LoLOriginally Posted by swampyankee
Yeah, being Ohio, we get snow too. And judging by most of the local forecasters, 3 or 4 inches of snow is equivalent to the coming of the Four Horsemen.
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LoL
Yeah, being Ohio, we get snow too. And judging by most of the local forecasters, 3 or 4 inches of snow is equivalent to the coming of the Four Horsemen.
Order of Kilopi
I saw plenty of quick changes from rain to sunshine and back in Edinburgh, Scotland. One morning it was raining hard and the weather report in the newspaper said more of the same for the next three days. I decided to stick to indoor sightseeing and left my camera in my room. When I got downtown I decided, on the spur of the moment, to climb to the top of the Sir Walter Scott Monument in spite of the weather. When I got to the top and emerged from the dark staircase, it was bright sunshine. There I was, in momentarily clear weather, with a magnificent view of the railroad station tracks below, and no camera. A trifle in the big picture of a great trip, but still a bummer.
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An irritating aspect of weather forecasting in the UK is that there is an automatic assumption that the hotter it gets, the better it is. Hot is always equated to good, cold is always bad. Similarly, dry is good and wet is bad. But good and bad are subjective, hot and cold are not. I'm not interested that this connection is valid for a townie out for a drive in the country. There have been plenty of times in the UK when I really wanted cool weather, to do some outside work without getting heatstroke. Although those were the days when it actually stopped raining now and again.
Order of Kilopi
[Cat-like typing imminent. I'll try to fix what she "fixes", but anything I missed are Kaylee's. I swear.]
Heh. I'd had a firefox weather plugin that connects to a US-based service ([irrelevant] the Roger Ailes owned one, IIRC, whose name I forgot. [/irrelevant]) It works fine for the summer, but quickly becomes useless in the winter. "Cold" apparently dominates "Snow", and "Cold" triggers on anything less than -10C, making their winter forecasts largely useless for me. I've since found an Environment Canada-based solution that (rightly) considers 3 to 4 inches no more than a flurry.
Neat story, Hornblower. Gotta love North Atlantic coastal areas. Never a dull moment, yet never too exciting.
Order of Kilopi
Well, doesn't most everything in the U.S. (weather) have to be dramatized? We're a nation of nerves after all. I am a bit surprised to see that snow/bad weather elsewhere (typical to region) are hyped; don't recall that growing up in Midwest ("just the facts").
Weather is over-dramatized here too. Laughable. Predicted wind gusts of over 25 mph prompt a "Severe Weather Alert," the local university installed tornado sirens two years ago (for the once-in-5-years-out-in-wideopen-desert tornado which only tears up some mesquite bushes), and 1/2 inch of rain ("Severe Weather Alert")?
We're such a nation of hype.
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When there hasn't been a hurricane in some time, the local weatherfolk try to get us worked up over a tropical wave off the coast of Africa.
Bad Post-Doc
A couple of weeks ago, I was waiting for a bus on one of the most beautiful days I'd seen in some time. Cloud but not too much. A bit of a breeze but not windy. Perhaps in the upper 60s, which is cool for early summer but warm for Washington. The girl sitting next to me thought it was too cold--and she'd moved here. I really don't understand moving somewhere you don't like the weather, and if that day was too cold for her, she should really be living in LA or something.
I did read an interesting article last winter about how it's okay that everyone in Western Washington freaks right out over snow. Our snow is almost always heavy and wet. We don't have the infrastructure for it. And Seattle apparently has more hills than any major US city which also gets snow. It's not as though we're the Midwest. Yes, we get at least a dusting every year, though most people here seem to forget that somehow. (I have come to the conclusion that Weather-Forgetting Drugs are in our water supply.) But not enough to ever get used to driving in it, and there are plenty of us on the tops of hills. Also, our much-beloved trees aren't quite so beloved when they collapse onto power lines.
Oh, and one Graham is having for his research for school? Trying to search for articles about Washington and weed out those about DC. And often, just adding the word "state" does not help. You'd think it would, but you'd apparently be wrong.
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Gillian
"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"
"You can't erase icing."
"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"
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Try living in Vancouver WA. You have to try to filter out both DC and BC. One time I made an appointment with a doctor in British Columbia.
When my friend moved to Seattle from Northern Utah, she had to get help from her neighbors putting those silly chains on. (Utahns don't use chains for the same reason Vancouverites don't use umbrellas.)
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I don't understand why all those people living around me find it necessary to buy all-wheel or four-wheel (isn't it normal for four wheels to be all the wheels on a car or suv?) drive vehicles. I've been driving about 40 years with two-wheel drive and I've been stuck a rousing three times, and one of those was because I was too lazy to shovel my driveway.
Order of Kilopi
Probably any search parameters you come up with either have an unacceptably high number of false positives or an unacceptably high number of false negatives. That being said I would expect adding "-DC" to the search to work better than adding "state".
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Exactly, try '-' to remove results. So if you want to search for biblical abraham, you'd type "abraham -lincoln"
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Exactly, try '-' to remove results. So if you want to search for biblical abraham, you'd type: abraham -lincoln
You can also use "" to search for strings of words, then type: "washington state"
Order of Kilopi
A really REALLY trivial one that I'm ashamed of: I was just held up in line at Costco for maybe one minute because the checker and assistant were cooing over the baby in the cart ahead of us. I started getting annoyed. The I thought, "Self, get a life!"
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt.
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Whenever I encounter someone going all "baby talk" over a baby or animal, I think of the Monty Python skit with "Do you like your rattle, do you like your rattle? What a clever little fellow. Can you talk? Can you talk?" "Yes, of course I can talk, I'm Minister for Overseas Development"
Order of Kilopi
I hear ya. There was a storm brewing outside in Milwaukee after midnight and I'm wondering how severe it might be. I tuned to the Weather Channel and some tropical wave ten days away from possible landfall was what they droning on and on about rather than something that just might affect someone right then in the Lower 48. Eventually Weather on the 8's came on and I read the radar for myself.
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I've wanted to go to coastal Washington (or southern Alaska, and coastal BC too if there weren't complications from the fact that it's in a foreign country) for several years now, and just haven't relocated yet because of money & job/career stuff. I did go to Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula a few years ago on vacation. I had been told ahead of time that it rains all winter but there's no snow so close to sea level, and I planned accordingly. So of course, as soon as I got there, the area got blizzards for three days in a row, turning the rainforest I'd planned to hike in into a snowforest and causing the closing of almost every place I'd planned to go that was inside.
There's a technical difference between the two systems. It has to do with the rotation rates of the inside and outside tires during a turn. When you're turning, one has a longer distance to go than the other, so a solid axle, on which both had to turn at the same rate, would create stress on itself and the frame, fight the turn, and force the tires to slip. At least, that's what happens on a surface with good traction, which roads normally do. It's OK on a surface with bad traction, and can even help.
With either type of 2WD, each non-drive wheel is just going for a ride so it only spins as fast as it's pushed/pulled and there's no issue there. Rear-wheel-drive vehicles have a device called a "differential" which takes care of the issue for the rear wheels by letting them rotate at different rates. (Some off-road vehicles have locking differentials, so both wheels rotate at the same rate when you lock them, just for driving on low-traction surfaces.) Front-wheel drive couldn't happen for decades because it's more complicated when the drive wheels are also the wheels that turn to steer, but they eventually figured it out and invented the modern transaxle.
4WD engages all four wheels, with the left & right front wheels rotating at the same rate, which is mechanically the simplest way to engage the front wheels. That makes it sort of like a locking rear differential: something to turn on only for low-traction surfaces. (That normally means off-road, but I did use it a few times to start moving uphill from a standstill on a freshly snow-covered road.) For normal road driving, you'd leave it off so only the rear wheels are engaged, same as with an exclusively rear-wheel-drive vehicle.
AWD engages all four wheels, with different rotating speeds on the left & right, in front as well as in back. Like rear-wheel drive and front-wheel drive, it can be left like that at all times, so it's not a mode you switch on & off. It's just the way the vehicle always is. Unfortunately, the phrase "full-time 4WD" has been used for this too, even though that makes it sound as if it were more like 4WD than it really is.
Order of Kilopi
What a shame that on this forum we can't name the lady who subsequently exploded.
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I'm telling you. Something in the water. The hill I live on is the first one closed when the weather changes, and the bottom of it is at sea level.I've wanted to go to coastal Washington (or southern Alaska, and coastal BC too if there weren't complications from the fact that it's in a foreign country) for several years now, and just haven't relocated yet because of money & job/career stuff. I did go to Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula a few years ago on vacation. I had been told ahead of time that it rains all winter but there's no snow so close to sea level, and I planned accordingly. So of course, as soon as I got there, the area got blizzards for three days in a row, turning the rainforest I'd planned to hike in into a snowforest and causing the closing of almost every place I'd planned to go that was inside.
_____________________________________________
Gillian
"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"
"You can't erase icing."
"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"
Order of Kilopi
Supermarket check-out operators who GRAB my loaf of bread in the middle making 20% of the slices non-rectangular.
(The cheese escapes my toasted sandwiches.)
Get up, a get-get, get down.
Established Member
The insurmountable checkout stacking problem. Trolley with heavy stuff like beer, wine and milk in the bottom, on top bread, eggs, squashy stuff. Empty everything, starting at the top onto the conveyor belt. That means the delicate stuff gets marked up first, and finishes up being squashed by the heavy stuff at the pick-up end, remorselessly pushed along by the cashier. The delicate stuff has to get bagged and put into a trolley first, which means the heavy stuff squashes it on top. There doesn't seem to be a mechanism for avoiding squashed tomatoes, broken eggs and bent loaves. I guess I just have a drink problem....
Order of Kilopi
I tend to find fewer problems of that sort if I go to the register where the cashier is a middle-aged woman instead of a high-school kid. Having a competent bagger helps, too.
Order of Kilopi
People who name their cat "Tigger" or "Garfield."
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Mrs M. (who is big on gardening) does just that, checks the radar for our area via local sites online. She always tells me which storms will be a concern, and which not to worry about.
And, she's always right. (Usually, I hate that when it happens, but not in these cases.)
Order of Kilopi
Been there, done that.
We had once gone to a friend's house, and realized after we arrived that we had forgotten something - so I took the car to run back home and get it. Shortly after leaving the friend's house, already somewhat annoyed, I ended up sitting at an intersection while a funeral procession went by.
I actually found myself thinking, "Why does this stuff happen to me?!" and then quickly chided myself for basically being a selfish jerk inside my own head.
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How about "Kitty"? That's even worse, in my trivial opinion. Is their child named "Baby"?
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Hey - when I was a very small child, we had a cat called tigger. In fact, I thought it was the name of the species, because I was also familiar with Winnie the Pooh. I used to be thoroughly mystified by a neighbour who regularly came to her front door and shouted 'cuckoo', until one day I realized it was the name of her cat.
Order of Kilopi
One of our kitties is named "Bunny." In the unlikely event we ever have a pet rabbit, we'll have to call it "Kitty".
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt.
Order of Kilopi
Waking up too early, then just starting to doze off again... and the alarm goes off.
STARGAZING: All I see are the lights of a billion places I'll never go. --Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary
Order of Kilopi
Waking up early can't go back to sleep for hours then going back to sleep then to sleep in.
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A friend of ours tells the story of the dog her son, then in his 20s, had who he named "Oven Mitt" (I never heard why, but I had met the son and that was enough of an explanation). Sometimes she would dog sit and would be at the back door of her house yelling "Oven Mitt, come here Oven Mitt". She suspected the neighbors thought she was even more insane.
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