Coming in 3....2....1....

Of course we all need to enlighten our climate-change-denying neighbors and relatives.

National Geographic is trustworthy

and 23 mph wind).

It was 10 below a couple of days ago. Wind chill much lower. Extremely unpleasant.

Today? 50 degrees and rain. Unpleasant, but for different reasons, not the least of which is road conditions.

This is not normal. And these fucking climate change deniers laughing it off is offensive.

By 5 PM, it will be -4 degrees. We have a week of this, at least, coming up. The wind is blowing hard, and when I went to the supermarket to stock up for a four-day deep freeze, the car thermometer said +3 degrees. Wind chill is around -15 already.

But, this is Minnesota, so the inch of snow that fell yesterday has already been cleared from the arterial streets and everyone's out and carrying on as usual. It's way worse further north in our state, but those folks are used to it, too.

In fact, this has been a very warm January so far, so it's about time for a frozen few days.

In other parts of the country, though, this sort of cold is less common. A lot of people are going to have a hard time coping.

Per the TV this morning, high of -1 and low of -7, unless -7 was the "felt like" high temp.

It's dropping southward. You ND folks always feel it first, I think.

That was the network TV, the CBS Morning News. Eighteen minutes in, they give the temps all over the US of A.

So, I saw that same weather map.

gives the weather. After that, it's solid commercials until about 8:30. I hit the remote and bailed this a.m. when I had had enough of the commercials.

Guess I'd better stop calling what's coming our way as a "cold front". It's supposed to "plunge" into the upper 40's and lower 50's here in central Florida. We may have to resort to wearing sweaters.

At least that's what my aunts believed.

They never get fired for making wrong forecast! Is is usually % chance of whatever.
So if 60% chance of rain is the forecast and it does not rain, they are covered by the 40%.
In my work, if I made a mistake in calculating stresses in a component, and it failed, 100%
blame was aimed at me.

Maybe those guys go to the same school............

We work to 99.7% (basically 3 sigma). Of course I'm required to maintain a factor of safety of 1.5 as well, so it not only can't break, but it can't break when they overload it by 50%. (But it can BEND!)

One of them asked me for a tall oak bookcase design with glass doors framed in oak. My process was to just build the thing, and then do the needed working drawings afterwards for the project. I worked from a mental design. That let me work quickly. So, I created a 6' x 4' x 14" oak frame and oak plywood panel bookcase design, with nice adjustable oak shelves and an attractive arts and crafts style design. After assembling it, staining and finishing it, all with the project lying on its back, I set it up to take photos of it for the magazine's cover. There was a catch, though, I discovered. With all of the shelves out of the book case, if you opened both doors, it tipped forward. I caught it in time to prevent damage. I had not calculated the weight of the doors, nor the center of gravity with the doors open. Glass is heavier than you'd think and the bookcase was not heavy enough without the shelves in it, so its center of gravity fell in front of the case when both doors were open.

Too late. So, I set the thing up, put the shelves in and added contents for the photos, but still had a dilemma. What to do? That's why I didn't do drawings until a project was finished. Once the shelves were in the bookcase, the doors' weight didn't move the center of gravity outside of the case. After some experimentation, I found that two shelves installed in the lower quarter of the case were enough to overcome the doors' weight and keep the CG within the boundaries of the case. As a safety factor, I also drew the cabinet 1" deeper than the original build and altered all dimensions to suit, which moved the CG back another inch with both doors open and the case empty. When i did the drawings, I showed the two lowest shelves installed as fixed shelves, making the other four adjustable, as all of them were in the original build. I also included instructions for attaching the entire bookcase to the wall for safety's sake. Problem solved.

I kept the bookcase for my own use, and always kept a couple of extra shelves stacked in the bottom of the case, to avoid ever having the thing tip over on me. I never made a similar mistake again, though. A lot of the magazine's subscriber's built the project and wrote that they loved how it turned out. It was a big hit. It's in one corner of my living room now, almost 30 years later.

like last spring/summer was perfection up until the last week of August, constant storms produced a summer's worth of rain in just a few days than it was cooler than normal.

Not nearly cold enough during the winter to kill off nuisance bugs; stink bugs, box elders, etc.

Late summer/early autumn was a deluge of near constant rain.

We are supposed to see some days next week with a high of 20, and 0 at night. Looks like I'll be carrying a lot of warm water to critters.

today it started out 60 degrees and went down
more to come I guess
the jet steam is collapsing and the cold is coming down
last year this happened in Europe and Russia now it is our turn