I missed it yesterday, but I guess the Today Show had George (the first) Bush and his, um “lovely” wife Bar on for Valentines’s Day. Because, when you think of love, hugs, kisses, sweetness, and light, you think of Barbara Bush. Right? Although I couldn’t bring myself to watch the replay, in looking at the photo, I must say that George finally looks old enough to be married to Barb. Well, good for them – I’m glad they’re so gosh darn happy. I mean, look at what happiness they’ve managed to set forth upon the planet in their 100 years of marriage.
Not all of yesterday’s news was of the touchy-feely kind, of course. Mostly there was Obama’s budget and the knee-jerk reaction to it by the Republicans. I can’t quite force myself to look at any of it. I guess they’ve finally worn me down, and now I just want them to al shut up and go away. I’m screwed no matter what, so just let me go to my job and die inside (and out, come to think of it) a little more every day.
Going to work really shouldn’t fill me with so much despair, but it does. And it takes more than Monday to get over it. By Wednesday night it isn’t too bad as long as I try not to think about it, but then Thursday I start to think about how short the weekend is.
And they keep flaunting these lottery commercials in my face. 🙁
Oh well, I hope it didn’t snow enough to plow the driveway last night, ‘cuz goddamn it, I’m not gonna do it. For one thing, I’d need to struggle with either putting the chains on one tire, or taking them off the other, and for another thing it’s f*cking cold out (again). Mid forties yesterday, single digits today. The only time I see daylight is on the ride in and the ride home (which of course is better than it was a few weeks ago, where, if I wanted daylight, I had to look at a webcam).
Clifford the cat spent the night hunting ( and occasionally catching) my toes. Not much sleep! And, the boss is coming to my school today. Things could be worse but they could certainly be better, too. :billcat:
pj, my sister was telling me about something called a roof rake yesterday. I also hear that there is some moderate weather coming through but you seems to have your own microclimate.
I think Maron is supposed to be on with Seder this morning on Majority Report 2.0. at 11:30 AM. They are ‘feuding’.
Yes, roof rakes are in theory very nice. Assuming you don’t have snow that’s very deep and you only want to get the ends of the roof to prevent ice dams (or you can deal with an extremely long pole – minds out of the gutter, please). When the snow gets deep and packed down, they become very difficult to use.
Fortunately, a couple days of fairly warmish weather got rid of a lot of my roof snow.
Yesterday started out warm and sunny, then turned rainy.
By the time I got out of work yesterday, it was cold, windy, and it was snowing very hard (both in the sense of it being near zero visibility, and that it hurt like hell when it hit you in the face).
Last night, temps dropped down really low, and it was very very cold.
The combination of wet and frigid made for ice, and a couple inches of snow on top of that made for very slippery conditions. On the way in today, there were accidents all over the place, the side streets were like ice rinks (I hope the money they saved in salt went to fund tax cuts for some rich people), and, well, it just plain sucked.
Took Granny well over an hour to get to work (normally a half hour or so), and it took me almost an hour, though my commute is a bit longer (being a manly man born and bred to drive in the snow, I of course am better adapted to this nonsense. In fact, having snow tires this year almost seems like cheating).
Tomorrow is supposed to be warm again – up into the 30’s, and they say 50’ish by Friday (which I’ll believe when it gets here – they tend to change their minds a lot).
Tonight is garbage night, and the weather always sucks on garbage night, so we’ll see how it goes.
Mid February is always a tough time, because we’ve generally had quite enough of winter, thank you very much (and this one’s been a bit tougher than the past few – we’re getting wimpy – and moving to an area that appears to be under a constant lake effect snow band has made things more difficult still, plus I no longer have much of the blubber that made the cold weather tolerable), but there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel.
Some of our worst weather is typically ahead of us at this point, and there’s the potential of pretty shitty weather through (and beyond) St. Patrick’s Day (except by March, there are usually enough warm days in between the cold ones to keep our spirits up). I’ve seen my share of April snowstorms (typically nasty, since April snow tends to be very wet and heavy), and of course there was that 8 inches of snow one Mother’s Day that one year.
By Memorial Day, we should have turned the corner from too damn cold to too damn hot.
I did sort of laugh when she mentioned it and thought it might be like bringing a pea shooter to a knife fight. My solution would have been a hose connected to the hot water but I can imagine the havoc that would bring to the purse and otherwise.
Well, problem there is you have a lot more volume of frozen water in the form of snow than you could possibly hit with hot water. Which means that the snow would mostly turn that hot water into really cold water and then ice (assuming it was cold out), rather than melt the snow.
A BTU is the amount of energy (in the form of heat) required to raise (or lower) the temperature of 1 pound of water 1 degree F, but it takes way more energy to change the state. In other words, to go from water to ice (or ice to water) or from water to steam (or to condense the steam to water).
Converting 1 pound of ice at 32 degrees to water at 32 degrees, would require 144 BTUs. No temperature change – but lots of BTUs.
This is kind of simplified, but let’s say you had a roof that was 80 feet x 40 feet with a 3 foot deep pile of snow that was 10% water. That would be close to 60,000 pounds. To turn that to liquid water would require something like 8.6 million BTUs.
If you had water at 120 degrees, you’d have something like 88 BTUs per pound to change the temperature from 120 to 32. So you’d need something like 97,000 pounds of water. Water weighs about 8 pounds per gallon, so that’s like 12,000 gallons of hot water.
But you’d kinda need to have a helicopter drop it on there all at once. I don’t think you could get enough volume through the hose, and then you’d mostly be turning that hot water to ice (depending on how cold it was out).
Another reason to avoid South Dakota.
Not that anywhere will be safe from these people before long. Especially with Neville Chamberlain (and that’s giving him credit for being an appeaser and not a collaborator – I have yet to decide which he is) in the White House
An ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure, how about a heated driveway to prevent the snow from building up in the first place?
Of course the real solution is to win the lottery and hire people to do all that snow removal.
I’d love to install a heated glycol system to melt the snow. Both the driveway and the roof. You could have it work off a heat and moisture sensor. So below a certain temp, if it detects moisture, the pumps kick on and run until everything’s melted and dry. That’s what our heliport has (at work, not at home – still working on the home heliport), and the newer parking garages. I imagine that’s expensive to operate, but it’s better than hiring people to do it, ‘cuz then you don’t have to deal with people.
The hunt is on for a gas giant up to four times the mass of Jupiter thought to be lurking in the outer Oort Cloud, the most remote region of the solar system. The orbit of Tyche (pronounced ty-kee), would be 15,000 times farther from the Sun than the Earth’s, and 375 times farther than Pluto’s, which is why it hasn’t been seen so far.
But scientists now believe the proof of its existence has already been gathered by a Nasa space telescope, Wise, and is just waiting to be analysed.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/up-telescope-search-begins-for-giant-new-planet-2213119.html
Did the roof raking on Saturday.
Saturday night I was conflicted whether to see Gang of Four or Boz Scaggs. Then I saw that Maron was at the Mall of America. Ended up going to the Boz. What Can I Say? .. What Can I Do? :bow: