it away again. In the spring, they bring warmth and rain, giving new life. Storms are not ‘bad’; they are a price for life, like growing old.

Ah me, enough with my philosophy as I have much work to do since I spent the weekend hovering over the weather and walking in the park during the lulls. Some of my favorite photos from the walk I’ve attached to the end of the post. More on the storms at Technorati. Make sure to turn off the authority setting–there’s no one with authority in Missouri.

My favorite comment on the storms comes from LiveJournal:

so what if a tornado DOES hit and we all die tomorrow? At least I updated my livejournal.

All of which is my way of saying the witch didn’t come for us this weekend. Zoë was relieved; she didn’t want to play a dog in a basket.

The first of the major Spring storms is hitting us, and will continue for the next few hours. It’s not even Spring, but we reached into the 70’s today, and should drop 40 or so degrees within the next hour or two. Can’t have two such strong systems meet without something bumping.

We have a tornado watch, but I’m more concerned about the hail. I called my roommate at work to see how the weather is where he’s at and he says they’re being hit hard with hail. He’s driving Golden Girl, so hopefully my car won’t suffer the consequences. Much.

At least we’re not getting the snow other places have received.

When I walked in Powder a couple of days ago, I chatted with a couple I run into from time to time and they told me about the birds they’ve seen this week. The pileated woodpecker is out and about, as was a flock of bluebirds. When I was there, I saw some form of small bird I can’t identify, as well as titmouse in addition to the usual cardinals, robins, jays, and so on. No, Spring is not waiting for the calendar this year.

From Weather Underground today:

January 2006 will go into the record books as one of the warmest
januarys ever recorded in parts of the Midwest. In Quincy
Illinois… this past January was the warmest January on
record… while in Columbia and St. Louis this January ranks in the
top 5 warmest januarys.

Specifically…

St. Louis…
third warmest January on record
average temperature… 42.3 degrees… 12.7 degrees above normal.

Yet lest we feel smug:

It should be noted that historically… a warm January does not
necessarily mean a warm February. And… it does not mean the threat
of snow is minimized. For instance… after the 7th warmest January
in St. Louis… (1914)… near 29 inches of snow fell during February
and March.

We got our first tornado warnings this morning, before a storm came through that blasted light and sound against my windows. At least we’ve had rain, unlike the folks in Oklahoma and Texas, who are battling some fairly serious plains fires. Too bad these states didn’t get the rain the folks in Northern California received.

Speaking of fires, I appreciate Jeneane passing the Pew Survey torch on to me, but I have little interest in doing more than give a quick cursory glance at the findings. There are others who have written in detail on the report. I would say that the researchers had a hypothesis going in, and then found the data to support it. If they had come out saying “Women prefer purple dots on yellow, while men prefer yellow dots on purple”, they would have found the data to support this, too.

Me, I’m more interested in watching the weather.