Barring some meteorological miracle, Hurricane Ike is set to be one for the ages.
We’ve got a lot of friends and even some family down that way. Hope all of you in the path of the storm will be safe.
(By the way Jonathan, looks like you’re going to get to experience a hurricane before your sister does 🙂...
I’ll admit, it’s so ironic you have to wonder if there’s some karma at work here.
A few weeks ago one of James Dobson’s cronies made a video and posted it on the Focus on the Family website. In the clip Stuart Shepard, who does a lot of multimedia production for the “ministry”, asks Christians to pray for “abundant rain, torrential rain… flood-advisory rain” in the Denver area on the night of Barack Obama’s open-air acceptance speech at the Democrat National Convention.
Here’s Shepard’s video, which he claimed was done for humor (but I can’t find anything funny about it at all)…
As anyone who caught his speech will know, Obama enjoyed terrific weather for his address, which aired to what some are saying is one of the record highs for political speeches before a televised audience.
But if Shepard’s cry to Heaven was echoed by his fellow evangelicals, they’re ...
You guys are definitely in this blogger’s thoughts and prayers this weekend.
I’m now hearing that Hurricane Gustav has gone from a tropical storm all the way to a Category 4 within the space of the past 12 hours. That in the past 3 hours alone the central pressure has dropped 9 millibars and Gustav still hasn’t hit the warmer Gulf waters yet.
The projected tracks also have the storm going west of New Orleans. If the east side of the storm gets too close, the town which is still cleaning up after Katrina three years ago will likely get hit even worse this time around.
Lord willing, this thing will fizzle-out into a relatively weak system (it’s happened before). Three years ago I went nuts chronicling Katrina on this blog, and truth be known I’m still a bit burned-out by the experience. It’s not something that I want to ...
As you might have heard by now, four Boy Scouts were killed yesterday when a tornado tore through the Little Sioux Scout Ranch in Iowa.
When I did the Boy Scout camp thing years ago, at Cherokee Scout Reservation, we had a tornado alarm. I think that I only heard it used once during a drill. I don’t think any of us ever expected that there’d be a reason why it would be used for real.
I’ve come to have a whole new appreciation for that alarm having been there now.
To our friends and brothers in the Mid-America Council and their families who are going through this right now, please know that our thoughts and prayers are with you, from here in the Old North State Council and beyond....
Last night north-central North Carolina got severely thrashed by a line of thunderstorms, and that might be putting it too mildly. It was more like a series of supercells that rolled through the region. There were numerous reports of tornadoes that touched down, particularly in Guilford County directly south of us and there’s been at least one death reported there. The local television stations were providing live coverage well into the early morning hours, including Reidsville’s own WGSR Star 39: major props to Matt Smith, Mark Childrey and Charles Roark for all that they did to keep the viewers in this area informed.
For most of the evening our TV was tuned to WXLV, the ABC affiliate out of Winston-Salem, so we could catch this week’s Lost. The teasers had implied that it was going to be a Locke-centric episode, which always means that it’s going to be a ...
The meteorologists saw it coming five days ahead. A high-pressure Arctic system was heading south across the Midwest states, brought down low by a jet stream from Canada. It was set to converge with intense low pressure over the Gulf of Mexico, and was then projected to head north and east… bringing massive amounts of moisture and cold temperature with it.
But for most of us here in north-central North Carolina at the time, this meant nothing. It had been at least three years since we had seen any decent snowfall. There were many young children who couldn’t even remember what snow looked like: they had no concept of the stuff. After three years without snow, it was beginning to seem like a mythic substance that one only found in exotic locales.
Nobody that I knew ...
Taken just after 7 a.m. EST outside our apartment in Reidsville, North Carolina…
Temperature was 38 degrees Fahrenheit at midnight and it’s been dropping since. It’s now just below freezing and it’s not supposed to get any warmer for the rest of the day. The driveway is already slippery in many spots. The Rockingham County School System canceled classes for today late last night, so Lisa isn’t going in. We won’t be getting out today.
But Lisa went and pillaged the local supermarket and Wal-Mart last night for supplies. We’ve got plenty of food. And we’ve got plenty of things to entertain ourselves with (like the Wii that I got Lisa for Christmas, the one that I camped out overnight at the GameStop in Greensboro to buy it the next morning :-). And, for once, I don’t have any projects that I’m rushing to get finished. And no bad guys ...
… and according to the Weather Channel website it’s 72 degrees and sunny.
Normal temperature for this time of year should be in the 40s. 50s at the most. Not this. And the high tomorrow is supposed to be 78.
Gotta wonder if we’re going to have to make up for this sometime this winter. By the way, when I was in Texas last week the daytime temperatures got up to the 70s, then dropped on Sunday and Monday to a high of about 50. So now Texas is cold and North Carolina is way too warm....
That’s how it it was at one point here in Reidsville, North Carolina this afternoon. I’m also hearing that some thermometers in the area reached as high as 107.
Today is very much the hottest weather that I can remember around here in quite a long time....
It actually started last night about 8 o’clock, with a few flakes falling. There was a light cover of the white stuff on our vehicles and in a lot of places on the ground when we woke up this morning. The past few days have been unseasonably cold for early April.
We didn’t have any really hard snowstorms this winter. Maybe we’ll make up for it next year. In the meantime, the snow this morning has been a pretty thing to behold....