The weather

[Bailing_Out]

Okay this is not about global whatever so no arguments by me.

Its the first time in years, hell probably more than 15 that the ground has frozen ahead of a winter storm here. Damn sure its the longest in forever its been frozen this long before it happened. Two days at least. The roads are below freezing by a lot.

Hoping for a dry snow, no ice storm, may lose the satellite but hope the internet an electricity keep on going on. Looking at the radar, Melvin should be getting his first stupid southern winter storm right about now. I count it as stupid when its mostly ice. Hopefully Buzz don't have to go out and shovel snow with his messed up heart.

Story I forgot to tell yall. Furnace went out right after my wife died, looked, didn't see anything. Called and called my heating and air guy, doesn't answer for more than a month, heating house with cook stove. He's the only reliable one near here so I waited knowing there was a reason. The reason turned out to be, he was lowest bidder on local government contract.

I said' well hell I understand you got to make money" he said "Mike now I know why those contracts are bid so high, I didn't make much money on it, the rules a regulations make it take forever to do the damn job, you have to bid high to make any money on it". He under bid waaay too much

Okay he goes in the house, opens up the furnace tests with the circuit tester and says "Mike this wire is broke", I see it and say "hell Kevin, I guess I was so messed up after my wife died I couldn't see it". He fixes it and then I say, "well hell while you are here go look at the AC unit" so he goes out and pulls the cover off off the electrical part and says "Well Mike I have never seen this before" I say "what". "A snake shorted it out" he says, "he crawled in here and touched by both sides of the 240 line, yeah the last thing to go through his little mind was 240 volts". He pries the dried out snake out of it and we test it and it works.

He starts to leave and I ask how much do I owe you and he says ahh nothing but I give him 20 just for showing up.

[Bailing_Out]

Somehow the power here went out anyway despite no ice on the lines. It was not the rolling blackout thing, the power guys were looking all over for the cause. So I drove to the gas station, less than a mile away, they had power. Almost every other place in the town had power. I swear this damn street always catches the power outages.

[Bailing_Out]

It only got to minus 9 last night LOL. I don't remember it getting this cold here since the 70's. These arctic things need to stop coming down here in those waves or whatever it is.

[[WaW]CA|Melvin]

In my part of northeast Texas, we didn't have much, if any, freezing rain. First, it was super cold with very small, very dry snow. "Dry" due to extreme cold. Temperature didn't get above freezing for four days, Sunday through Wednesday. Low was -3F early Monday morning. That's -19C if you're not 'Merican. Thursday got up 1 degree above freezing and thawing started being useful on Friday. We accumulated about 3 inches of snow.

We had rotating electric outages for two days. Well, at least we had some power. Many, many Texans had no power for three days! Deadly conditions. Our rotating outages were weirdly short. First day was about 30 minutes ON and 15 minutes OFF. Next day had longer ON and shorter OFF. Overall, the power cycled about 60 times.

The power problem was that Texas power generation facilities are not winterized to the level needed to take this once in 50 to 100 year event. Everything got froze up. From the wind turbines to the coal plants. If it wasn't the turbine itself like for the wind generators, it was the supporting equipment that broke. There were transmission line problems, but the failure of the power generation was the main problem.

It's all because we have a border problem. I blame it on the Canucks!
They need to keep their damn Polar Vortexes on their side of the border!

[Bailing_Out]

Yesterday it was 75, I wore shorts, the week before it was -9, quite a swing in the weather.