June 4, 2023

Tempest.

Even though my birthday is over a month away, Jamie, Chris, and Mike gave me my birthday present. Mike kindly installed it yesterday. It’s a Tempest Weatherflow weather station.

I’ve had my eye on this weather station for a while. As I’ve mentioned many times, I’m fascinated by weather, and the guys thought it’d be best if I had my birthday present before Monsoon Season starts up later this month.

As a trained Weather Spotter for the National Weather Service, I’m excited about this piece of hardware installed on our roof. I’ve already given the family the weather stats for the hour several times today and I’ve been playing around with the incoming data and the like. I’ve also started contributing to Weather Underground. I was excited to see the number of weather stations in our neighborhood, and I’m happy to be contributing our data to the mix.

Mike was able to use an old DirecTV mount for the weather station so that made installation easy. It’s solar powered, so I don’t need to climb up there to change the batteries like the old days when we lived in Central New York. And this weather station has real-time data, so I’ll be able to see how high the wind gusts actually are as a storm is rolling through. Plus, this provides lightning detection with a roughly 40 km radius.

In addition to our station stats in Weather Underground, I’ll probably end up putting a widget somewhere on the page here to share our weather data. I love this stuff!

4 June 2023 by Geek Storm Chasing. 2

The Great Purge.

I refuse to be sick. It’s just the way I approach the idea of illness, I refuse to accept it and I press on. Nine times of ten I feel like this approach works to life but once in a while my body wins over my mind and I end up getting sick.

Hence the activities of Friday.

After repeatedly vomiting during the day on Friday and taking some much needed downtime from work, I decided to just approach the weekend to allow my body to do whatever it needed to do. Apparently, that meant lots of sleep. I am writing this on Sunday morning and for the first time in months I actually feel well rested. I took three or four naps yesterday, went to bed early last night and ended up sleeping straight through until my usual wake up time, which these days is around 06:00. I get up early because after all, I’m a middle aged man and that’s when middle aged men apparently wake up. I also have a feline that likes to stir a bit at sunrise.

When my body wins the illness battle and convinces me to slow down, I take a moment and realize that it’s time to listen. So that’s what I’m doing. As a riff on Friday’s theme, I’m calling this weekend “The Great Purge”. I’ve made a few promises to myself in regards to tamping down on some of my habits (caffeine intake, calories intake, etc) and trying to get myself to a better place, both mentally and physically.

My career can be stressful. It’s manageable, at least I think it is, but it is stressful. Sometimes I think I take work things a little too seriously.

Home life can be stressful too. Again, I think it’s manageable but sometimes a house of five grown men can be overwhelming.

As one that tends to read into things, I feel like this bout of illness was my body and brain ganging up on me a little bit and saying, “hey, slow down a little bit. Get your act together.”

And that’s what I’m going to try to do.

4 June 2023 by Ponderings and Musings 1

About J.P.

Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.

Weird? Eccentric!

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