Not that cold, but...deep, sure

Welcome to the Precious Metals Bug Forums

Welcome to the PMBug forums - a watering hole for folks interested in gold, silver, precious metals, sound money, investing, market and economic news, central bank monetary policies, politics and more. You can visit the forum page to see the list of forum nodes (categories/rooms) for topics.

Please have a look around and if you like what you see, please consider registering an account and joining the discussions. When you register an account and log in, you may enjoy additional benefits including no ads, market data/charts, access to trade/barter with the community and much more. Registering an account is free - you have nothing to lose!

DCFusor

Yellow Jacket
Messages
1,662
Reaction score
18
Points
0
Location
Floyd, Virginia


And we're supposed to get two more days of this. I didn't think I'd need hip waders in the mountains, living as I do, 80 feet higher than the creek. Yeah, that's my Weber grill with the snow hat, for reference on how deep this is.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Looks like a snow cone waiting patiently for the sugary food coloring syrup to be applied.

Stay safe DCF!
 
OUCH!

We're sunny and 70 degrees with a decent breeze out of the north-west. That picture is exactly why I live here. While the summers here would kill a man from up north, the winters are awesome [for the most part]. So far, we have had just over 11 hours of freezing temps, and four days of sub-50 degree weather.
 
Well ancona, be glad you're not growing oranges or something else where even a little freeze means no crop. Other than it's a pain to move anywhere - it's not anything like as bad as those negative F temps we had awhile back - now that hurt!
This would be fun if I could find my sled.

Good thoughts, Bug. I'm old skool - what doesn't kill ya makes you stronger, and it's nice to have the preps tested and known-good. Makes me feel more confident.
I jury rigged a roof over the generator using the other snow to hold up a plywood sheet, and it likes that great - now I know a new trick, and it was easy to re-fill with gas since it was clean and dry in there. It uses about 3 quarts/7 hours...I have 15 gal stored in an accessible shed, before I have to start thinking about syphoning gas out of vehicles to keep it going.

The snow cone idea was cool, I'll direct some of my neighbours to the site to look at it. After all, they have nothing else to do just now...

But it'd be more than I could eat - and some of them can't get their front doors open at all - even the types that have computer controlled propane whole house generators - they thought they were ready (and now they know better - one had to jump out of a window to get outdoors, then dig his way back to the front door to get back in).

But it's nearing 5 foot deep here (again, not that cold - and it's almost 12 feet deep where my solar panels have shed it) and now all you see is a cone sticking up out of nothing - the grill itself is no longer visible. Wow! I stomped out a tunnel to my infra-structure building so I still have plumbing etc, and of course, power for a day or two even if the generator fails right now (but I hope it won't - if it does, I have to clean off my Volt and hook it into the system as the backup-backup).

This is stuff that stops even a 4wd big tractor dead. A tracked loader - maybe, maybe not. I don't expect to see another human for about 3-5 days, and that'll be a guy on a huge CAT road grader - if we're lucky. If it's like it has been in the past, it'll be a week(+), and a front end loader loading a big truck to carry it away - you can't push to the side if there's no place to push it to. Takes awhile doing a road 10 feet at a time and waiting for the truck to return for the next 10 feet of progress.

The good news is - we out here can count on exceptional crops next year. Rain runs off and carries nutrients with it. Snow melts slow and carries fixed nitrogen (from 'pollution') into the ground with it. So, once again, when the rest of the farming world is whining about drought - we'll be getting rich. Always happy-making to have all your neighbours swimming in cash. If we're double-lucky, we'll have a nice late freeze and another almost insect-free year. Something you don't get in FLA.

Glass is solidly half-full. I bet people in say, Minnesota are laughing their butts off at the reactions from south of me where it's like the first time they've seen snow at all, and are clueless about how to handle it. Even in 5-6 foot deep snow I barely sink knee deep, after all. And I know how to drive in it, when that becomes possible (as in, is that big lump over there my truck?).

Staying safe and warm. No biggie, it's like when my parents would send me to my room, which was of course, where all my toys were anyway.:rotflmbo:
Today, I'm doing a wireless web server on this, with their wireless "shield" plugged on top. Pretty cool you can even do this with 75 milliamps at 5v. Call it half a watt.
The title is "Because it's sometimes too much of a pain to go over there to flip a switch or measure the water system temperature". For some reason.
 
I like your attitude DC. I believe however, the glass is always full, only sometimes it is half air and half water, but full nonetheless.
 
You're right, of course, ancona. Robert Heinlein, I believe in "Farmer in the Sky" mentioned - one thing normal homesteaders/settlers never had to worry about was where their next breath was coming from, like on Ganymede (the setting of the story).

Pretty good treatise there on what constitutes a "real engineer". When I held myself to that standard as a boy, I found I was "over qualified" when I went for a real engineering job. Funny that.

So, you're exactly right - the glass is full, not half. I have all the air I can use!
 
The title of this thread reminded me of a joke.

Two liars were standing on a bridge, peeing into the water below.

One said, "man, that water's cold!"

The other replied, "and deep too!"
 
Good thoughts, Bug. I'm old skool - what doesn't kill ya makes you stronger, and it's nice to have the preps tested and known-good. Makes me feel more confident.
While we haven't had any snow, it has been the coldest winter since I've been here. I usually don't turn the heat on and have no issues, but it is rarely this cold and I decided to completely tough it out. I like the cold since alergies, bugs, and respitory issues go away. That, and it will be rediculously hot and mosquito ridden soon enough, so let's enjoy the cold now and have some memories for August.

I found pretty quickly that I didn't have much cold weather gear worth using (cotton kills...). If the power went out when it was really cold or I had to walk away from a broken car it would be a really bad situation when dressed for a 2 min walk across the parking lot.

So, I pounced on a few sales and am now much more thermally secure. Wool beanie and balaclava, insulated shell with hood (I didn't have anything with a hood!), insulated overshirt (my new favorite thing to wear), merino wool baselayer, and some socks. I did have some gloves from my motorcycling days, but I could use something higher quality and less bulky when a good deal pops up. I'm thinking some of it should be kept in a backpack in the car, with other stuff of course.

People don't think of this place as being cold, and I'm sure the northerns laugh, but 35F (or higher even) will cut right through you at 80-100% humidity.
 
Last Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were real bears here. Low 20s and high teens for both the highs and lows. The killer was a 45mph EAST wind out of snow country. Wind chill took the temps to MINUS 30.

Thursday afternoon brought us 5 inches of snow (first this winter) snarling rush hour traffic. Friday most stayed home (I didn't - I know how to drive in this stuff). Friday night was freezing rain on top of the snow.

Saturday? Don't really know. Never left home. What I do know is that there was no ice on the roads at home, just 2" of packed snow on the roads and 2" of snow in the front yard. Winter temps at home are usually 10-15 degrees higher than 2 miles south, and since we never had any wind it was quite pleasant to be outside even in flip flops without socks on. If the landlady had been home, I would have had her fill the bathtub on the back porch. Then I would have soaked for a couple of hours watching the creek flow by 20 feet away.

Late Sunday the Pineapple Express arrived and by the afternoon temps were in the low 50s.

By Wednesday morning all of the snow was gone except for the piles. Today the overnight low was around 45 and the high pushing 60. These are the same temps we had 10 days ago.

So, now winter is over for us. Next are the blistering months of June, July, and August where the high temps hang in the high 70s and low 80s, way too hot for me. If they get above 90 (which sometimes does not happen for years), I will just stay home where the temps are normally 10 degrees lower than 3 miles west of us.

The last time we had a cold winter like this was December 2008 where everything shut down for a week. We probably won't see these extremes for at least another 5 years or so. In the meantime I will think about Fusor with his never ending Arctic weather and Ancona with his never ending Equatorial weather. Both of you can keep that crap. I prefer to be where the weather is livable most of the time with winter weather absent most years and the horrible sun hidden most of the time.
 
If the landlady had been home, I would have had her fill the bathtub on the back porch. (snip)...and the horrible sun hidden most of the time.

I vote this the most unique post of the year! :rotflmbo:
 
Guys, it's a true 4 season place here - we get it all. If you look on say, my youtube channel (available by looking for DCFusor or Doug Coulter) - you'll see vids of it all, or at least some. Even there, I tend to get the pix of the really strange stuff, not what's normal - who wants to see normal? When it is (most of the time), I'm too busy enjoying it to take many pix or vids. Would you take a pic of your wife and fap to it, or invite her to bed?

I get to sit and be rained on by cherry flower petals in just a month or two, with super nice weather leading to orgasmic spring. Then there's summer - which can be all over the place, but is usually in the 70's for most of it, up to the high 90s sometimes - what we call the dog days. Florida would not kill me, I like it hot too.

But I like the variety more. Spring is that much easier to appreciate if you've "just been through hell" - and it seems the flora and fauna here agree, it's insanely nice.

The instructions for gardening are: plant seed, get away - you'll poke your eyes out otherwise. Of course, you plant when the weather is right for that crop.

The instructions for raising cattle are: Have fence so they stay yours. Feed them some when there's snow on the ground. No barn required. Sell them when they get large.

Having also spent time where it's always the same - I like this better. Maybe I bore too easily, but continuous 'perfect' weather bores me (and also, it seems the other wildlife). Nothing happens - it just sits like that.

Fall here is fall, with the nice colors and brisk mornings. It's not that weird here. I only report on the outliers, as I assume people already know what normal is.

(and, it's obviously popular to read about, and respond to - see this thread for ref)

But of course, it could be selection bias. I traveled quite a bit before I decided this was the place for me. The Bahamas bored me. "the world of indoors" in the cold places bored me (I am not fond of cold, I'm too skinny for it). But we don't have that much.

With all that snow we just had - today you could go out in shirtsleeves (I did) - it nearly broke 50f out there, even with snow everywhere (but rapidly disappearing).
Blinding sun - with only about half my solar panels having shed snow, I probably set a record for power input. I brought my Volt back to full charge and cooked a hot shower while running a buncha computers I'm playing on. I don't get it - what's not to like?
 
Back
Top Bottom