Weather

No Snow…Tires

I put the snow tires on the car back in early November and never really had a chance to use them for their intended purpose. There was one snow “storm” in January that dropped an inch on the ground and then we got lots of ice so we just never went anywhere until the ice was gone.

A warm sunny spring started yesterday afternoon, it continued today and will supposedly continue for the next couple days before typical Portland weather returns. The sunny low 70s will run until Tuesday and then the normal cloudy/rainy upper 50s return. This afternoon I took the snow tires off the Mini and put the regular touring all-seasons back on.

Winter Wonderland

Last Friday during the day it was doing the usual northwest winter weather thing, i.e. cool and misting. That cool was the last time it was above freezing for 5 days. Saturday the rain shifted to snow and it kept falling until late Sunday afternoon leaving behind an inch or so on the ground. On Monday I made a quick run to the grocery store to get some essentials because now there was freezing rain headed our way.

The freezing rain came down Monday night through Thursday morning leaving everything coated in a sheath of ice. The city came to a standstill. Trees came down knocking out power to thousands. We were very lucky in that ours never really went out. But believe me there were at least ten times from Wednesday evening until Friday morning that it flickered or blipped off momentarily making us hold our breath. Our cable stayed on the whole time except for one brief outage on Friday evening.

The weather folks say it got it 35 degrees on Thursday, but you couldn’t tell it if you poked your head outside. It really wasn’t until Friday that the temps peeked above freezing and moist rain fell. Friday afternoon I went outside and found some ice melt stuff in the shed that the previous owner left behind. When I looked at Portland’s usual winter weather before we moved I opted to leave behind the melt stuff I had in Klamath Falls along with the snow shovels. I poked around inside the shed and did find an 8 x 24 piece of floor tile that became my impromptu shove that I used to clean the driveway until it broke in half.

Because we are the first house as you come into the subdivision off the main drag and it is all slightly uphill after us, our driveway was kind of ice locked and I figured I could get out if needed but getting back in was probably not going to happen, so we skipped the usual Friday grocery shopping trip. Fortunately once it got above freezing on Friday it has stayed that way since. Then the rain that fell that night and on Saturday was now helping get rid of all that ice. Probably by Monday morning there will be very little evidence left of any of the snow and ice.

2002 All Over Again?

I started blogging in January of 2002 and if I remember right the first few posts I wrote back then were about the cold weather in Aiken, so here is a throw back to those early days:

Last weekend we had some uncharacteristic weather for Portland, snow. Maybe an inch with two inch drifts, we really didn’t need to go anywhere, so we didn’t. The Mini would not have had a problem in it. I kept the snow tires we bought for Klamath Falls living and mounted them on the car back in December. But, the chance of finding another driver out there with something other than all-seasons and snow driving experience were pretty slim, so we stayed at home. Along with that snow came bitter cold and then a couple days later on Tuesday we got freezing rain which continued all the way through Thursday morning.

Yesterday the high, for the first time in nearly a week, made it a couple degrees above freezing. Today, Friday, we made it to around 35 and actually got some melting. Tomorrow, hopefully it will actually get to the predicted 41° and maybe we can get out and do some grocery shopping.

Shortest Day Of The Year

This morning on a quick run to Fred Meyer the Mini beeped to let me know that the outside temperature was 37 degrees (so as to let me know to be careful as ice may form on overpasses.) Even though the winter solstice hadn’t actually happen yet, still had about 12 hours, it was now winter here in Fairview because this was the first time the temperature has been that low since last winter.

One Month In

We arrived in Klamath Falls a month ago today.

We are still stuck in that awkward time between agreeing on a price and actually taking possession of the house and the big hold up is the bank’s appraisal, there is a 4 week backlog. At this rate we will have to get lucky to get into the house by Christmas. We have agreed to extend our stay in the AirBnB until 12/21. The Host wrote back saying she was going to block off the place until the 5th of January, just in case we need longer.

Both the rental car and the Mini were returned to their respective homes this afternoon. On further troubleshooting it was determined that both the #2 and #4 cylinders were reading bad. Because we had the coil pack on #1 replaced in May and now #2 & #4 were acting up, we agreed to go ahead and change the coil pack on #3 because sure enough in a couple weeks that probably would have started acting up as well. Add in the cast of the rental car for a week and are out over $600.

Over the weekend I developed some pain in the upper left of my mouth. It really didn’t feel too bad, until this morning when the pain increased to about a 3 of 10. I though maybe it was time to see a dentist. There were 10 listed that were in our dental insurance network. Several were a little too far away so I eliminated them. There were two practically next door to each other, not far from our favorite grocery store, so I called one of them hoping I could get to see the doctor this week. The receptionist said, “We just had a cancellation for 4:00 PM. Would that do?” I said, “See you then.” They took x-rays. After the dentist took a look them, she then poked and scraped and prodded around the two bad teeth. She said’ “I don’t see anything obvious, maybe it is just a sinus infection.” She prescribed an antibiotic and said if it doesn’t clear up in a week, call me. Then she added, “And call me if it does work.”

We have had a fairly mild November so far here, but things are about to get real with highs in the 40’s and lows in the upper teens to low 20s. And next week leading up to Thanksgiving there is a good chance of a bit of the white stuff.

This Weather Is For The Birds

On February 2nd of this year when Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, legend had it that we were in for 6 more weeks of winter. I always thought that mean six solid weeks of lousy winter weather, so I laughed out loud when the weather in early February started to warm up. But Phil had the last laugh because he knew that the winter weather didn’t have to be continuous, it could show up randomly every once in a while during the next month and a half and his forecast would proven out.

And it has, we have had several swings from abnormally above average temperatures, leading us to think we might be getting triple digit highs by April, to abnormally below temperatures that make us cuss out that prognosticating groundhog. Yesterday it was sunny and upper sixties, just a touch above normal for this time of year, but today our high didn’t even get up to what is our normal low of 41°. This coming Wednesday we will have a high nearly 20 degrees below normal and the low that night will be in the upper 20s! Thursday, exactly 6 weeks after the second of February, the temperatures start to rise towards normal. Hopefully to stay.

Oh That Worked Out Well…

On Thursday night we packed up in preparation for riding the tandem to work, but we knew, however, that it was an iffy proposition. The weather folks were predicting a decent chance of a couple of hours of rain in the morning. If it happened early enough, we might ride if the road wasn’t too wet. If it happened late enough, we would ride before the rain ride and everything would be dry by quitting time.

When the alarm went off at 5:00 AM I went and checked the radar on the computer. And while my calculations from watching the current loop and their future cast predicted that the narrow visible line of thunderstorm would arrive after we were inside at work, we both agreed it was too close to risk. The last thing we needed was to get soaked a mile from work and have not only our cycling clothes get wet, but the work clothes we were going to change into as well. We went back to bed.

When the alarm went off again at 5:30 we got up and unpacked everything, got dressed, made our hot beverages and headed into work where we had our pre-staged breakfast waiting for us. About a mile from work the first large raindrop hit the windshield. The amount of those big drops increased in reverse proportion exponentially as we got closer to work. By the time we pulled into the parking lot it was a full on deluge. It was coming down so heavy that we opted to forgo parking in our usual far left corner spot and get one a lot closer to the door. In spite of cutting our distance to walk in by two-thirds and having a large golf umbrella, we still got soaked from the knees down and merely damp below the waist.

Lets recap, we got up at 5:30 and left the house at 6:00 to arrive at work at 6:15 and get really wet. If we had bike ridden, the time line would have went like this, up at 5:00, out the door at 5:30 getting to work at around 6:00, or about 10 minutes ahead of the rain. So, to avoid getting wet, we adjusted our schedule just enough to cause us to get wet.