but you wouldn’t know it if you owned property near the shore.
And then there’s this.
Things at home are unharmed, & I’m so pleased!
No heat, no electricity, but OK.
Thank you for all your prayers.
Brendan Loy is tracking. We’re all worried, of course.
Meanwhile, yet more politics,
Did Barack Obama Intentionally Mislead KUSA’s Kyle Clark About ‘Abound Solar’?
Did Obama Lie About Political Pressure For Solar Abound’s DOE Loans?
That middle arrow runs right through here.
First of all, if you’re traveling to the Northeast in the next few days, don’t. Read Airline Crisis Survival Guide, reschedule your trip, and save yourself the hassles.
Coalition of the Swilling has the exhaustive list of preparations, which you must read if you live in this area.
If you live in Princeton, you can count on extended power outages, which means no blogging if my neighborhood has no electricity – almost a certainty.
Here in Princeton, with the combination of Third World infrastructure (i.e., electrical cables not underground, and not enough cell phone towers) and huge number of large trees, most people prepare by mobbing the Princeton Shopping Center, especially McCaffrey’s Supermarket.
Of course, I had to stop by and check ou the place. The parking lot was nearly-full, but I was able to find a spot right in front of Blue Ridge Mountain Sports, and picked up some fuel for my small camping stove. It turns out they had them on sale. During the last power outage, I had stopped at Radio Shack and bought a cell phone recharger for the car. (Call ahead and ask if they have any in stock.)
I walked by McCaffrey’s, which of course was packed. I only needed some powdered milk and a newspaper but decided against it when I saw the lines. It looked like people heading to a Romney rally. Since the store was out of powdered milk, I decided against standing in line for 1/2 hour just to buy a paper.
At home, anything that can fly must be taken indoors
The most important thing we did, and have always done, is CLEAR THE AREA OF POTENTIAL FLYING OBJECTS. Anything and everything in our yard AND the neighborhood that could be turned into a missile (including that 100lb garden pot you don’t think can fly…it can), goes into the garage.
Most importantly, you must get all your preparations done TODAY.
Once you have that done, stock up on wine, get all your laundry washed and dried, make sure all your battery-powered gadgets are fully charged, and hope for the best.
Ace posted a link to a BLACKOUT AND POWER OUTAGE TRACKER, which may come in handy.
UPDATE,
Gov. Christie’s press conference,
The experts have spoken: No Shadow, Spring is Near!
And none too soon, at that.
UPDATE,
A reader who prefers to remain anonymous sent this, in case the groundhog is wrong, Groundhog: It’s What’s For Dinner
Princeton Township just called declaring a snow emergency. This is what things look like right now at casa de Fausta,
Holiday Travel in Disarray as Blizzard Heads Up East Coast
As the season’s first blizzard barreled up the East Coast on Sunday, promising to dump more than a foot of snow over the New York metropolitan area and batter the shoreline with fierce winds, holiday travel at the region’s airports was already in disarray, leaving thousands of passengers stranded.
Here’s what it looks like in Princeton,
at 2:34PM,
UPDATE
at 5:50PM, blizzard, 0.3 mile visibility, 17mph winds,
Leave it to government to leave you stranded.
As snow pounded Washington state and Seattle commuters waited for a bus, the iPod app failed because King County shut off the data feed that tracks bus locations.
Brian Ferris, who created the OneBusAway app explains,
In his blog post, Ferris notes that outdated technology on King County buses makes it especially difficult to track bus locations when weather turns nasty.
The position of each bus in Metro KC is not tracked with GPS, but rather with a decidedly lower-tech approach. Each bus is outfitted with a device that can radio the current odometer reading for the bus back to a server. If we know the odometer reading when the bus starts its route, we can periodically monitor the real-time odometer readings to determine how far along the route the bus has traveled. This gives us an estimate of position and from there, an estimate of how early or late a bus is. This is how http://mybus.org works and OneBusAway is just a fancy front-end to MyBus.
The problem comes with buses on adverse weather reroute, or any type of temporary reroute. When a bus goes on reroute, the physical route changes and the odometry calculation based on the original route used above is no longer accurate. In a perfect world, we would know when a bus is on reroute and adjust to its new route. Unfortunately, there is currently no automated way for handling this situation.
King County is “years away” from a GPS bus tracking system.
Your good-weather friends at King County, however, thank you for using public transit.
Cross-posted at Hot Air
Doug Ross contemplates the possibility of the next disaster:
What the Obama administration has wrought: the world’s first “Oilcane”
Art Horn, writing at OilPrice.com, describes the catastrophic potential of an oil-infused hurricane in the Gulf. Consider the series of missteps by the White House that has led up to this point, wherein the entire Gulf waits on pins and needles for the impending “Oilcane”:
• Disregarded and underestimated the impact of the tragic explosion and spill for over a month…
• As of last week, had deployed only 20 of 2,000 skimmer (clean-up) vessels…
• Fought Louisiana’s use of sand berms to prevent damage to the Gulf coast tidal region…
• Forced Louisiana to stop using 16 barges that were sucking up thousands of gallons of oil daily out of the Gulf…
• Refused to waive the Jones Act, which prevented foreign vessels and crews from cleaning up the Gulf, even though “American shippers who generally support the ban said they wouldn’t object to lifting it to fight the spill”…
Go read the rest.
What folks in Buffalo refer to as “a light dusting”.
The Philly Channel 6 station just reported that there is thundersnow, which apparently is a very rare phenomenon.
Here’s the forecast as of 2PM today,
Here at casa de Fausta we had a power outage earlier in the morning. The intersection across from my house was blocked by a barrier, so I went to investigate.
What happened is that a large tree came down at another street and the PSE&G utility workers have had to replace all the lines, and the posts:
The posts in the foreground are the new ones that they’ll use to replace the damaged ones.
Here they are at another intersection,
After all this investigative reporting, it was time to go back indoors and enjoy my definitely not sexy but very warm polartec socks.
That’s the snowmageddon update, for now.
And, how will affect my going to tango?
U.S. Northeast May Have Coldest Winter in a Decade
The U.S. Northeast may have the coldest winter in a decade because of a weak El Nino, a warming current in the Pacific Ocean, according to Matt Rogers, a forecaster at Commodity Weather Group.“Weak El Ninos are notorious for cold and snowy weather on the Eastern seaboard,” Rogers said in a Bloomberg Television interview from Washington. “About 70 percent to 75 percent of the time a weak El Nino will deliver the goods in terms of above-normal heating demand and cold weather. It’s pretty good odds.”
If you don’t like winter, it’s not looking good,
“It could be one of the coldest winters, or the coldest, winter of the decade,” Rogers said.
Sure, some worry about commodity futures. I want to know if I can make it to tango.
You have to have your priorities straight.
