A Near Miss?

the neighbor's garage, a photo by mmahaffie on Flickr.

Our next door neighbor's garage door took a mighty wrench at some point during the storm. another neighbor, across the street from this one, lost the top of a large tree as well.

The working theory around our cul-de-sac is that both were caused by the storm cell that spawned the tornado that hit Nassau station, northwest of us -- or maybe by the tornado itself.

We Survived Hurricane Irene

It's a wet, blustery Sunday morning here in Lewes and we're approaching the endgame of Hurricane Irene. Bottom line: we're just fine.

The storm has moved inland in New York state at this point and is down to Tropical Storm strength. It was a Category 1 Hurricane when it passed east of Delaware overnight. I think the worst of the wind and rain for us was later afternoon and early evening of Saturday.

We had a scare when a storm cell that appears to have spawned a tornado passed just overhead of our neighborhood. we'd had warning from local television and spent a few minutes down in the basement.

The twister apparently touched-down about three miles to our west and damaged a number of houses, at least one of them seriously. as of now, I have heard no reports of injuries or deaths in Delaware from this storm.

We spent the rest of the night on the main floor, closer to the basement, camped-out in the living room.

I took a quick look around the house this morning and so far just a small tree is down in the side yard. It may be savable.

A Stormy Night in Delaware

A storm front moved across Delaware last night, bring high winds, thunder and lightning, and possibly hail up and down the state.

The scene at right was at 7:05 p.m., just outside of Rehoboth Beach. Heavy rain showers had just moved through, though there was not much thunder or lightning. There was a momentary opening of the clouds that showed the sunny skies that had been around earlier in the day, and the tops of the storm clouds above the murk that hovered just over our heads.

As the evening progressed, we watched storms roll across the sky north of Lewes. They tend to pass us to the north, but we did get a few brushes of rain and wind and were able to watch the show from our north-facing living room windows.

And it was possible to track the various storms via twitter.

In Ocean City, Maryland:

• drvcrashI sweat a tornado is coming thru right now
• drvcrash It's hailing sideways
• scottking http://twitpic.com/67xft Hail just shattered the windshield on our neighbors truck. They look like cocktail onions.
• drvcrash @scottking yeah i was watching the cameras at work when it hit and all the customers run in
• scottking @drvcrash I can only picture being putt-putting or on the boardwalk and have it start hailing. Bet it's hilarious to see tourist run.

In New Castle County, Delaware:

• del_editor http://twitpic.com/680ld - rainbow outside the news journal
• del_editor power's out in bear, we hear
• del_editor about 5,600 Delmarva Power customers w/o power in Glasgow area. power back on by 11 p.m. they're saying.
• del_editor http://twitpic.com/6863r - rainbow on 141 SB

At around 10:00 p.m., del_editor, who works at the News Journal, tried a little twitter-based reporting:

• del_editor so how's the weather, any power outage situations out there in the south, north and in between delaware?
• andytuba @del_editor Well, Newark had that weird yellow sky earlier, but it stopped raining a while ago and the power's doing fine.
• lifeontheedges @del_editor not much crazy weather here, lots of thunder and lightning for a while but calm now. sky looked like orange sherbet at sunset.

I assume there were several other responses, from folks I don't follow, because del_editor soon seemed satisfied:

• del_editorI love the power of twitter. In a few seconds, I can gauge weather throughout state. thank you, all.

And others were watching the storm and storm-watchers:

• lifeontheedges wow, looking at flooding in Salisbury on @wboc preview

Meanwhile, in Southern California:

• martenhogeweg even the fox weather man is twittering: it's sunny in socal.. it's sunny in socal.. it's sunny in socal..

And this morning? Here on Delmarva:

• oceanviewde Storm last night was worth the incredible weather it brought for today!

Spring Has Sprung in All Its Glory and It Is Making Me Feel Like Crap

Spring is a time of growth and rebirth. The world wakens from its winter slumber. Flowers, grasses, and trees burst into color and life. Spring is when we are made new.

And it is making me utterly miserable.

The pollen content of this spring air is as high as I can remember. I'm one of the Hay-Fever sufferers sneezing and hacking through this week.

I'm glad that spring is here. I love the new green and all the flowers. But I am tired of feeling like crap.

Too Much Weather

This is what we found when we returned home on Monday evening, after a day of gale-force winds.

This is the second of two Bradford Pear trees in our front yard to split and fall. The trees were planted by the previous owners. They bracketed the front yard and lent a symmetrical prettiness to the yard.

But these are not good long-term trees. They are a variant cultivated to be pretty. And they most certainly are. As they age, however, they outgrow their ability to hold themselves up. Eventually, without constant care and (I think annual) trimming, they split and often don't survive.

I did not keep ahead of this tree. It was due to be severely trimmed back; it was starting to brush against the house. The wind-storm came before I could contact a tree service however.

The first fell a few years back. It wasn't nearly this large. We had some trouble getting rid of the stump. The folks we paid to grind it out did a poor job, and I was left with more root mass than I could get rid of by myself. Eventually I got smart. I built a low, loose-stone wall around it and back-filled to cover the stump with rich garden soil. I planted a mess of lilies that seem to love feeding on that stump.

We had a fellow come and clear away the fallen portion of the tree on Monday. It looks like the tree will not be able to survive on its own. I'm waiting for an estimate from the tree guy to remove the remainder, but the weather has been wrong for that kind of work. After that, I'll have the winter to think about what to do next.

There is one positive note; a small dogwood that had been struggling in the increasing shade of that tree will now likely start to thrive.

Hot. Humid. October?

This is what Dover looked like at the start of this week. Blue, clear skies with a selection of fluffy clouds. This is what we expect from Fall; low humidity and comfortable temperatures.

So, what has gone wrong? The rest of the week has been too warm and too humid. Sure it led to a few fog-delays to delight my school-age kids. But I've been running the AC in the Prius again, just to cut the mugginess.

Of course, a cool-inside car cutting through a fog-bound landscape is going to gather condensation, obscuring the view of a dank, gray, misty commute. So I run the wipers. Which just makes it worse.

This isn't the October we ordered.

Hartly's Happy Hippie has a post up this week lauding the arrival of fall. She's a young fashion-plate and looks forward to being able to "layer" this season. I think she's being a bit optimistic. I'm still trying to find some sort of justification for wearing shorts and sandals to work at the Office of Management and Budget.

Meanwhile, the forecast for tomorrow is for temps in the mid-80s. There's talk among my girls of going to the beach tomorrow. The beach?!? This is October, we should be haunting the Punkin' Patch, looking for carvable and chunkable gourds.

Oh well. This too will pass. The temps will fall and the humidity will lift. Maybe this day-long sinus-ache will leave me as well.

Did I Jinx It?

There I was on Saturday, thinking spring and digging higher temperatures. I called the change of season too soon, I guess.

This evening, we're looking out at about three inches of snow that fell during the day today. It's not a spring snow, either. This is a fluffy cold-weather snow.

We could see school delays in the morning. The main roads look mostly wet, as evidenced by this image from shortly after 8:00 p.m., just outside Rehoboth Beach. Things could be a tad slick in the morning.

Thanks to the DelDOT Interactive Traffic Map site for the image.

Snow at Last!

It snowed in Lewes, Delaware, this morning. Unless I'm forgetting something, this is the first snow we've seen this season. And it wasn't much, just a healthy flurry of big, fluffy flakes. And we're still within about a week of seeing mid-January temperatures in the mid- to upper-sixties. Odd weather.

It has been a strange winter. Our temperatures have been above normal, and much of the rest of the nation is seeing devastating ice-storms, which may be a result of higher winter temperatures. I believe that colder temps would have made much of that mass of ice simply snow instead, which the American heartland can deal with rather well.

I should say that this is not the first snow I've seen this winter. There were some flakes mixed-in with a very cold rain up in Dover on Thursday. And I understand there were flakes in the skies of New Castle County this week.

Indonesian blogger Dino, newly arrived to study at the University of Delaware, saw what seems like his first snowflakes on Thursday in Newark:

It was beautiful seeing the tiny white snow flake falling from the sky. I tried to take picture of it but my camera can’t capture the tiny white snow flake in the air. It’s too bad because I want to show it to my family in Indonesia.

I did manage to capture a few flakes in a photo this morning. But that may just be because they were the very large, slow-moving sort.

The two snow shots I posted this morning, by the way, are the first photographs that I have posted on-line since January 5. That's a long dry spell for me. My lower back problems, and the resulting sciatic pain, have kept me from my habitual wandering-with-camera walks around Lewes and Dover. I haven't even really felt like photo-exploring from behind the wheel of my Prius, either.

I need to get past that.

The snow fell here between about 8:00 and 8:30 a.m.. As I write this, a bit past nine, the skies are bright and sunny, though a cold wind is blowing.