Happy things

[urbpan]

My happy things for yesterday were easy to know.

1. Never going more than 2 blocks from my house all day, and rarely even leaving my bed. That hasn't happened in years. Parking my car at work all weekend meant not having to play moving cars roulette with the city lot and our parking space.

2. The Solstice. I need more light. MORE LIGHT! Now it's coming.

In related news:

Portland Oregon, a shoo in for "most likely moving place" for us, has lost a lot of its lustre in the past week. I know that it's unusual weather, but the whole Pacific Northwest looks disconcertingly like New England this week. Of course, since it doesn't happen all the time, the city is unprepared, and the portland lj community is full of desperate pleas of various kinds (mostly "what liquor stores are open?!") and discussion of tire chains. Tire chains? Didn't those go out with the invention of snow tires, except for crossing the Donner Pass in January? Those poor bastards are in snow covered raincoats, eating xmas cookies intended for friends they can't reach, wondering what pizza place has a sherman tank that can get through their unsalted roads to feed them.

How are things in Austin, my Austiney friends?

Comments

[morgi.livejournal.com]

My coworker who left Indy for Las Vegas was pissed when it snowed. Heheh.

[corivax.livejournal.com]

I've lived in the Pacific Northwest twelve years, and this is the first time I've seen snow like this here. The reason it causes so much trouble is that cities don't keep snow plows and salt around; most years we'll get an inch that melts by morning or never sticks on the road.

Portland is a little worse than the rest of the area - I know they had some freak ice storm two years ago, for example. They're in the Gorge, which transmits weather from the other side of the mountains that protect the rest of the PNW. Still much better than anywhere except Florida - even New Orleans had a bunch of snow and power outages this year.

[smallerdemon.livejournal.com]

Austin had snow about three weeks ago. :) Not like Portland is seeing now, though. But they suffer from exactly the same case of unpreparedness which Portland is now suffering from. I don't live there, although I was there not two days after the snow and it was mild and beautiful, followed immediately by mid-30s and 20MPH winds and rain. :)

I did notice something about Austin this time that I really had not picked up on before: sprawl. Wow. I wasn't aware that it had gotten so thick. Still, it's on the list of places to think about, but Chicago, snow or not, is top of our list.

[grace-batmonkey.livejournal.com]

Austin is currently a wee bit chilly but we're going to get up into the 50s today. This'll go on for most of the rest of winter - some chilly days, some warmer days, a couple of freak really warm days, maybe a couple of freezes, perhaps more of that sleet/tiny flakes mix to watch melt by 10am. The little bit of snow we got recently was charming and didn't shut the city down...and it was gone very quickly.

Regarding the weather up in the PNW, a few days before I moved up (Jan. '97), they had this massive snowstorm that shut everything down just like right now. When some silly monkey went out to water the snow off the marina roofs, said roofs collapsed. This anecdote is a placeholder for a whole write-up on how the snow cycle in the PNW is increasing during the climate shift, which is one of the reasons we moved. I love snow, but I can't handle being in a place that has absolutely no resources or tolerance for it. This was also a count against Portland on our list.

[ideath.livejournal.com]

Hey, can you tell me more about the connection between the snow cycle in the PNW and the climate shift? This will totally influence my garden planning! (And help me decide whether to get a snow shovel.)

Have references you can point me at?

[grace-batmonkey.livejournal.com]

I do! These are somewhat disorganised, as they're a dump from a previous research session:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13998-us-struggling-to-respond-to-climate-shift.html
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/environment/july-dec08/troutdrought_10-31.html
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/More_on_The_Great_Pacific_Climate_Shift_and_the_Relationship_of_Oceans_on_Global_Temperatures.pdf
http://theenglishyouneedblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/climate-shift_20.html
http://www.rockymountainclimate.org/website%20pictures/Less%20Snow%20Less%20Water.pdf
http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/Library/nationalassessment/10NW.pdf
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/148043_warming13.html
http://cses.washington.edu/cig/pnwc/ci.shtml
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:WDbW0dOPD_4J:focusthenation.evergreen.edu/docs/lara_whitely_binder.ppt+%22pacific+northwest%22+%22climate+change%22+snow&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=10&gl=us (http://focusthenation.evergreen.edu/docs/lara_whitely_binder.ppt.)

Now, one thing you'll notice is that pretty much everything is talking about how PNW is going to end up with less precipitation...eventually. Based on climate modeling and looking at how the growing zone curve has evolved over the past couple of decades, we (somehow correctly) figured that winter '08/'09 would be ugly up there and made that something we wanted to avoid. The way we figured it, in order to get to less precipitation, there'll have to be a period where the cycle sorts itself out, and since there wasn't a formal drought pattern yet, it seemed like it would have to be in the next couple of years.

Anyway. Basically, our calculations were via random research + hedgewitchery, so I'm not sure how much help that's going to be, overall.

[ideath.livejournal.com]

Thanks for sharing your research!

[urimancy.livejournal.com]

The weather has been pretty wacky in Austin this month. It gets cold for a couple of days (30s & 40s cold), and then shoots back up to the 70s for a few. We did have the one night that it snowed, but it was a wet, sleety snow that didn't last long and didn't stick to the ground at all. By the next day it was sunny and dry again. Right now it's 45 degrees and hazy at my house, and it's supposed to be in the low 70s again by Christmas.

Normally Austin gets one good freeze per winter, which puts ice on the roads and shuts things down for two or three days. We didn't get one at all last winter, and it was actually kind of disappointing. Overall we've had an unusually warm, dry year. We could really use some rain. Although it doesn't rain very much during the winter here, so we probably won't get it.

Our hatred of the cold was one of the reasons we moved here two years ago, and I really like that the winters are short and relatively mild, while the summers are long and hot. On the downside, the summers can be a little TOO hot. On a muggy day in July, the heat outside can be nearly intolerable.

I don't like the sprawl mentioned above so much, but I was used to dealing with San Francisco Bay Area traffic & roads (tunnels and bridges every three feet, and a zillion people trying to use them at once), so I still find getting around by car here pretty painless -- most of the time.

Also, the Alamo Drafthouse alone makes up for most, if not all, of the cons about living in Austin, for us.

Forget Austin! Corpus Christi!

[propaddict.livejournal.com]

Austin's a nice college town. But, it does get cold there (read: it actually freezes annually).

Corpus Christi is where it's at. It's 46 today, but Saturday it was 85 and I was surfing at the beach which is 3/4 miles from my house. Apparently, it snowed overnight here once about 5 years ago. On Christmas Eve. It was melted by noon.

You can have the Urban high rise lifestyle in the western part of the city (where the museums and office blgds are), the quintessential suburban dwelling in the south side, or live the carefree life of a beach bum on Padre Island. From one side to the other is about 15 miles.

The island is the most expensive, where 1800 sq ft of single family house with a garage will run you $200K if you want to have your own private dock on the canal in your backyard. Knock off $60K if you can forgo the canal frontage and walk the half mile to the beach. Or drive. Cars are allowed on the beaches here.

National park/seashore just to the South and we have 8 stops on the "Texas Coastal Birding Trail" scattered throughout town.

No zoo here, you say? Well, we have the aforementioned park and a rather large Kemp's Ridley Sea Turtle hatchery/preserve.

On top of it all, it really doesn't feel like Texas. at. all. "Cowboys" in boots and hats are rare. Most people are transplants from elsewhere, so it's not as. . .ahem. . ."conservative". . .as most of Tejas that I've seen. The US flag flies higher than that of Texas everywhere in Corpus. And aside from kids in school, no one here says the Texas State Pledge of Allegiance. "Ain't" and "y'all" are more the exception than the rule, so as long as you don't mind people ending sentences with "at" (e.g. "Where's he at?"), the grammar is rather normal.

Re: Forget Austin! Corpus Christi!

[cottonmanifesto.livejournal.com]

doesn't god like destroy that city on a pretty much annual basis?

[propaddict.livejournal.com]

Damn. . .forgot about the hurricanes.

Yeah, we get them here. Hasn't destroyed Corpus in recent memory. The insurance is pretty cheap, too ($8 a month for $170K of cvg). And all the houses are brick or geodesic domes, so mainly it's the storm surge/flooding that will wreck our fun. Which could be a deal breaker for you.

[cottonmanifesto.livejournal.com]

hurricanes aren't so bad in the scheme of things.

Re: Forget Austin! Corpus Christi!

[cdozo.livejournal.com]

It snowed in Corpus Christi a couple of years ago and the whole city shut down.

See http://www.srh.noaa.gov/crp/stories/Christmas2004/christmas_2004.html and http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0geu8eKjVBJIs8AbOVXNyoA?ei=UTF-8&p=corpus%20christi%20snow&fr2=tab-web&fr=moz2

[droserary.livejournal.com]

Ahh, tire chains. I believe they're regularly used on I-90 over the Cascades. It's awful up there in the winter.

We Get About Two Weeks Of Winter A Year

[cdozo.livejournal.com]

I'm not there right now. but I hear it's a bit chilly in Austin. It's supposed to warm up by the end of the week.

Austin gets ice storms most years. Usually things are back to normal by the next afternoon. But once every four or five years, it stays cold and things shut down for a few days. There's usually plenty of warning, so I just stock on on food and hunker down until it warms up. The roads get quite slippery and a surprising number of people drive around as if the laws of physics don't apply to them. As a result, the number of accidents goes up by a factor of ten. So I won't drive if there is any frozen precipitation out there.

In addition to ice and snow, we get huge hail, flash floods, straight line winds, and tornadoes every now and then. With these the damage is not citywide, but if it hits your area it can be pretty destructive.

Personally I like weather. So the extremes that Austin gets are a good thing to me. But if you're looking for calm consistent warm weather, Austin may not be for you.

[jainabee.livejournal.com]

I grew up near Portland, and the few times we ever had snow (I can count 'em), I recall widespread panic and a complete inability to deal with it.