an excuse to eat carbs RT @margarita: What are we calling this blizzard?
— dodai (@dodaistewart) January 25, 2015
.
The local weatherpeople are highly excited about a ” ‘crippling’ blizzard that could drop up to 3 feet of wet, heavy snow amid whiteout conditions…’This storm definitely has the capability of being not only historic but also catastrophic’…”.
I can only hope they’re exaggerating — so far, it’s been a remarkably light winter here north of Boston. And if they’re not, I hope at least our power doesn’t go out.
How’s your new week looking, weather- or otherwise?
Villago Delenda Est
SNOWPOCALYPSE NOW!
The enthusiasm of the weather talking heads is really rather disgusting.
xenos
3 feet is a heavy storm, but is it snowpocalypse all over again?
OzarkHillbilly
So do I, but not because I could give a tinker’s dam!n about any of you New Englanders. I just don’t want to hear GLOBAL WARMING IS A HOAX!!!! from all the idiots who are incapable of understanding any kind of scientific thought that goes beyond the Baby Jeebus.
And it’s all about me, don’cha know?
raven
Cool interactive freakout graph!
Joey Maloney
I’m battening down and preparing for the avalanche that is sure to accompany the storm.
You know, the avalanche of climate-change denialist bullshit from FOX News, Congress, and the Heritage Foundation. What did you think I meant?
Tommy
@OzarkHillbilly: I’d like to say I agree but it was -27 here with the windchill not that long ago and I kind of freaked out about it. Well not totally, went for a walk just to see what it felt like. But I’ve been in two blizzards with three plus feet of snow and it isn’t a “fun” thing.
ThresherK
I have enough bacon for a week but only enough maple syrup for two batches of pancakes.
PS: That opening pic of Thurston from last night is too squee for words.
Schlemazel
This has become the thing for weather forecasters now
Its silly but it does get people to ‘stay tuned’ for more scarey updates. I really do think it is this sort of fear mongering from TV news and weather that made the nations response to 9/11 as bad as it was. When everyday panic is turned up to 10 the only thing left is to go to 11. Somehow our ancestors survived this sort of thing or we would not be here today.
That said, if it is bad stay safe.
OzarkHillbilly
@Tommy: Oh, I’ve seen a blizzard or 2 myself over the years and I can only say bullhockey. I even wrote a book about how to survive a blizzard.It said,
“Stay Home.”
Couldn’t find a printer for it. Don’t know why.
Mustang Bobby
It’s in the 50’s up in Betty’s part of Florida, while down here at the tip of the dick it’s in the high 40’s. Go figure.
I sympathize with the folks who are getting snow measured in feet and remember doing the same when I lived in Petoskey, Michigan. What it means for us down here is that the hotels and beaches will soon be full of snowbirds. Bring your money, park straight in the lots, and have a nice time. Oh, and tipping is appreciated (and included in the bill in a lot of places on Miami Beach since a lot of visitors “forget.”)
raven
@Mustang Bobby: Canadians!
Mustang Bobby
@raven: Oh, that explains why I get a friendly wave when I drive around in the Pontiac with the 1988 Ontario plates.
MomSense
I’m looking around at all the pine trees and thinking that 3 feet of snow plus 50 mph gusts of wind will mean lots of damage and power outages.
I took the big pine down that was in front of our house–but they are everywhere. The last little storm we got put a tree on my neighbor’s house.
gene108
@xenos:
No, I think it will be Snowmaggedon this time around.
South Jersey seems to be at the bottom end of this thing and we’ll only get around a foot of snow. It gets worse fast, further up the Turnpike.
satby
What was supposed to be 3-6 inches of snow for my area missed us, we got the freezing rain topped by a half inch of snow instead. And a low that’s 10 degrees lower than they predicted, so a nice veneer of ice is on everything. They don’t salt the roads here.
Honestly, I would rather have the snow.
Mustang Bobby
@gene108: If this happened at Christmas, they’d call it Snowell.
Bystander
I give these Repubs credit. At least they’re brave. I would have bet they would have kept their white hoods on to avoid being identified.
Botsplainer
Back in the same bed, but not sure I want to stay there after all that has transpired over the previous year. I’d actually come to mental terms and peace with it, even having considered my life forward.
Hawes
Do you have your milkandbread? We have several different types of milkandbread, because – as we all know – milkandbread is the only thing that magically prevents blizzard-onset rickets.
Betty Cracker
Light rain and 60 degrees here, which is PARKA WEATHER. I saw some tweet pix of NYC store shelves — reminded me of the summer of 2004 when we had four hurricanes and people descended on Publix like a swarm of locusts each time.
@Botsplainer: Sounds like you have a lot to think about. I wish you courage and wisdom.
Iowa Old Lady
@Botsplainer: Whichever way this goes, I hope it goes well.
Gin & Tonic
Don’t mind staying home, which is highly likely for tomorrow, but not enthusiastic about shoveling 2-3′ of snow. BTW, it’s 14 out now, so, Betty, take your 60 degrees and put it where the sun don’t shine.
Elizabelle
I’m glad the leftists were elected in Greece. I don’t see how electing the status quo was going to improve things.
Heartened the margin was as decisive as it was. Let’s hear some different solutions.
Austerity sucks. And it’s not even good economics.
Elizabelle
@Botsplainer: You’re in my thoughts. Breakups are rough.
Betty Cracker
@Elizabelle: But if we stop clapping, the Confidence Fairy will die!
Steeplejack
Happy birthday to me!
January 1952: A young Air Force doctor and his very pregnant wife are driving through bad winter weather in Ohio and Kentucky, trying to make it to her parents’ farm in Tennessee en route to a transfer to Kelly Field in San Antonio, Texas. They don’t quite make it, and tiny Steeplejack is born in the Army hospital at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky.
When my mother tells the story she says she ended up in Texas a month later in a cold-water flat converted from a bunkhouse. She was 21, she didn’t know anyone, she had a baby she didn’t really know how to take care of, her husband was gone on maneuvers a lot of the time, and they had very little money. She listened to country music on the radio and cried herself to sleep.
So later today I will call her at her very nice house in Las Vegas, where she is mostly healthy and still active at 84, and sing the opening lines of Elvis Presley’s “In the Ghetto” to her: “On a cold and gray Chicago mornin’ a poor little baby child is born in the ghetto / And his mama cries.” That has been our private joke for 40 years. She has been a lifelong Elvis fan since the very beginning. She’ll laugh and probably tell me the whole story all over again.
What a long strange trip it’s been.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Steeplejack: Happy b-day Steeplejack. Didn’t know yours was so close to mine.
Baud
@Botsplainer:
Good luck, man.
@Elizabelle:
But they were this close to perpetual prosperity.
Baud
@Steeplejack:
Happy birthday to a good son.
Iowa Old Lady
Dammit. Deere is laying off 500 more people in my area. They laid off a similar number in the fall. This is a disaster for the local economy, not to mention all those families.
OzarkHillbilly
@Steeplejack: Heh. Good story.
Mustang Bobby
@Steeplejack: Happy birthday! Your mom and mine are close to the same age (and you’re nine months older than me), so I raise a toast to both you and your mom; we all made it this far in fine fettle.
danielx
@Betty Cracker:
I’d heard it was the Bond Fairy. Could it be both?
debbie
I don’t trust anyone’s motives anymore. Last fall, the publisher of the Farmer’s Almanac was predicting that this winter would be known as “RefrigerNation.” It’s like there’s a race to see who can be the scariest.
geg6
@Steeplejack:
Great story! Happy birthday to a good son!
OzarkHillbilly
@Botsplainer:Stay strong.
debbie
@Steeplejack:
Ha! My parents were doing the very same thing about a year after yours, driving from Fort Gordon to Ohio. The first few months of my life were spent living with my dad’s parents. I don’t think my mother ever recovered from my grandmother’s endless interference.
All these preggers women and no seatbelts. Happy birthday!
GregB
Winter storm Ebola-ISIS!
Elizabelle
@Steeplejack: On a cold and grey Kentucky mornin’, another little tiny tech guy is born …
Happy Birthday. Enjoy. Hope the housecat ordered you a sufficient gift.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steeplejack: Happy birthday.
shortstop
@Steeplejack: That’s extremely dear. My mom is about your age but I’m quite a bit younger (koff! Accident! Koff! Koff!) and she too loves to tell the (different but still complicated and dramatic) birth story on my bday. Since she is starting to lose some cognitive function it was particularly poignant to hear it told in the usual shining detail a couple of weeks ago. Happy birthday to you.
shortstop
@GregB: I think we all know both of those are just the tool of the tyrant pretender in the White House.
Steeplejack
Thanks to all! I was thinking about the story more than usual this year because we are getting some nasty winter weather here in NoVA today. Right now I’m seeing some light snow or “wintry mix,” but late this afternoon it’s supposed to start snowing for real and keep snowing all night.
Bro’ man, his husband and a couple of friends are supposed to take me to dinner at the Old Angler’s Inn tonight, but that may not happen. But we had a very nice dinner last night at Sighthound Hall, bro’ man’s palatial Arlington manse, so I feel sufficiently feted.
chopper
@OzarkHillbilly:
meanwhile, the people who point out that more snow comes from a moister atmosphere will be drowned out by the screams of ‘OMG it’s snowing in january!!’
rikyrah
for those in the eye of the storm, BE SAFE
Steeplejack
@Elizabelle:
The housecat is a gift and a joy every day. She came to me when she was 12 years old, after (I think) a mostly neglected life, and she is 14 now, still in good health. She is at her workstation on the desk beside the computer right now: microfleece throw wrapped around a heating pad set to 3 (“low simmer”). Occasionally her head will ooze over onto the keyboard to check my work.
Bystander
Anybody else catch the headline on Huffington about the swimmer who was caught in a tide of whale feces? HP dubbed it “Poonado”. Personally, I prefer “Poopnado” to avoid any unseemly double entendre.
shortstop
@Bystander: that’s one of those things you never see coming.
Amir Khalid
RIP Demis Roussos.
Amir Khalid
@Bystander:
Was it Huffington Post UK, by any chance?
rikyrah
More from the WaPo series on Prince George’s County
…………………
Broken by the bubble
In the Fairwood subdivision, dreams of black wealth were
dashed by the housing crisis
Fairwood is a sprawling 1,800-home subdivision in Prince George’s County built on a former slave plantation that was once owned by the state’s 34th governor, Oden Bowie. It should have been a success story for black Americans.
The decade-old neighborhood is 73 percent black and its residents have a median household income of more than $170,000, according to the census. Some houses there once sold for more than $1 million.
But half the loans on newly constructed homes in Fairwood during the housing boom in 2006 and 2007 wound up in foreclosure — 723 of 1,441 so far, according to a Washington Post analysis of private and public mortgage
data.
On some blocks in Fairwood, nearly every house went under. On Burkes Promise Drive, an arcing street of broad lawns, 20 of the 34 homes fell into foreclosure. Neighbors awoke each day to the tell-tale signs: rental trucks in driveways and piles of old furniture, strollers and garbage bags dumped on the curbs. A neighborhood security guard papered hundreds of houses with notices that homeowners were being sued for outstanding association dues and would soon be locked out of the pool.
Nationwide, the disproportionate impact of the mortgage crisis on African Americans has been well documented.
Less understood is how the crisis played out block by block and continues to reverberate in Prince George’s, the wealthiest majority-black county in the United States. It was also the epicenter for mortgage failures in Maryland. Today, far fewer blacks are getting home loans in the county, foreclosures are on the rise again and the African American share of the population has started
to decline there for the first time since the civil rights movement.
Fairwood, one of the nation’s most aspirational black communities, is a symbol of what blacks lost in the crisis. For all its wealth, the community had the second-highest foreclosure rate in the county for a neighborhood with more than 100 loans, behind only one in Adelphi, which had a much-lower median income of $64,398.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/01/25/in-fairwood-dreams-of-black-wealth-foundered-amid-the-mortgage-meltdown/
PurpleGirl
@Steeplejack: Happy Birthday. Best wishes for a long and healthy life. Say ‘Hi’ to your Mom; that’s a nice story.
Shana
@Steeplejack: What a lovely story. My birthday’s tomorrow and I’m not sure if we’ll be able to make it to the restaurant to celebrate. They say we may get up to 5 inches here in Northern Virginia. At the moment: 9:43, it seems to have stopped. I’m heading out to run a couple of errands before it switches to snow.
PurpleGirl
I headed out to do some shopping around 8:30. I spent a bit of money. (But then I have a house guest, so some of that can be attributed to him.) Now to see how the day progresses. My power and heat supplies come from my development’s own power plant and the lines/pipes are all underground. Our porters have all been clearing sidewalks and spreading salt already. (It was nice getting a little snow on my head walking back from the market.)
Steeplejack
@Shana:
Happy birthday (early) to you, too!
FlyingToaster
@Hawes: In Bwahstin, we call it the French Toast Alert.
FlyingToaster
@MomSense: Actually, most of the pines bend with the snow pretty well. It’s the Red Maples (’cause their sap’s underground right now) whose branches snap and take the power lines with them.
In town, the tree warden or arborist go with the NStar supervisor and they paint red lines on the branches to come down. That runs May-August every year in the Hub, to try and beat both the hurricanes (if any) and the ice come winter.
FlyingToaster
@Betty Cracker:
I went down to Ft. Lauderdale in February of 2006 to clean out a garage (XMas present to in-laws). I was in the parking lot of a Publix, wearing a tank top and shorts. The girl rounding up carts in the parking lot was wearing a parka and parachute pants.
Y’all are a buncha wimps.
But thank you for keeping Florida open; we’ll be south of you in 3 weeks, driving by JetBluePark on the way to the beach :)
negative 1
@OzarkHillbilly: Yeah, except joking aside it can be dangerous if the power goes out. We’re predicted for 2-3 feet with 35 mph winds gusting higher, with no heat that would not be good. I’m a healthy, fit young soul but if you have any kind of limitations the humor of the situation begins to wane…
feebog
OK, a report from SoCal at 7:40 PST. We had a delightful day yesterday, windy as hell in the morning, with the clouds gradually moving in late afternoon. Cloudy and breezy this morning, with rain expected this afternoon and overnight. We have good chance of rain throughout the week, which would be most welcome. This front is moving in from the South, so temps in the the 60s and snow level above 7K in the mountains.
Shana
@Steeplejack: Thank you!
Petorado
@GregB: I’m betting on “snow-and-Isis” being the name for this storm — “Don’t get beheaded by falling power lines!”
Villago Delenda Est
@Schlemazel: Local news is ENTIRELY about fear mongering now. “Crime alert”, “Storm alert”, “Consumer alert”….that’s all they talk about…various “alerts” that you need to jump out of your barcalounger about.
Tom Q
@Steeplejack: My birthday is not only right next door to yours in date — I’m tomorrow — but also in the space/time continuum…which is to say, I’m a 1952 guy, as well. My birth was further east (Charleston WV) — just as foreign to my parents, since they’re both from Brooklyn.
And both my parents are still alive and well, at 88 and 86. I expect to talk to them tomorrow, unless the snow knocks out their (now-Connecticut) telephone.
Calouste
What’s this snow people are talking about? It was 64 degrees here yesterday and I sat outside in my t-shirt.
Ruckus
@feebog:
Rain all week would not be good. For me. Have to move this week, mostly on Sat but with runs to all sorts of places in between. Really, really don’t want to have to do this in the rain.
shortstop
@Ruckus: moving in perfect weather is a huge bitch. In the rain, ugh. Here’s hoping for dry weather for you.
Tree With Water
@Villago Delenda Est: Hunter Thompson wrote a contemporaneous account of a hurricane that was predicted to be of such force that god knows how many people would die, how many cities destroyed. The head of the national weather service was in meltdown mode on TV for days scaring the bejeezus out of the entire Atlantic seaboard. The thing petered out offshore, and if it hadn’t been publicized folks would have put the hurricane down to a blustery few days.
Bystander
Amir Khalid, I think HP must maintain separately branded domiciles. It may relate to different corporations they have formed globally. In France, I don’t seem to be able to log on to HP USA. Everytime I’ve tried, I’ve just been re-directed to HP France.
I don’t mean to sound like an HP freak but I’m compelled to check out the scandal sheet at least once a day.
Bob In Portland
Regime change coming in Hungary.