Ugh, it's starting...

We've reached that time of year when sunset is occurring before the time when normal people are just starting to think about dinner. Combine that with three days in a row of overcast skies, drizzly weather, and the leaves being off the trees, it's time to get the SAD lamp down from the attic and plug that thing up.

.

Tumbled Gyros

I know it's Thursday but between the weather completely changing, plus yesterday's holiday, and the calendar rolling over to November, today feels like Second Monday.

Monday through Wednesday were unseasonably warm and sunny, yesterday was overcast and rainy, with temps returning to seasonal norms. Today will be sunny but cool.

It doesn't feel like tomorrow brings the weekend, but here it is.

.

As the Wind Blows...

There's a good explainer here on what caused the rapid intensification of Hurricane Milton, why "bigger" doesn't necessarily mean "stronger" when it comes to hurricanes, and what's likely to happen over the next couple days as Milton continues to track to the northeast and encounters less favorable (for the hurricane) atmospheric conditions while still remaining over unusually warm Gulf waters...

The hurricane went from a Category 1 storm at midnight to a Category 5 hurricane by noon. And it didn’t stop there.

By 8 p.m. on Monday, the storm’s maximum sustained wind speeds had increased to 180 miles per hour, making Milton one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes ever. Based on wind speed, it joined a handful of other hurricanes to rival the strongest Atlantic storm ever recorded: a 1980 hurricane named Allen, which had a peak wind speed of 190 m.p.h. before it made landfall along the United States-Mexico border.

As a small, compact system, however, Milton was more similar to Hurricane Wilma in 2005, which holds the record for the lowest pressure in a hurricane, another measure of a storm’s intensity. Its small size, an excess of extremely warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico and calm atmospheric conditions allowed Milton to “explosively” intensify, as hurricane center forecasters noted Monday afternoon.

The standard meteorological definition of “rapid intensification” is 30 knots in 24 hours, or roughly 35 miles per hour daily. Milton increased by more than double this definition on Monday, at a pace similar to that of Wilma and another record storm, Hurricane Felix in 2007.

It's funny that, like, the sixth post ever made at this blog, just over nineteen years ago, was about politics making people stupid about hurricanes...

.

Tab Clearing...

Today in headlines:

• Fidelity has cut its estimate of X’s value by 79% since Musk’s purchase


• China, at UN, warns against ‘expansion of the battlefield’ in the Ukraine war


• Switzerland and Italy redraw border due to melting glaciers

.

Tab Clearing...

• Unless you're deployed there (or transiting through) this piece from the Beeb is about as close a look as you'll get at Diego Garcia.


• Helene set some storm surge records in Florida.


• More stuff on the sunk minisub.

.

That came in handy...

Tucked into my tote bag is my handy ProStorm travel umbrella, which was robust enough to use yesterday, despite the heavy winds.

However the rain was almost horizontal at times, which made me glad for another piece of snivel gear I keep in there.

Not technically a rain poncho, it's windproof and wicks like nobody's business. Just don't go pedestrianing around in it after dark.

.

Hammered by Helene

Not us here in Indy, mind you. We got a little wind and rain. Some branches were down here and there. Power flickered only long enough to set the microwave clock to blinking. Other than that, it was pretty much a wet firecracker here.

Asheville, North Carolina on the other hand... yikes.

I remember when a good-size rock closed I-40 west of Asheville, and also when the southbound lanes of I-75 slid off the mountaintop between Knoxville and the Kentucky border, and how much that snarled traffic. I can't imagine what it's going to do to a decent-sized city like Asheville to have all interstate access whatsoever temporarily cut off.

.

Serutan is natures spelled backwards...

I was complaining about the lack of precipitation causing a certain rather... whiff aroma around the sewer drains at big intersections like, say, 54th & College yesterday morning.

Well, we had a pretty good line of thunderstorms blow through yesterday evening, the kind that would have definitely had me worried about the old hackberry in the back yard were it still there.

The rain was blowing sideways and there was hail lashing the back wall of the house like half-spent turkey shot.

It wasn't a lot of rain in total, probably only a tenth of an inch or so, certainly no drought-buster, but hopefully the fact that it all came down at once provided enough water in the storm sewers to, er, get the mail moving, as it were.

,

Drought…

So we’re officially in a moderate drought here in Indy. All but about five days so far this month have seen above average temps and the only rain we’ve seen since the first was a fraction of an inch back in the first week of September. This has two big effects in the neighborhood:

• First, the leaves on the trees are going to turn earlier than usual. Some have already started.


• Second, as I may have mentioned, Broad Ripple has an elderly sewer network that combines both sanitary and storm sewers. Go a few weeks without rain and things can get a little whiff at bigger intersections near the storm sewer drains, since there hasn’t been storm water flow to wash everything down to its final destination.

.

Ugh.

I had intended to go to the outdoor range today, but it's going to be swamp-ass hot, like Gulf Coast levels of heat and humidity, and neither the Mustang nor the Zed Drei have any refrigerant aboard currently.

If I were faced with a week- or month-long stretch of this, I'd just cowgirl up and go, but when you can look ahead to Thursday and Friday and see it's going to be more bearable, it's easy to just punk out for a couple days. I'll maybe hit the indoor range on Thursday and Friday.

The next three days are supposed to have highs in the mid- to upper 90s and dew points in the low 70s, and it's those dew points that'll take the starch out of me. Bicycling and walking around the neighborhood will be bad enough, but 30 minutes or more in a car with no A/C? Nah. I'll skip that. Next week is supposed to return to more normal late summer weather.

.

You're not going to believe this...

...but it's hot as dammit again out there today.

Supposedly a front will move through on Sunday and we'll get some rain and it'll cool off some.

(I mean, for a given value of "cooling off". Other than 88°F on Sunday, highs are supposed to be in the nineties until next Wednesday at the earliest.)

.

Hot.

Fixin' to be hot today here in Indy. The weather dude says we're likely to tie the previous record high for the date, 95°F, set back in 1913.

Going to be keeping a close eye on the air conditioning, because this would be a terrible day for it to freeze up.

.

Sproing!

With the arrival of the vernal equinox today, spring is officially here! Well, technically it will be here at 11:06PM Eastern Daylight Time.

Hooray! If you're reading this you've survived another winter!

.

Still Here

Roseholme Cottage didn't blow away last night. All we got was a pretty spectacular light show, lots of thunder, and a few spurts of rain. Not even any hail.

Quite a few places across a swath of Indiana just north of us weren't so lucky, however.

.

Meteorological Spring

Punxsutawney Phil may only be right between thirty-five and forty-one percent of the time, but he frickin' nailed it this year.

It's supposed to possibly get into the seventies tomorrow here in Indianapolis, and it won't even be the first time this year.

Groggy.

In retrospect, it was probably a rumble of thunder that woke me.

All I know is I was laying awake in bed and the curtains over the window flashed white. I thought that someone must have been in the yard, playing the beam of a flashlight across the house. As I sat up and pulled the curtain aside to peek out, the tornado sirens started going off.

I decided to go wake Bobbi, who turned on the TV, and sure enough we were about to get smacked by a hella strong front, barreling straight for Indy at 55 miles per hour.

The house rattled with hail, like someone was throwing handfuls of pebbles against the walls and windows. Bobbi was like "Okay, if we head for the basement, you grab Holden and I'll get Huck," and for a hot minute that seemed like a possibility, but then the first wave was past us and the weather settled down to a normal, albeit heavy, rain. At least it would have been easy to grab the cats, because when it started blowing outside, they both jumped up on Bobbi's bed, looking for some soothing.

There were at least two more lines that passed over us behind that first one, but neither was anywhere near as dramatic.

Still, I didn't get a lot of sleep between two and five AM...

.

Unseasonably Balmy

We got a brief cold snap with that snow over the weekend, but things here in Indiana have returned now to our previously-scheduled weather, namely one of the warmest Hoosier Februaries on record.

Today's predicted high of 64°F will be a few degrees shy of the record for the day, which was 69°F back in 2018, but I'll take it.

I could use a good, long walk under sunny skies. Maybe touch some grass while I'm out there.

. 

Ugh

/me looks out window at snow on ground

/me goes back to bed

Brrrrr!

It is currently two degrees below zero, fondly Fahrenheit out there.

A reminder to my fellow Hoosiers that 0°F is not, in fact, an arbitrary number like the internet memes say, but is instead the freezing point of brine.

You know what brine is, right? That's the stuff they spray on the roads to keep them from icing up. Well, it's not working quite as good as it should until we get a little warmer today. (And we're only going to get a little warmer. The forecast high is supposed to be a balmy 5°F sometime late this afternoon.)

O hai Jack Frost

I was wondering when winter was going to get here for realsies. It's been unseasonably balmy for the last couple months and we've only had a couple half-assed attempts at snow. Nothing that even rated sweeping the walks clear thus far. (There's no point going out there in the freezing cold with a broom or shovel before dawn if it's all gonna melt off by lunchtime, after all.)

Well, if Weather Underground is to be believed, we won't be seeing the far side of freezing for at least a week. Not much in the way of snow though. I have mixed feelings about that. I'm generally not a huge fan of the white stuff... see the above enthusiasm regarding shoveling ...but bone-numbing cold without snow feels like a ripoff. If you're going to freeze me half to death, Gaia, you could at least be scenic while you're doing it.