Dry Slot

More and more I'm hearing talk of teleconnections and pattern change. The stratosphere over the pole is warming. La Niña may be ending. The Arctic Oscillation is going negative. The North Atlantic Oscillation is poised for a drop. The Madden-Julian Oscillation has been wavering over the Indian Ocean and western Pacific.

What does it all mean weather-wise? Well, here in the Southeast, not much at all so far. Jack Frost seems to be cranking the chill up a notch, but verily 't is the season. If not now, when?

The part about the AO means that a pool of cold air will settle over Hudson Bay. That will affect the northern tier from the Great Lakes into New England. The storm track will shift southward a bit. A frontier between arctic cold and southern warmth will set up across the mid-Atlantic states. There will be recurring chances for snow and wind along that line.

The Dry Slot is located just south of that zone. On average this area should be on the warmer side, especially while La Niña persists.

The NAO is the wild card. If that goes negative we can get an omega blocking pattern, which would allow cold air to penetrate far southward. Storms looping around the jet stream would have time to deepen and develop into nor'easters. That hasn't happened so far this winter.

Happy TGIF day, Rob.

Yep, I chose that word deliberately, not knowing what sort of crowd it would draw. :o)

Interesting opportunity for etymological pursuit there. I guess "spanking new" may refer to the whack a new baby gets to jumpstart his/her respiration.

I've heard "brand new" all my life without knowing its derivation. It could be a commercial brand, or it could be the kind used to mark cattle. Hmmm, dictionary.com says it means "fresh from the fire", like a firebrand. That doesn't exactly answer the question for me. I guess you had to be there, back in the 16th century.

The local weather service says our high temperature was 65°. I went out wearing a sweatshirt this afternoon, and it was a bit too much. A t-shirt would have served better. The sweatshirt is a good bet again now. With the sun long gone temps are dropping through the mid forties.

Looks like another warm day tomorrow, then cooler with rain chances Sunday night. No big freeze in the forecast over the next few days. The pattern change I mentioned shows up from ten days to two weeks out.

Good morning, campers!



Ylee - Dunno. I was asleep. [Yawn!]

There are waves of scattered showers blowing this way from the Gulf of Mexico, but so far they're mostly breaking on the mountains west of here. There's no precipitation listed on the local weather history.

Here's what the prognosticators in Raleigh are saying:

.SYNOPSIS...
A BACK DOOR COLD FRONT WILL STALL OUT SOUTH OF THE AREA TODAY. WEAK WAVES OF LOW PRESSURE WILL DEVELOP ALONG THE FRONT TONIGHT INTO MONDAY...RESULTING IN COOL AND DAMP CONDITIONS. DRY HIGH PRESSURE WILL RETURN ON TUESDAY...FOLLOWED BY A POTENT STORM SYSTEM EXPECTED TO TRACK ACROSS THE CAROLINAS ON WEDNESDAY.

Yeah, I know. They always shout like that.

RTLSNK - Call it a premonition.

Then there's the whole Mayan doom thing. I'm not too worried about that, though. If the Mayan calendar dudes were still around to explain their system, I think they would tell us how to flip the page.

That's a great picture, by the way. Here we stand ready to fly, and our animal nature keeps holding us back.

Damp and dreary weather to start the week. There's a big storm a-building over south Texas. A swath of grunge extends away to the northeast like the tail of a comet. I'm under that.

By the way, if you watched the YouTube video in the previous comment, you'll probably enjoy BORIS THE SPIDER as well. Consider this a favorable review.

Hey, BriarCraft. Welcome back.

I won't disagree about your choice of terminology. 'Interesting' in the context of the curse is surely tantamount to 'aggravating'. I don't remember the exact circumstances under which I originally used 'aggravated', but I've used it before, more than once, for years like this one. I searched through my old log files. The earliest year I could find it cited was Y2K.

Anyway, I certainly don't want you to burn your brain out. I read the other two posts to which you allude, and it looks as if you had a busy afternoon. You could recycle the post from ycd's blog over on sp's and still be on topic.

Rob

It's only in retrospect that any of it makes sense.

Part of a historian's job is to assemble a jumble of often random-seeming events into a narrative. That's part of our mind's job, too, come to think of it. Our raw perceptions have to be spliced together, translated and transformed, synchronized, edited and corroborated before we accept them as a version of reality. Another witness might report a different version. Another historian might come up with a different narrative.

It's a philosopher's job to worry about where the truth lies.

Just rain, Shore, about an inch of it.

Supposed to get cold tonight.

Nice day today. The yard was squishy from last night's rain, but the sun rose and the weather was warm. I went for a walk when the cleaning crew ran me out of the house. Uploaded a couple of photos when I got back.

The warm weather is about to come to a screeching halt. Rain and now snow are moving over Mom's house in the mountains. Nothing happening here yet, but NWS predicts a chance of showers and low temperature near freezing in the morning.

Hiya, Shore. It was 31° when I first checked this morning. Should reach the low twenties tonight.

Would you believe I got an AC for taking a picture of somebody's yard less than a block away? You never know where lightning is going to strike.

Yes, that is pyracantha. It's a common sight around here, but the hedge in that picture seems to be doing uncommonly well. Maybe it's the warm weather we've been having, or maybe the folks who live there just do a good job tending their plants. They do have one of the best landscaped lawns in the neighborhood. Have to give them part of the credit for the AC!

Ylee, "Life is like a box of chocolates."

Some candy manufacturers thoughtfully provide a little diagram inside the box to show you which confections are what. Too bad life doesn't come with a map. You pays your money, and you takes your choice.

Shucks. I tried an experiment here to find out whether I could embed a traffic camera from WRAL in Raleigh. No joy. It didn't work.

The stretch of pavement in question lies near Raleigh-Durham airport and Research Triangle Park. If you follow the link you'll be looking at eight lanes of some of the worst traffic in the state. I confront that snafu several times a year, either to go to the airport or simply traveling east on I-40. Not recommended.

Our temperature bottomed out in the mid twenties this morning. There's a warm front moving this way, which will usher in warmer air and a chance for rain later today and tonight. The NWS warns of strong winds tomorrow. We should get a break from freezing weather until Thursday morning.

One of my cousins died suddenly last weekend. Didn't hear about it until Monday afternoon. Tuesday I drove two hundred miles to attend his funeral. Yesterday I drove back at a more leisurely pace. It was good to be home again, but I'm afraid Wife welcomed a morose traveler.

There's better weather news this morning. It didn't get quite as cold last night as was forecast. For the next several days we can look forward to the kind of temperatures that prevailed throughout most of December (cool rather than cold). The weather service has plastered rain imagery all across the weekend, though. Good for blogging and watching NFL playoffs, I reckon.

Morning, ycd,

The camera works if you follow the link to WRAL. You can watch it for thirty seconds or so, until the view shifts to the next camera in the list.

The embedding code they supply does not work for me. I wanted to display the camera here in a comment like a YouTube video, or like the webcams over on Ylee's blog. Perhaps I could hack it to get it to work, but I didn't try.

Thought I would take a moment to remember some of the pioneers of aviation. The space race is fifty-five years old this year. Double nickels.

The first American astronaut, Alan Shepard, successfully completed a suborbital flight in 1961. Shepard deserves his glory, but we often forget that Ham the Astrochimp beat Shepard into space by three months.

The second satellite ever launched into orbit, Sputnik 2, carried the dog Laika. Poor Laika didn't make it. There was no provision for controlled re-entry of the satellite. That technology was developed in time for Sputnik 5 in 1960. Cosmodogs Belka and Strelka returned to earth safely. In 1961 Nikita Khrushchev presented one of Strelka's puppies to Caroline Kennedy.

Animals have a long and distinguished history as stand-ins for human explorers. In 1783 the Montgolfier brothers chose a sheep, duck, and rooster to demonstrate their newly invented hot air balloon. The frères were interested in the effects of balloon ascent on the physiology of living creatures. The sheep was the main experimental beast. The duck was included as a control, because it could fly on its own. It was expected to survive the experience unharmed. The rooster served as understudy for the duck. If the rooster had only run a little faster, he might have avoided the foofaraw... but then he would have died in anonymity.

Dickenson stumps a lot of people, ycd. One of the commenters on the poemhunter site calls Dickenson insane, her poetry babble. Another commenter calls the first an imbecile.

I chose this poem for its title, which alludes to my alternate ending for Montgolfier's rooster. I'm saying that we remember the rooster because he was catchable. Perhaps there were other equally likely candidates for fame who managed to elude capture.

There's talk of planets and gravitation, which might have interested Ham, the Astrochimp. Ham rode his rocket to worldly glory on January 31. That anniversary draws near.

Wikipedia calls the poem a whimsical Valentine. The season for that looms right around the corner.

That reminds me, I gotta call the florist!

I know, after the last video this must sound like mixed messages. Trust me. Roll with it.

There's a big golden sun rising this morning! First time that has happened since last week. All through the weekend it was rainy. Yesterday blue skies returned, but the day started out under thick fog.

Hi, Shore.

I can certainly identify with the sentiment expressed in that song, all except for the fumes. And maybe skipping lunch.

Wife introduced me to Pink Martini last weekend. I spent most of an afternoon on YouTube checking them out. They appear to have been transported to us from another era. I hesitate to use the word 'authentic', but my time travel theory makes the word applicable. The group seems absolutely fearless about what they're willing to tackle. They seem able to stretch around whatever improbable tune strikes their fancy and carry it off. Definitely not your average cover band.

Tsk, tsk. It's just not getting cold. Not here anyway. It's the middle of winter. This is when it should happen, if it ever does.

Yes, we've had a few mornings when the thermometer dropped below freezing. On a lot of those days it was shirtsleeve weather again by afternoon. I realize I may be tempting fate by uttering these words. We're not out of the woods yet, as the saying goes. We could get a blizzard in March. Right now that doesn't seem likely.

Next week Groundhog Day rolls around, which marks the point in the year when the days start getting noticeably longer. Light and warmth will begin to return. Too much warmth, if you ask me. Grumble, grumble.

Shore, I have yet to visit Pink Martini's web site. It occurs to me that I have accumulated a number of questions about the ensemble. Their home page would seem to be a good place to start looking for answers.

You have spoken before on your own blog about the power of music to affect one's emotional state. I confess I had a strong and unaccountable reaction to one or two of Pink Martini's numbers. I say 'unaccountable', because I don't understand why. There are no deeply personal memories of dancing the rumba in Rio for the music to evoke. Perhaps it was a sense of missed opportunities, that life is passing me by, and I never danced that rumba. Who knows?

Whatever the cause, the result was cathartic.

When I was a child, my family stayed for a while in a house with a piano. Naturally I found time to mess around with the thing. Mom noticed. (I was probably driving her crazy.) She decided to send me to lessons.

Here is where I'm tempted to get a little bit snarky. I probably learned all the music theory I was capable of learning in a year or two. But the lessons went on and on. I never understood why Mom felt compelled to subject me to that. The joy of discovering music was sucked right out of me. It became a chore. To this day I still don't play. Grumble, grumble.

But I still enjoy listening. I sing in the shower, tap my foot to the radio etc. For years I thought of myself as a hard core rocker. These days I'm constantly surprised (as I was by Pink Martini) at the breadth and depth of music's appeal.

Ycd, it's good to know that I can share my suffering, and there's someone else in the world who understands. :o)

Gah! Sheet music. I learned to sight read sheet music. That's not the same as knowing how to play the piano. That is a common misconception that piano teachers perpetuate to stay in business.

The child who first sat down at the piano wanted to learn how to play the music he could hear in his head. I never did learn how to do that.

I, too, eventually acquired a guitar. I pull it out of its case occasionally to have a strum. House of the Rising Sun is one of the tunes I can attempt. I wonder if we both use the same chords? Heck, my guitar isn't tuned to any particular frequency. I reckon I could crank the pegs until my chords lined up with yours.

Guitar via Skype? Be careful what you wish for... XD

Yesterday was a beautiful day, warm and humid, suitable for framing. We had light rain overnight. Wife left the back door open, because there was no reason not to. It was 61° at 7:00 this morning.

Cooler air is queued behind the rain, but it's not here yet. It will move in gradually. The forecast high temperature for Sunday and Monday is fifty degrees (10° C). Lows will be running near freezing for the next few days.

Well, sp, it sounds as if you were able to maintain a better attitude during and after piano lessons than I did. I was supposed to practice playing an assigned piece of music half an hour per day. Once the last note was struck, I was out the door. Schoom! Any thought of actually enjoying my interaction with the instrument was suppressed or forgotten.

In retrospect, the experience of learning to associate piano keys with marks on paper was similar to learning to operate a typewriter. You need the same kind of eye to hand coordination. Here I am tonight sitting at a keyboard. Maybe those piano lessons were not entirely wasted.