Well the ice did make it to here Sat. There was not the wide spread serious problems like in GA and the western half of the state. The NOAA warning Friday night were something on the order of “Please remain indoors, traveling is considered extremely dangerous and taking your life in your hands” I am not 100% sure of the wording but it was ominous.

In other news I have my first trip to the oral surgeon scheduled for tomorrow. I have way to many teeth in my mouth according to my dentist. I have 34 currently in my mouth, while most normal humans only get 32. So the plan is to remove the 2 extra and maybe my wisdom teeth(I have atleast one cavity back in there)

There is also other stuff going on this week, To borrow a line from Jimmy Buffett, I am about to complete my 33rd trip around the Sun this Thursday.
Festivites are underway. I will probably reflect more on this later in the week.

Hmm well everybody can watch the little icon down below and see how much if any of snow/sleet/ice and rain we get this weekend. Right now it looks pretty ugly(enough ice to cause trees/power lines to drop) Well we are stocked up on the food stuffs, so just hunker down and see what happens. Guess I am glad we decided to do the party next weekend.

I have added a new item to the sidebar of my blog. Yep its the local weather information including doppler radar. If you click it will bring you to wral’s website(local tv station) I have also created a new section for weather rants.(acutally I have several, City of Heroes, Jeep, General) one of these days I will actually make it so you can view by category.
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Well Saturday was supposed to bring a fair amount of ice, so we cancelled our plans for Saturday. The idea of getting trapped in downtown Durham not our idea of a good time. Well the weather was only spotty ice. So we spent the day geeking. Sunday was not only cold but windy. Our weather station recorded 35+ mile wind gusts, and average winds over 15 mph.

Up north it snowed and snowed and snowed, infact you only had to go to Virgina to see it. Glad we missed all of it. Weather for the rest of the week is supposed to be season with no real moisture.

Well “storm 2″ turn out to be nothing. It barely rained let a lone snow or ice. So far this week the weather team has been 0 for 2. Its really hard to prepare when you have no idea whats actually going to happen. The ice of Wednesday has acutally been picked up nationally so finger pointing and blame is now being passed out. Well they are still saying that winter weather of some sort is inbound for Saturda/Sunday, but I am not holding my breath. We have plans to go to the Nevermore Film festival, but if we do get the ice and snow then that will be scrubbed.

Now I will say this for the forcasters in our area. I wouldn’t want anyone else to predict tropical storms. These guys can usually tell like with in 10 miles here a storm is going to hit 12/24 hours out. Just don’t make them do winter predictions.

Well yesterday was amazing. RDU reported less than an 1″ of snow. And it shutdown the entire area. All major traffic routes were parking lots until about 9pm. Children were trapped in schools overnight. Black ice currently covers many of the roads. Athought things are clearer now most schools are closed.(mostly in an effort to get the kids home finally) Problem is that another storm is heading in tonight this one is predected to drop another inch and then we get to hang on and see what winter weather we get for this weekend. We loaded the jeep with all the gas it could carry, and bought food for a couple of days, so we are ready for the next siege. Updates as they happen.

Once again I feel my blood begin to boil at the latest winter weather to hit NC.

First the weather guys were not even close.(and I mean this across the board from weather channel, noaa, and local stations) All were predicting snow, but only a light dusting at the most. Well we are now at a good 1/2 inch with another hour plus of snow fall predicted.

Second. there are as I type this 125 closings/delays.(there were only 80 when I started typing this message.) I have seen many cars and such slide in these “extremely dangerous” conditions infront of my office.

Fortunately I have learned to prepare for the worse around here, at even the hint of possible bad weather. I wore boots, brought my heavy winter shell and took the Jeep to work. The reason for the jeep is not the 4×4 capacity but the steel front and rear bumpers. I know that 4×4 does not help with ice and such (my first live driving lesson was in freezing rain in CT) but the bumbers should provide protection against the yahoos who don’t grasp the concept.

sigh….
And they are guess at more winter weather this weekend….

Maybe I should just stay in Hawaii.

For our faithfull readers, wondering how the lastest jeep upgrades went. I shall fill you in on the details.

Roll bar handles. They are a little big for the bars, but look pretty good and not too cheesey.

The Mirrors. The new mirrors rock. They mounted to the bolts holes where the windshield hinge is. They allow good visbilty driver and passenger side, even with the doors on and the windows closed.

The Dome light switch. This is the thing I am most disapointed in. All it was was a small toggle switch and wire with a 10amp fuse holder, and 2 metal ends that I stuck into the fuse box. I had trouble getting the wires to stay in the box. I think if they had designed it more like the end of a standard fuse it would have worked better. The mounting of the switch was pretty good though, using an exsisting screw used to hold the bottom of the dash secure.

Unfortunately are upcomming trip will put a big damper on any new parts for a while.

For those who don’t know in our house, we split most of the tasks into two catagories. Its either Desgin or Engineering. I handle most of the engineering stuff, while Melissa does the design, Now don’t get all sexists on us, we will occasionally swap roles. But often engineering tasks like hooking up our new weather station, require climbing on roof which is not something Melissa does, and sadly if I were to choose a color palate it would be dark and cave like. Anyways Engineering’s creative contribution was to the website itself. We now have a little favorite icon in the url.(see above) I thought it would be a some code changes but, nope it drop the right type of file in the right spot. Melissa even approves of the design.