Results tagged “weather” from Proud Dad / Happy Husband

And it just wouldn’t stop coming down. In fact, it’s still misting outside, even 3 days after things started. It wasn’t ever too hard of a rain — an amateur weather station just a few miles from my house has only recorded about 5 inches of rain so far. But it definitely accumulated.

See for yourself, in this picture of the drainage pond at the bottom of the hill near my house. We don’t border on it, so we’re nowhere close to getting flooded. We’d need a Noah flood to get to our house from here. But those trees on the left, in the standing water, are probably almost 3 feet above normal water stage in the pond. And you can see the water trending toward some of those fences on the left.

Sorry for the fuzziness. The weakness of a cameraphone picture, I guess.

Hope everyone else stayed dry, if you were on the East Coast. Our fine governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia stayed dry — by having Democratic Party fundraisers in Memphis and Little Rock after declaring an emergency in the state. (See, both parties’ leaders can be tone deaf.) Have a great weekend.

I learned 2 things today:

1. We must be extremely lucky or rich here in Hanover County. We got a nice double rainbow after a storm front blew through. We didn’t get much rain where we were, as the heavy stuff passed just to our west. We did hear the thunder, though.
2. Apparently, it was Santa Claus that parted the Red Sea, not Moses. Daniel looked at the picture in an illustrated (kids) book of Bible stories, and the picture of a older man with a scraggly, white beard was identified as Santa Claus. When I told Daniel his name was Moses, Daniel corrected me, “No. Santa Claus.”

Of course, when Will was this age, he saw Charlie Daniels performing during the Super Bowl pre-game show and said, “Santa Claus.” And he really did look like Santa Claus.

That’s the only way I can describe today’s precipitation. You’ve heard of a sun-shower. Well, we got hit by a sun-flurry. The picture to the right really cannot do it justice. (I don’t have the camera or the know-how to take the shot properly, but clicking on it will allow you to see the flakes.) But I was walking around the house, with the sun shining bright outside, and looked out a window to see large snowflakes falling. And they were sticking to the ground!

We still haven’t had a good snowfall yet.

The weekend has been a good one. Will had another good outing of swim lessons this afternoon. He’s really trying more and more stuff. It’s really cool that I think he may finally be willing to try more of it and get a little better at it each time. Could be an interesting summer of swimming for Will — which would be a good thing to have him swim more independently. That will allow Kellie and I to focus on Sean and Daniel, who will probably really want to take to the water this summer.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get any video of Sean and Daniel dancing to the music on the Weather Channel forecast. The boys have taken to another skill instead — vacuuming up their mess under the table after a meal. Well, at least they do it sometimes. We also give you a ball throwing exhibition, with a touch of twin-on-twin “violence.”

Hope you have a good week ahead.

It’s with a bit of trepidation as I watch Hurricane Ike decide to take aim at Texas and possible even head for Houston. I still have a bit of a soft spot for Houston, where I attend college for 4 years at Rice University. I still have relatives, friends and classmates in the area (and elsewhere in Texas, like Austin and the Hill Country), so I pray that they are able to stay safe during this storm, wherever it decides to make landfall and proceed inland.

This is true for any storm that comes along.

I’m also a bit of a weather nut (just like Will and one of my cousins, who is a meteorologist), so when there is a storm, I particularly like to look at the prediction models for the path and try to see what I can deduce from what those models are saying. (Just the inner geek, I guess.) Two sites that give a lot of information are StormPulse, which has an awesome interactive map and lets you check back on some of the previous storms of the season, and Weather Underground, which has a plethora of maps and history on each storm. I especially enjoy the Computer Model Verification, which shows the daily predicted path for the different models versus the actual path.

Again, I don’t want to make light of the death and destruction that unfortunately comes with these storms. But as we attempt to understand the storms better, hopefully this allows us to better protect ourselves in the future. We’re praying that everyone who has been affected so far in the Caribbean and those who eventually find themselves in the path of Ike (or any other storm) will be safe and sound.

…Still. We’re here in the Outer Banks for a few days, and we’ve watched as Cristobal turned into a tropical storm, but never really spin up into anything greater. When we watched the weather forecast last night, it indicated we’d start to get some rain last night, then get drenched during the day today before it would blow off the coast Sunday night.

Well, there has been no rain on our part of the world yet. Bone dry. (I will admit other areas have been getting rain — just not the northern part of the Outer Banks, where we are at.) That’s allowed us to do some other stuff today, but we also held off on some things (like my morning run) because we expected some storms at some point. It’s not that we want a storm — we don’t — but they were so far off on this one.

We’ll give more info on our times at the beach later and share some images. But we’ll leave the story at now with us getting soaked at the beach on Saturday, both when we arrived and when we decided to leave. I guess it was just a small cell in each case, where you could see clear skies elsewhere. It just decided to rain on us hard.