October's cooling...Ahhhhh...

Celia....ACKKKKK!

All the snow is gone. Temps will be rising into the mid-50s and mid-60s by the weekend.

44 °F right now.
Mostly Cloudy
Windchill: 44 °F
Humidity: 61%
Dew Point: 31 °F
Wind: 0.0 mph
Wind Gust: 0.0 mph
Pressure: 29.81 in (Steady)
Visibility: 10.0 miles
UV: 0 out of 16
Pollen: .40 out of 12Clouds: Few 6000 ft
Mostly Cloudy 8000 ft
Mostly Cloudy 9000 ft
(Above Ground Level)
Elevation: 4269 ft

57* and windy. We had rain in the night and a tornado watch till 6:00 this morning. It will get windier this afternoon.

It's grey, windy and cool today. I'm glad I went out and finished up yesterday. I set a couple of small pots in the ground and I had to wash the shovel instead of taking a putty knife to it. We are plenty wet!

Yesterday, the blackbirds and cool breeeze sounded just like a spring day. Sniff.

It's light out now. I see we got 3/10'' rain and it's still spitting.

Bernie, lovely blue and yellow Iris. Are they rebloomers? Beautiful spots of color left! Wow on all the Glads! All those pictures make me long for Spring.

Chrissy, are tornado watches normal for you this time of year? They aren't for us!

Celia, how interesting to have had snow earlier than October.

Bernie, wonderful!! Those are Glads to be proud of!!

Pepper, beautiful fungi!

Celia, big smile! Now it can warm up a bit!

Pepper, for you. DH found these and brought me ''flowers.'' I really had trouble focusing. My camera doesn't do whites and yellows very well. I needed that magic button.

They were really pretty.

Got a bit of catching up here, but just on a few points....

We don't have daylight saving. The difference between the longest and shortest days is only a bit over an hour. Some parts of the country (down south) have it so if you're ringing people there it does make a difference.

My mother used to make kraut and I like it. But the bought stuff leaves a lot to be desired.

There's no snow here. I spent a few years in Europe some time ago and got to experience snow in winter. It was nice out in the country where the snow was clean, but I can live without it despite having taken a real liking to skiing.

Got an interesting surprise at work yesterday. Went out to retrieve a trap from an area likely to be shortly cut off by the developing wet season. When I got there the trap had been sprung and I thought it may have been by a Freshwater Crocodile. When I got onto the trap and moved back the shade cloth, through the reflections on the surface of the water I made out a fairly large head. We'd got an Estuarine Crocodile, over 2.5 metre (8.2 feet) long. It's been decided to put a satellite tracker on it, probably tomorrow. We'll get exact measurements then as well. I'll take photos of the process and post some.

The weather's dried out, sort of. It's still very humid but getting hotter with the lack of rain. Has been mostly sunny for the past week. Maximum temperature today was 37C (98.6F) after a minimum this morning of 23.8C (74.8F).

Mixing up some soil I found this little fellow. It'd been camping in a opened bag of potting mix. About 110mm (4.3 inches) long.

BP yes tornadoes are popular in the fall, not as much as in the spring but yes it's normal.

I woke up this morning to a HUGE gust of wind, the house was popping! I grabbed my phone that was sitting on the night stand next to me and there was a text, a tornado watch from 4am til noon, it was 5am then! I thought, "They said this next line of storms wasn't going to be severe, what's up!" So I turned on the Weather Channel to check it out, the tornado watch is following the squall line, there wasn't even any thunderstorms in our part of it so I just went back to sleep for another 30 minutes, alarm went off and by the time I left the house at 7:45 the squall was past us. By the time I got here to work they had canceled the tornado watch, so we're in the clear now. It's weird for me still to watch the temperature, at 5am it was 74*, at 6:30 it was 68, at 7:30 it was 64, now at 9:00 it's 58!

BP those are cute!

Ew I hate centipedes.

Centipedes are cool!

Tropic, looking forward to those pics. I've neverr heard of that kind of croc so I'm off to look it up.

45º for our high today with a 70% chance of snow.

All of you from MI down to MS... Look out, your weather is gonna get nasty if it hasn't already.

Tropic, except for liking a lot of daylight in the summer, I could do without the daylight savings time. Instead of doing away with it, they start it earlier and end it later. It's never bothered me sleepwise.

I have never tasted homemade kraut, so this will be new to me. I'm hoping to keep it in the fridge to eat fresh.

Like Celia, I too had to Google your croc. They are impressive!

I have a fondness for alligators. When I was a kid, the next town over had a zoo, and they had an alligator pool. Not very big, and the alligators just sat around. It was rare to see them move. I remember pennies on their backs, that people had thrown over the fence. I remember the smell. I don't think we ever took pictures of the zoo. I wish we had.

There was also a monkey cage and I like monkeys less, now, thanks to nature shows :o)

Hmmm, I'm glad I wear gloves when working even with potting soil, but it is pretty.

Chrissy, ROTFL! If I had done all that, no way could I have gone back to bed, much less sleep! I'm glad nothing came of it. Our temps dropped from 57* at 5:00 am to a windy cool 53* now.

Friday, our clouds were the amber color of burning leaves. I've never seen that before.

Oh BP I have a storm radio, storm alerts from Accuweather that come into my phone, and if there's a storm headed directly at my house I get a phone call from our local NBC channel, plus I was watching Radar on The Weather Channel and had it up on my phone for a closer view. Don't you think for a second I don't know exactly what's going on with the weather, I can spot a tornado on Radar faster than the weather service can put a warning out for it, I've done it before LOL!! Ask Mau and Celia! I am surprised I slept through the weather radio going off when we were put in the tornado watch. I was shocked, I think I actually said, "WHAT!?!?" LOL

Chrissy, LOL! You are a true weather person!!

Very windy, rainy, cool.
Nice day to not be outside.

And that is why we are all here :o)

I'm from CA and when I first moved here April 2007 we rented an apartment on Lake Hamilton in Hot Springs and Dave told me that AR doesn't have very many tornados, and the ones that do touch down are almost always F0's and F1's and pop right back up, so I don't remember any tornados in 2007 but in October 2007 we bought our house out in the woods. All was fine until Spring of 2008 and all hell broke loose. That was one of the tornadoest weather that we've had here on record and man was I freaked out, every week we were having tornados, so I put in a storm shelter, of course all the locals laughed but so what, I'm not really a local anyway. I'm just starting to get better where I don't freak out when there's a tornado 2000 miles away heading in the opposite direction, and I didn't freak out Sunday when we had a severe thunderstorm come over the house and as soon as it got past us it turned into a tornado warning. Maybe I didn't freak because the rotation was headed right for the building I work in, in downtown Little Rock and if the building gets hit, no worky jerky... I don't know!

Chrissy, I'd thumb my nose at them too. What I wouldn't give for a storm shelter! ROTFL over no work!

We have never had a tornado in all my life, here either, until 2006.One went thru town a full block from me, tearing down a pole building uptown that housed the appliances from Chown's appliance store. The debris hit a house and damaged the roof and camper, a block away, then continued another block and hit our old school. Only one death from the second one that night that struck three miles south of town. It killed the mother of the guy that had the Chown's building hit his house. It was a sad night for all.

I don't freak out, but I'd feel better with a storm shelter.

Every room in my house is connected to an outside wall so that's why I put one in.

Chrissy, that would worry me too!

I argue that mine could be a root cellar. I'll sit down there.

Coolish, windy, and mostly dry. The storms rolled thru here last night but they didn't do much around here. Just wind gusts around 25-30 mph and some rain. The worst of it is up north and down south. We're in a quiet spot pressure wise I guess. lol. At least this time we are.

Another kind of fungi.

Next time the weather gets bad, I'm calling Crissy for my updates! LOL

47° with a high of 60°
Through 12 pm: Mostly sunny and windy. Temperatures steady or slowly warming to the upper 40s. Winds SW at 20 to 25 mph.
Partly to mostly cloudy and windy. Winds WSW at 25 to 35 mph. Winds could occasionally gust over 40 mph.
Daybreak and I see the trees moving with a bit of wind.

Pepper, those actually look tasty!

Marsue, I think she's on top of it all!

We didn't have a lot of wind either. Last night the weather radio went off and I thought it was the phone ringing. I was waiting for the answering machine to pick up :o) I was also dreaming I was at a ski lift and there was a problem. I had a magic marker and was writing POST on a door mat. It woke me up before I could write a warning about the ski lift :o)

One county has high wind warnings and they are North of us. I don't think we will be near as bad. It's also windier south of us again.

I need to bring flowers and two tubs of squash in from the garage. We will freeze Thursday night and it just stays cool now.

I got my first 2011 flower catalog. Thompson and Morgan! I love to look at the pictures!

My neighbor's Mums :o)

BP I want a basement for more than one reason, wonder how much it costs to do that... lol I'm sure it's not cheap.

LOL Mau!

It's sunny and supposed to be 84* today, but by either tomorrow or Friday, I don't remember which, we're going to drop about 15*.

Basements can be dug for an ugly amount of $$$. Having a cellar dug elsewhere on your land would be a lot less, I would think. You wouldn't have to have the house jacked or worry about flooding issues in your house.

This morning...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BERNIE!!!!

New to this forum. Hi, Billy! Hi, Pepper!

Crissy - I chuckled when I read your post about the tornadoes. When we first moved here, I was the same way - freaking out every time there was a thunderstorm or even a mention of a tornado anywhere in Missouri, Oklahoma, or Kansas. After 30 years of living here, I'm still cautious (tornadoes are not something to mess with!), but not so freaked out anymore. I turn on the weather radio and take out my map of MO and track the storms. It's kinda fun, actually, and occupies my mind so I'm not just worrying.

Kudos on building a storm shelter. It's the sensible thing if you don't have a basement. We have a basement, but it's a walk-out. The only windowless room is the laundry room. There have been a few memorable nights down through the years when we have huddled together with our two dogs in that 5x5 space! Nowadays we just hang out downstairs and wait until there's a tornado warning or we hear the tornado siren go off. We have had a couple of bad tornadoes in our town, one in 2003 that hit about five miles south of our house.

Beautiful, cool Fall day today! Forecast is for 66 today and 36 tonight. That's what I consider perfect weather! Ahhhh... I love Fall!

I have a storm shelter but I want a basement! I want I want I want! LOL

It's like a fiberglass pod under the ground, kinda cool but I need a lot of dirt to put over the top, it's bald and has a huge sink hole behind it.

You don't really want a basement. That big rain here a month ago thrashed everything in any basement. I'm talking freezers, furnace, washers & dryers & whatever furniture was down there.
Nobodies insurance covered the loses.
Very expensive to build a basement. At least half the cost of the house. Then if you finish the interior, wow.

Crissy, the tree is a valley oak (Quercus lobata).

Bernie, I wondered what you did with the glad corms, if it was worth the effort to dig them up each year. Happy birthday to my favorite Minnesotan! (Joe Mauer is so jealous. LOL!)

We have a closet under the stairs. If we lived somewhere else, that would be our storm shelter.


Windy today, which is perfectly normal for this time of year. We've had around 1.5" of rain for the month, which is a good bit, probably the most for October that I've seen in the 23 years I've been out here.

Van Nuys, California (Airport)
Updated: 7:51 AM PDT on October 27, 2010
63 °F
Partly Cloudy
Humidity: 20%
Dew Point: 21 °F
Wind: 15 mph from the North

Thanksgiving cactus

You may have rock which is hard to dig the hole.
In years past basements were dug by hand & concrete was cheap, but no longer the case.

I saw in one tornado report this past summer, someone had built a storm room in their house. A concrete cube almost like a bank vault. Only thing standing in the whole area.
They used it for something also, but I don't remember what.

I saw a house that burned down that had something like that. I called it the wine cellar, but I don't know what it really was.

Kelli you don't want a basement in CA, if you were in it and a bad earthquake happened you'd get buried alive.

OOOO A wine cellar!! There we go!!

I would imagine a concrete cube would stay cool inside. Think of the fun tasting wine while waiting out the tornado. Maybe wouldn't even worry about the storm! LOL!

LOL Drink enough wine and I might forget all about it!

Chrissy, 15*? That is extreme!

Celia, is there a Christmas present under there? I'm not sure the tree was ready for snow :o)

I think a basement would be very expensive which is why I'll take that root cellar. We have a town that manufactures concrete storm cellers and there are also plastic rooms you can bury. I'm with DH. There does have to be two ways out in case a tree or house falls on us.

Bernie, I missed it on the front page! Happy Happy Birthday!! Hope you are in out of the wind!!

ImaMes, welcome! I'm glad you came over! I do almost the same thing. I had a small map of Iowa and I ''triangulated'' the towns that seemed to get storms all the time. I too take a ruler and see if I'm in the path. We don't have a safe room. We usually run to my Dad's house.

Chrissy, LOL! That's how I wanted to put it! I might as well have a whole underground house because I'd be filling it with cots and food and creature comforts.

Your pod sounds...... um...... Bald with a sink-hole? ROTFL!!

Bernie, I hear ya. That's why I can't have one. The water table is too high, but jeeze, we want something!

Kelli, most likely close to the truth. A basement sure would feel good on a hot day. I wonder what your ground temp is, 6'-9' deep? Your cactus is beautiful!

Bernie, a house up the street has a concrete room in the middle of the basement. They had a nice basement too, with a concrete floor, from what I remember from 6th grade. Ahh, Bernie, you've taken us to a whole new level of storm shelters :o)

LOL!

BP yea it is, but I've seen temps drop 30* in one day. I'll find pics of my pod and post them for you.

I don't know what the ground temp would be here. We don't have any caverns around here so I can't even guess.

Here you go BP