Didn’t Make It to Oz Last Night

Posted on by Jordan

The weather forecast was pretty dire yesterday afternoon. As the evening progressed, the sky to the west started to look rather dire too. Heather and I were setting on our bed, looking out the window while keeping one eye on the weather maps via. the laptop. We have a rather good view looking west, there is basically nothing blocking our line of sight for miles.

At some point during the more exciting part of the storm, I started pondering the fact that our apartment was rather exposed. The complex is named “Whispering Hills” I started thinking of new, more accurate names:

  • Wind-Raked Hills
  • Wind Buffeted Hills
  • Roaring Hills

I am sure there are more, but I can’t seem to think of them right now. In the end, the storm didn’t amount to much more than some wind and rain. I was thinking the entire time that I should take pictures, but the lighting wouldn’t have been great, and wind is remarkably hard to photograph. It would have been ideal to have some sort of web-cam rig doing a picture every five seconds, then I could have stitched together a video showing how quickly it got dark, then light again once things blew over.

-Jordan

Notes

Posted on by Jordan

Well, its Friday the 13th.

The forecast is saying 100% chance of snow today. Walking through the parking lot, nearly everyone seems to have broken down and washed their cars in the last few days of +40f temps. I wonder if the car-washing karma has an exponential effect, and we will have a blizzard today. On the other hand, basically every school in Lincoln and Omaha preemptively closed, so that should mean this storm completely fizzles.

In other news, we still don’t have any wedding pictures. I have some hope they will come in the mail today or tomorrow, but who knows.

-Jordan

Ice Storm!

Posted on by Jordan

Omaha, got hit with an ice storm that slowly turned to snow last night.

By the time I got home from work, everything had a thin layer of ice on it, and the storm wasn’t showing any signs of letting up. It was really the kind of weather you stay at home and drink hot chocolate in. I didn’t have any hot chocolate though, so I went to the gym. Heather apparently also lacked hot beverages, and went to the gym in Blair. Getting home from the gym was a little exciting, but the advantage to driving when you shouldn’t is that there aren’t too many other cars on the road.

This morning, it only took roughly 25 minutes  to get enough ice off my Escape to consider it drivable. I think it would have been a lot longer, but when the engine runs that long it gets warm and makes a big difference in how hard it is to get the ice chipped off the windshield. I don’t know how my car was in the perfect place to get this effect, but the caked icy snow stuff was over two inches thick over my windshield and hood. I have never seen anything like it. Luckily it was really brittle, so it broke up fairly quickly, but I was still left with a conventional layer of ice covering the entire vehicle after that.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch… or I mean… In Blair, Heather was discovering her car wouldn’t traverse the farm roads at all. Local family members helped get her to work, but not until much later in the morning.

Hopefully we are getting all the nasty travel ending weather out of the way now… you only get one bad ice storm per winter right!? I can’t imagine another one come January, especially late January. 🙂

-Jordan

Speaking of Winter

Posted on by Jordan

I mentioned the apartment being cold yesterday. It still is by the way, but what I wanted to post on today was the window situation.

back at the end of June, there was a major wind storm that knocked out power for most of Omaha for a few days. Some parts of town were without power for over a week. Lucky for Heather and I, she never lost power, and I only lost power for about a day. Heather’s apartment (now ‘our’) was however rather exposed to the wind. The storm did some impressive things to the building, such as tearing off siding and breaking two windows in the bedroom. They were double pane glass, so nothing to into the apartment, and functionally they were still windows. I took a picture of them the day after the storm:

img_0142

(well one of the windows anyway, you get the idea) As you can see from the picture, The window is very visibly broken. So visible we could see the broken window from almost a block away when we went out to look things over the next day after the storm.

Fast forward to November, and I move into the apartment. My first night sleeping there I could here a strange rattling sound coming from the windows. The next morning I peek behind the blinds, and there is still a pile of broken glass where the second pane should be! I have no idea how the repair team missed something so glaringly obvious, but nobody realized there was a broken window or two on the building after 4 months. I talked to the office later that week, and they didn’t doubt for a second how the window had been broken, or that it was broken. It took them over a week to actually get it fixed, but at least its fixed now!

The point of all this is just to say that I am happy the window is fixed now! I don’t know how much insulation value the double pane windows selected by the apartment actually provide, but it has to be better than the pile-o-broken-glass we had before.

-Jordan

Snow!

Posted on by Jordan

(If you really wanted to nit pic we had some dustings before, but they don’t count)

Today was the first snow of the year! I can’t say that I am really that excited about it, but its still kind of fun to see. It made the drive to work rather long and slow, but my fellow drivers were being cautious, and I won’t complain about that. It’s much preferable to the other alternative.

Also, it is still brutally cold, not quite the -4 we had yesterday, but today still saw negative temperatures. The thermostat in the apartment still says the temp is the same, but it feels colder. I think maybe there is just a bubble of warm air around the thermostat. On a recent trip to Blair I helped Heather figure out how to hook up the electric blanket her bed was equipped with. Right now I have to say I am somewhat jealous of her blanket, although I would settle for Heather staying with me in Omaha.

I guess it is kind of nice to have Heather in Blair on days like today, when driving conditions are questionable. She only has a few miles to get to work instead of 30ish. Sadly I can’t really think of anything else good about having her MILES away, but maybe the cold is inhibiting my creativity.

-Jordan

YAY For Hats

Posted on by Jordan

Its December and I finally replaced the stocking hat I lost moving over to the new apartment a few days back.

this may sound dumb, but I have been amazed how much warmer I am with it. I think I wore a stocking hat last year when it got cold because it seemed like a good idea, and maybe even because my ears got cold. Those were the reasons I replaced my hat, but I also discovered that the 10 degree days we have been having don’t feel nearly as cold when I am wearing a hat.

your thinking “why is this worth sharing?” and really I have no answer to that. However the cold was killing me, I kept thinking this winter was going to be the end of me. It just felt like I couldn’t hold up to the weather as well as I expected to be able to. I thought maybe loosing 60+ pounds could have been part of it. Somehow being in better shape seemed like with better circulation and whatnot I should hold up better to the cold, even without the extra mass to dampen the cold.

As it turns out, a good hat is all it took. At some point I will break down and wear insulated gloves too, but not until the temperatures is at least single digits… Hopefully I can hold out for the negatives before resorting to that. You have to save some way of counter-escalating things 🙂

-Jordan

And It Just Gets Worse

Posted on by Jordan

I suppose I should take the hint and stop complaining about weather on the blog. I said it was cold yesterday, and now today is not only colder, but driving to work required scraping my windows!

Scraping ice isn’t a chore I really mind that much, but doing it today was depressing. Its not even November yet, I didn’t want to start doing this every day quite yet. Then again, Saturday was nice enough I didn’t even need a coat, so I shouldn’t act like its going to be bitterly cold until March. The weather will swing the other way a few times I am sure.

I might have my projector sold, but it will be a few days until I know for sure. Selling off a few things I own, and cutting ourselves down to just one round of rent and utilities for the remaining time until the wedding is going to do wonders for our goal of paying off all our debt ASAP. Dave Ramsey would be proud I am sure 🙂

Only three more days until I move, and I am maybe 15% packed… you would think I could have used some of that time last week when Heather was gone to get that take care of, but I really didn’t accomplish much on that front. Moving is more fun if you wait till the last minute anyway, right?

-Jordan

(Doing these rambling multi-topic posts is messing up my nice clean plan for categories and tags, you would think the editor would crack down on that)

The Pedestrian Bridge

Posted on by Jordan

Sunday night Heather and I decided to go for a walk, as we seem to be running a surplus of amazingly nice fall weekends right now.

Unfortunately, we were a little slow getting left to go for a walk and it was getting dark, making the neighborhood we were going to walk in sort of a bad choice. Our hastily composed plan ‘b’ was to head downtown to investigate the walking bridge over the Missouri river that we had heard people talk about.

Our first problem was we had no idea where the bridge actually was. The only directions we could remember was that you “can get to it from the ConAgra park.” About half the park is closed at night, so we walked a long ways around the park, going the wrong way hoping to find an open gate. We could see people walking along the path across the main lake, so we were pretty sure there was some way in. After giving up on our initial search, we saw the bridge peaking through the trees! The only problem was we had been walking in completely the wrong direction for over 10 minutes, and the bridge looked to be about 4 miles away. We also had no idea how to get to it still.

We walked across a few streets, under some bridges, and across a set of railroad tracks, finally getting ourselves onto the proper path to get to the bridge. From the path we could see that none of the obstacles mentioned in the preceding sentence were necessary, as there was a cool raised walkway that let you hop straight from the open half of the ConAgra park onto the path we were now standing on. I would recommend using the raised path after dark, our path was a little sketchy, and lacked sidewalks for about half the way.

All that got us only part of the way to the bridge, but at least we could really see it at this point. Sadly we didn’t bring a camera, so you are on your own to find out what the bridge looks like, but it is fairly cool in the dark. we walked across the bridge, discovered that you cant see much looking off the bridge in the dark, and that there isn’t anything on the Iowa side right now.

Heading back we found, for the second time that night, that the view retracing our steps was a lot better than it had been going out. You get a rather amazing view of the Omaha downtown at night when walking back from the Iowa side of the bridge.

Before heading home we spent a few minutes setting in the dark watching the big fountain in the lake at the middle of the ConAgra park. It made for the perfect way to end the evening.

you really can’t complain about having a day that broke 60 degrees, was as beautiful as Sunday was, and that you could set on a parkbench without a coat on, when it comes this late in October. I just hope this is a sign of weather to come, and we aren’t using up all our unusually temperate days before the wedding. It would be nice to get one of those freak 50-degree-plus days January 24th 2009 😉

-Jordan

Fog!

Posted on by Jordan

Maybe this seems mundane, but personally I have found it to be really really cool this morning.

The fog was unbelievably thick on the way to the gym around 5:30 today ( we started a little later because our schedule was a little more flexible today). Easily the thickest fog I have ever driven in, I honestly thought the streetlights were out on the next block almost the entire way there. Visibility was maybe 40-50 feet and then just black.

I probably wouldn’t have posted anything about that here, but the fog was just as thick almost 3 hours later when I was driving to work! Sometimes visibility dropped down below 50 feet, it was honestly a little scary considering how heavy traffic was… you really couldn’t see much.

-Jordan

September

Posted on by Jordan

A few days into Sep and we have skipped our morning workout two of two opportunities to try and get a little more sleep 🙂 I can’t believe how hard it’s been to catch back up these days. 

Also, today was the first day I walked outside in the morning and thought “WOW it feels like fall!”  I know it’s a little dumb to be making a post about the weather, but it seemed like an event worth remembering what day it was this year

-Jordan