For those who hum that familiar song,

I'm Dreamin of a White Valentine's Day..

This is all fun to experience. Vicariously.
Glad the electrons returned before you had to chop up Aunt Maude's sideboard, though a roaring fire in the living room also makes for a romantically snug retreat. (Best: if you have a fireplace.)

Rain here, filling up the ground water nicely. Discovered more of WeatherUnderground's clever features -- showing a Station only a few blocks away!
http://www.wundergro...year=2010&month=2

Kewl:
Found that my retro barometer (a '50s Airguide via eBay) had -indeed- a hole with a screw-head beneath / unlabeled, of course.
Prompted me to disassemble, clean glass and blow out the aneroid gearing of years of cruft:

Calibrated barometer via minute-minute data and noted that it tracked pretty well, within ±0.02" across recent range, with just a bit of a tap to kill the hysteresis of the gearing. Amazing accuracy for such a device; of course it makes more sense as %-full-scale of ~~ 320º; too lazy to count the marks.
(An exercise in mensuration for a frosh class; this sucker makes 1/1500 precision. Who'da thunk?)

Fun to watch the precipitation rate in-real-time correspond to what eyeballs guesstimate.
The Web ... extending our sensory tentacles from the sublime to the ridiculous --
Science.. it just Works.

Stay snug, well at least to ~ 1:1500 Microsnuggies

Thanks for the good wishes. It's been fun...

We lost our power again around 11:30 yesterday, and it was off about 11 hours. The home cooled off to about 57 degrees before it came back. We stayed plenty warm with various goose-down comforters and such. We've got a fireplace, but they're mainly decorative (and not too good for warming a house anyway).

We spent yesterday and much of today shoveling. It's an amazing amount of snow. I measured 24.5" in our front yard this afternoon. The actual amount of snow that fell was probably higher - there were places I cleaned off on our deck that later had 6" of fresh snow but the unshoveled areas didn't seem any thicker. The snow is heavy enough that it just seems to compress the underlying stuff more...

We cleaned off our cars today. It got close to freezing so the sunlight helped speed up the process.

We only got our cable TV and internet back about 30 minutes ago. The cable had been down at least 12 hours. Withdrawal symptoms were pretty strong! =8-(

Even with all the outages and so forth, we've been pretty lucky. We just got back from our evening walk and at least half of the streets in the areas we normally walk are still without power. There are outages even in an area where the power lines are underground, which surprised me.

Barometers are neat. I once found an old surplus one that was filled with mercury. It can be incredibly accurate, but there are several offsetting adjustments that need to be made - e.g. http://www.npl.co.uk...28faq-pressure%29 . I'm glad that you did't need to mess with those things!

Have fun.

Cheers,
Scott.

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