Weird Weather

Last Friday we closed the office in anticipation of the huge snow and ice storm that was being forecast. It was supposed to start snowing Thursday morning and not stop until late Friday, or maybe even Saturday. Well, it finally started snowing midday Friday, after a lot of rain and some ice. Here's the view I saw from my front porch Friday evening... isn't it pretty?

Saturday I took a walk to get some pictures of what was going on. You can see the whole set here, but I've included a small sample below. You'll notice that there was a lot of beauty to see, and you can also see in one picture that the ice on the tree limbs was as big around as my finger. I measured almost 5½" of snow on a picnic table in my back yard, and the ice must have been about ¼" under that. Needless to say, we stayed home, although as you can see from the pictures, the roads were basically clear by Saturday afternoon. We also had a couple of pretty mean icicles in the backyard... longer than my yardstick!

Here's my favorite picture of the day for irony:


I think tryouts may be postponed.

Needless to say, two 5+ inch snowstorms in less than a month (see this post for more about the snowstorm a month earlier) is odd weather for Tulsa. We've also had several extremely foggy days. Today was one of them. Look what I found when I got downtown for work!

This morning:

Similar pictures in clear conditions:

If you want to see the whole foggy batch, look for it right here.

Less snot - more ice

Monday morning I stayed home from work to take Hannah to the doctor... she had been congested and coughing since the Wednesday or Thursday before, and because she would cough and cry during the night, nobody in the house was getting very much sleep. Turns out she just had some congestion, and swollen tonsils probably irritated by the coughing and making it worse. We've known for a long time that her air passages are a little narrow, so every bit counts for her. :) They gave us a prescription for some medicine, and she's feeling much better... but now Cathy spent so much time sleep-deprived that she's feeling sick! Everybody is slowly getting better, although there is still quite a bit of coughing happening around here.

Tonight in Tulsa is literally the calm before the storm. Tomorrow we are expected to start getting rain, then freezing rain, then sleet, then maybe a little snow by Friday morning. Everybody is thinking about the horrible ice storm we had in 2007; depending on which weather forecast you watch, this is either expected to be as bad as that one, or not really quite as bad. The power company is much better prepared this time; they've been cutting tree limbs more regularly since then, and they have already called in extra help from nearby unaffected areas, so if people start to lose power, PSO should be able to get it back up much more quickly than they did then. We'll see what happens; my main concern in these kinds of situations is to make sure we keep warm if the power goes out. Luckily for us, our heater runs on natural gas... WOO-HOO! But our blower is electric... D'OH!! So when the power goes out, we don't have heat in the house. Worst case scenario, we have relatives with fireplaces and we'll go over to one of their houses until the power is back up.

Fox 23 is predicting that we'll wind up with 2"-4" of snow/sleet on top of .25" of ice before it's over with. It will be below freezing all weekend, and dip back above 32 by about Sunday afternoon. Low of nine degrees Saturday evening! Should be exciting! :)

The Jones Flood of 2010

I was at my Mom and Dad's house last Sunday, installing a printer driver on her computer, when the call came. Cathy had gone to the store, leaving me and Mikey and Hannah over at Mom & Dad's so I could fix up her computer, and she had just gotten home. "Come home!" she said, and I could hear the stress in her voice. "There's a flood in the garage, and water is spraying everywhere!"

Cathy has been known, from time to time, to overreact to water in the garage; one time the "flood" she reported wasn't enough water to quench a grown-up's thirst on a hot day. But I could tell she was totally freaking out this time, so I hurried as quickly as I could. Turns out, her stress was justified. When I got there I looked through the window into the garage to see a vertical slot in the wall above the clothes washer, and water was indeed spraying out of it at an alarming rate. There was so much water it was running down the driveway, freezing in place and making the driveway even more treacherous than it already was! After the snow on Christmas Eve, our time above freezing had been limited, so one of the pipes that supplied water to the laundry had frozen and broken. The water was shooting out of it with so much force that it had drilled a hole in the sheet rock and it actually was spraying out into the garage.

In our nine years of living in this house, our garage has only flooded one time before. A year or so ago, it rained and rained for several weeks straight, and the water table was so high that we got some water in the garage. That was NOTHING compared to this. We shut off the water at the street (Dad had come with me) and surveyed the damage. Our garage is a good inch lower than the driveway, so you can imagine if the water was draining off onto the driveway... it was pretty deep! When I stepped down into it wearing my boots, it covered the toes. I grabbed my snow shovel, which was right near the side door of the garage, and started shoveling out water; I figured it was the quickest way to get a bunch of water out of there. It actually worked fairly well; I got most of the water out in oh, maybe an hour or so.

I had learned some things in that last flood, and the main something I had learned was this: wet cardboard must be gotten rid of as immediately as possible. This is because cardboard, left wet on concrete for a week or so, becomes very slimy and disgusting, and anything that is inside that cardboard mildews and has to be thrown away. So once I had the water under control, I started trying to get things out of the wet boxes and get them out of the garage. Knowing that pipes were likely breaking all over town, I called a friend of ours who is a contractor, remodeling houses for a big part of his livelihood. I needed to get the pipe fixed as soon as possible... I couldn't afford to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday for a plumber while my family lived in a house with no water!

Dwayne answered the phone with a groggy voice. He had spent the weekend on Guard duty, and he had been taking a nap. I told him basically what was going on, and he came over right away. Long story short, he wasn't able to fix the problem that day (although he tried) because he didn't have the part he needed, but when the supply store opened the next day, he went out and got the part he needed, and we were fine before noon on Monday. It's awesome to have friends who are so competent at what they do, and so willing to help out a friend in dire straits! He is definitely getting a meal out with us in the near future!

The one thing that really differentiated this flood from the last one was that this was clean water, not muddy rainwater that had seeped in from outside. Most of our stuff was also already up off the ground from that former episode, too, so although I threw out a lot of cardboard and set a lot of stuff out to dry, not very much of any consequence got thrown away (in fact, a lot of stuff that I did throw away wasn't as much water-damaged as just needed to go anyway). It was kind of like spring cleaning in January! And I did find some old pictures from several different eras of my life, Cathy's life, and our life together, and I got to take inventory of all the CDs full of pictures that were out there. I found some pictures from the wedding that originally brought me, Kevin and Candi (and Littlefoot) to Tulsa, and some even older pictures of me from high school. I found a Goodbye card that my youth group gave me when I was leaving Shreveport to go to college at ORU. I found a report Cathy wrote on marriage for a class when she was about 17 (VERY interesting reading!) and a bunch of bubble-gum cards with pictures from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey. It was fun to experience and share some of those things again!

One week later, there are still some things out there that are damp. Some of the cardboard is still outside; the garbage collection will only take so much at once. But things are basically back to normal; the garage is much clearer; and I'm committed, once it warms up, to doing a real spring cleaning. This is a great excuse to simplify and remove some of the junk from our life!

Big Ugly Tulsa Rainstorm

I looked out the window of my office about 10am today and saw this:



Definitely NOT a 10am look! For comparison, on a normal day it looks more like this. It was looking more like dusk... except for the ugly black clouds just above the BOk building (you can't really make them out in the picture). They were really moving... kind of boiling, and heading east as fast as they could!



It started raining off in the distance before it got where I was, but when it got into downtown proper, it came in with a vengeance:



It was REALLY coming down in sheets... it was very exciting to watch (from inside!) I even called Cathy to tell her about it! But it didn't last long... pretty soon a beautiful ribbon of sunshine peeked through:



If you want to see these pictures plus a few more, here's a link to the whole batch.

My birthday was great, by the way... I'll tell about that in another post. We haven't told you about Cub World - we went camping with Cub Scout Pack 137 last weekend! I've got lots of pictures with actual people in them lined up to upload... stay tuned!

Big Easter Weekend 2009

What a weekend!

It actually started on Thursday, when unexpectedly (to me, anyway) my boss was no longer my boss. I'm still in the same position, but my immediate supervisor moved into a part-time/consultant status, and I was going to have a new manager. So THAT was a crazy day! Friday was Good Friday and the office was closed, so we mostly vegged out at home, but SATURDAY was Cathy's birthday! Mikey had a soccer game at 8am (41 degrees... in April?!?... BRR! ...but they won it 1 to 0) and then he went to Lowe's and built a birdhouse, and then he and I stopped at the store to pick up Mama's birthday present from him.

Mikey got her a beautiful pair of earrings (she wore them that evening to dinner and then again on Easter morning!). My gift to her was a shopping trip! I gave her a little bit of cash, enough for an outfit or maybe two if you got something on a good sale, and we went to a couple of fluffy lady clothing stores with her. Having the family along was supposed to be part of the gift, but Mikey was a little bit disruptive at first (he calmed down later). And we had a really happy surprise when we ran into Cathy's brother's wife Theresa at one of the stores! She's been really sick and we haven't gotten to see her much, so that was quite a treat. She was with two of her daughters, too, and we love them and were glad to see them. Theresa kissed Hannah on the cheeks so much I wasn't sure if she was going to raise a bruise! That evening we went out to eat at Charleston's, and got full until we were ready to pop.

Easter was great! Cathy got up early so she wouldn't have to rush so much getting ready, and we were at sound check on time (!), and the service was AWESOME from start to finish. I think that was the most fun I've had in praise & worship since Brian and Nancy came on board at Grace (which is not to minimize other services, but this one was TOTALLY maximized! I was SWEATING when we were done!) Pastor Bob preached one of the most awesome Easter messages I ever remember hearing him preach, and we had a great lesson in Sunday School as well.

(I touched on how cold it was Saturday morning... chilly but not windy, and very sunny which counteracted the cold a bit. And by noon it had gone up like 25 degrees and was in the 60s! Sunday morning was almost the opposite, though... rainy to the point of big puddles of standing water on the sidewalks at Grace, chilly again, but breezy as well. Have I mentioned, Welcome to Oklahoma? And Monday it was chilly to mild again, and dry. WHATEVER.)

After church we met Mom and Dad at the little church they're attending; they were having lunch together as a church and we got invited. Unfortunately for us we got there at the tail end of the meal; there was lots of food left but the people were trickling out and heading home. We did get to monopolize the pastor for a while, though, which was cool for us. Everybody is really nice there. They even gave Mikey and Hannah each an Easter basket! (Monday night I put the Easter basket they gave Hannah, which is plush like a stuffed animal and has a head like a purple hippo, to good use... Hannah and I played "put the plastic eggs in the basket" while Mikey worked on homework.)

That reminds me... I forgot one of the big parts of Saturday afternoon! It was the annual Grace "Egg-stravaganza", which I guess you could call an "Easter egg hunt" but in practice it's more of an "Easter candy foot race." You may remember it from last year. Anyway, Cathy chose to go with Mikey and I stayed with Hannah in the "walkers to twos" area. He did the run-and-collect thing, and Hannah, who is walking just barely, did the "get carried and sit and put the candy I can reach in the basket even though I've got no idea what's going on" thing. Next year she'll be totally into it; this year it was a bit much for her to take in, but she had fun anyway, as did Mikey. The whole thing was a hiccup in Cathy's birthday, but after having that birthday her whole life, having it intruded on by Easter is no surprise. The surprise is when Easter happens in March like last year or something, and it doesn't step on her birthday!

So how were things with the new boss Monday? He seems like a really great guy, and I think I'm going to enjoy working with him. His name is Travis and he knows about this blog, so I'll tell you the REAL story when he turns his head. Hi Travis! Wow it was great working with you Monday! Don't forget to give me a good performance review at the end of the year!!

First Steps

What an eventful day! This evening, Hannah surprised us all by standing by herself for a good twenty or thirty seconds! Here's the picture:



After that she took three or four steps without any help and totally under control, and then she did some walker-toy lifts, just to keep the old blood moving:



We were TOTALLY excited for her! Now if she'll just give up the Hannah-ese and start speaking English so we can understand her...

The weather reports we saw tonight said that Tulsa got in the neighborhood of 7" of snow today. There were areas nearby (I think they said Mannford) that got as much as 10" in this one day. Last time we had that much snow at once was like three years ago, and that sure wasn't March.

Snow in March???

It Starts Snowing In Our Back Yard

At about 8:00 this morning, it started to snow. The video is of the very beginning of it, when you could still see green grass. It kept snowing, and kept snowing, and kept snowing! In fact, as I type this, it's almost 5pm, and it hasn't stopped yet! Mikey and I went by Meme's house so I could break her computer, and while we were there he made a snowman! Later we went home, and what did he do? He made ANOTHER snowman!



Here's a batch of pictures of the morning's events.

Merry Christmas, Tulsa!

For most of the day today, March 12 2009, it was SNOWING in Tulsa! Generally in Tulsa we don't get snow until after January 1, but it's a little unusual for it to snow this late in the winter. But it did give me a good excuse to do something I've been needing to do anyway... post our family pictures from Christmas! Here they are... or take a look at the whole set here!

        

Soccer on the Tundra

Saturday. It's 6:46am. It's 37 degrees outside. I've been up since a little after 6. In one hour, we will be out at the soccer fields, and at 8am Mikey's team will be playing in the first game of the championship tournament for the fall league of Foot Action Soccer.

Why we were so blessed as to get into the 8am game, I have no idea. Needless to say we're going to dress warm and bring blankets. Hannah is going over to Meme's house, so she won't be out in it. The tournament is double-elimination, so we may be out there for much of the day... we play until we lose twice (if we lose at all!) The coach wants us to just hang out at the soccer fields pretty much for the day, because after the first game we don't really know when we'll be called to play our next game! It's not supposed to top 50 degrees all day long.

Pray for us. Pray hard. :)

Welcome to Oklahoma

Today, 7am: 65°
Today, 5pm: 91°

Welcome to Oklahoma. State motto: if you don't like the weather, wait a minute.

Cub Day Camp: Day 1

Today was our first day at Day Camp 2008! It was a soggy mess all day long, but we had a lot of fun!

When Cathy dropped us off, it had already been raining for some time. Add that to the incredible amount of rain we've already had this year, and it makes for a lot of high water and a lot of mud puddles! Add Cub Scouts to that and you've got a recipe for... well, a recipe for a lot of wet Cub Scouts, anyway! When we got there, there was actually some doubt as to whether we were actually going to have day camp at all... there was some lightning and there were some ugly-looking storm cells on the TV stations' radar. Ultimately the decision was made to go ahead and have camp, and it was the right choice... we would have all been very disappointed otherwise. Actually the rain made it nice and cool, and although we occasionally had to put up the umbrellas and don the ponchos, and the kids mostly wound up damp and muddy by the end of the day, sloshy and refreshed was probably better than sweaty and exhausted. Mikey and I were flying solo; Pack 990 decided to not go this year (I think maybe because we had some pretty low turnout last year) so Mikey and I were paired up with Pack 933 for the week. Once we found them and got our cool camp shirts, we were ready for the day.

They started out with a flag ceremony (it's kind of a Scout-y thing to do, you know) and then we went on to our activities. We had archery, slingshot shooting (the real kind of slingshot like you get at the sporting goods story; it was kind of substituted for BB guns. My understanding is that the BB guy didn't show today for some reason), fishing (nobody caught anything), crafts, "tools" (some Boy Scouts showed the kids a bunch of tools and taught them to hammer a nail), a "skill" (we showed the kids some stuff about how to raise an American Flag), games, and the part the kids liked best: "FREE TIME!" Free time consisted mostly of running around like a bunch of crazies. Since that is one of Mikey's specialties, he was a helpful example of how to properly accomplish this!

We finished kind of early, but since Cathy had the car today (Hannah had a doctor visit) we had to wait for a while, so Mikey had plenty of time to play with some of the other kids. On the way back out I took some pictures of all the water that was out there. There's a little creek running through the camp that... well, the little creek isn't so little right now! It looks like a total waterfall. Don't miss the pictures!

I'm Soggy

What a morning!

The Tulsa area has gotten a lot of rain this year. I think the grand total is something like a gazillion and a half inches or something like that. So it was no surprise to have another line of storms come barreling through last night. Unfortunately, the ground is REALLY saturated, so we get a lot of water staying on the top... especially in our back yard, which has a dip in the back anyway. And in our side yard, which has never managed to grow grass back since we had our cocker spaniel Molly like three years ago, so it's a total mud pit.

So we've lived in our house seven years, almost seven and a half... and we have NEVER gotten water in our garage until a week or so ago. It's coming in from that side yard, which is a half-inch deep in water. This morning when I got up I had to go out there and get a bath towel out of the dryer, and discovered to my horror that the water had gotten high enough that it had soaked into a bunch of boxes of stuff out there. Mostly my stuff that got moved out there when we were clearing out what is now Hannah's room. Some boxes of textbooks and who knows what all else. I had to go to work so I had nowhere near the time to try and salvage anything... thank goodness the washer and dryer are a couple of inches up from the ground! Realistically, if the stuff out there had been truly important it probably would be inside and in use... thankfully I never put my music equipment out there. So hopefully if anything got trashed, it was kind of extra junk anyway. I guess I'll find out tonight.

So I got ready to go... running a little late because I had been sloshing around out there in the garage trying to see what got messed up... threw my lunch into my bag and ran most of the way to the bus stop. Good thing I did, too... I got to the bus stop at almost the same time as the bus did. Partway there I noticed that my leg was getting pretty wet... I thought that the rain had soaked my faux leather el-cheapo convention bag and was running off onto my leg. Once I got onto the bus and opened it up I learned otherwise.

I found out that the can of diet Dr. Thunder that was in my bag had been punctured and most of it had run off into the bag, wetting my clipboard (I carry it for collecting gas prices for this Web site), my notebook that I carry to write song ideas in, my library book, and my metal Bible. I got the bus driver to stop for a minute and I dumped out what I could of the soda and then tried to lay everything out on my seat to dry. Once I got to the office I got some paper towels and worked on it some more. Now everything's king of laid out in my office, slowly de-popping.

Fortunately, nothing important appears to be damaged beyond repair... even the fake leather bag seems to be in OK shape (we'll see later if the pop that soaked into it attracts critters, I guess). (I like the word "critters," don't you?) Hopefully they won't flog me for the library book... the drink only got on the very edges of the pages, and even then it's not the whole edge. Still readable, if maybe a little bit ugly. I'm at work and I forgot to wear a belt today because I was in a hurry, so I'm feeling a little frazzled, but I'm healthy and except for my pants pocket, pretty much dry. Even my GoGear survived the ordeal without damage (it was in the pocket that got wet). My house has power (at least it did when I left). My family is safe, I have a job I enjoy, I have a church full of people that I care about and that care about me. It's been a frustrating first couple of hours of Monday morning, but it could easily have been much worse. Life is full of frustrations (especially, apparently, on Monday!) but I'm so thankful for the blessings.

Tornado Alley

Wednesday nights are church nights for us. We probably would go anyway... I went on Wednesday nights long before I joined the choir at Grace (it's very healthy to have a little bit of Word and fellowship in the middle of the week)... but now we pretty much have to go because we have choir practice immediately after the service. Tonight Cathy wasn't feeling well, though, so Mikey and I went on to church while she and Hannah stayed home. On the way there the weather looked pretty average, but little did we know there was something really brewing! Church started at 7, and maybe 15 or 20 minutes into the service, right in the middle of one of the songs, Pastor Geof, who was supposed to speak while Pastor Bob is away on a missions trip to the Ukraine and a couple of other places, stopped the service and told us that tornadoes were headed right our direction, and that we should all calmly move into the tornado-shelter children's building. A few minutes earlier Cathy had called my mom (who was sitting next to me) and told her that the tornado sirens were going off at our house, which is about nine miles to the North of the church. I wound up with my mom and dad and a bunch of friends from choir in the 5-year-old classroom, not really knowing exactly where Mikey was but knowing he was being safely taken care of in another one of the tornado shelter rooms (he was). Cathy wound up in the closet at home, probably squeezing Hannah so hard her eyes bugged out. Down in the classroom where I was, we basically picked back up where we left off and sang a bunch more praise choruses. The tornadoes apparently missed the church and the house both, and service and rehearsal were both canceled. Without the storms, about this time we would be in the middle of choir practice... but instead I'm at home blogging. God took care of us!

UPDATE: another account of the same incident from another dad who goes to Grace here.

On A Clear Day You Can See Forever

The other day I blogged that there were still branches in my neighborhood that were making it hazardous for me to get to my bus stop. That was Saturday... imagine my surprise when, on Thursday, I found that some of the branches had been removed! (Unfortunately, not all of them had been taken off, but it was a little safer getting to my bus.)

The only reason I had the camera with me that day was because a few days before that, I took a bunch of pictures from my office window of a "snowstorm" blowing in. I thought it would be interesting to take some similar pictures on a clear day so you can see how far the visibility really is from that window. Here are a couple of examples:


Snowy Day


Clear Day

I should have waited for the next day... it was much more clear... the pictures in the set were taken when it was kind of overcast, but you can still see a lot of stuff. I also took some pictures of my desk... anyone who has been to see me in my office will attest that it has (ahem) "character". (Really... it has cartoon characters.) I also took a few kind of pretty sunset pictures. Click over to see the whole set!

January 31, 2008 Snowstorm

Today there was a snowstorm that had been trumpeted by the TV news as pretty severe, and then turned out to be something of a non-event, at least in Tulsa proper. As it turned out, it was mostly pretty. I took the camera with me to work to try to take some fun pictures... this one is one of my favorites of the batch. Click over to see the whole set!