mattie g

It wasn’t like this at all last year or the year before.

Was on hold with American Airlines for over 1.5 hours to try to reschedule our flight out of HHI on Tuesday…and the call simply hung up out of nowhere. I’m not concerned at all about postponing our departure (I’ll just cancel and rebook if I have to), but I just want to say…fuck all these companies that no longer actually have customer service but charge more than ever for their services. Fuck. Them. All.

We're in Hilton Head through Tuesday. Prefer to get this this thing here and out in time for the flight home, but kind of looking forward to possibly Good thing is that, besides planning to go to Bethany Beach with friends on Thursday-Sunday, there's nothing forcing us to head home that day since I've got PTO planned for the week anyways. Could just reschedule our flight, if needed.

Looks like MBY jackpotted with those cells - about 0.5". We headed out of town first thing in the morning and it was surprisingly wet when we left.

I spy a Beltway Split...

16z initiation was spot on with that complex in west/central VA.

I've been using the same one for quite a few years now and I can attest that it works flawlessly. So flawlessly, in fact, that the squirrels prefer going to my garden for an easy snack (and apparently to get a drink) instead of eating sunflower seeds from the bird feeder.

I'm just to the south of Fairfax City (maybe just west of where that last lightning strike showed up), so I feel you on having missed this one. Fingers crossed for today...

Yeah...that was pretty awesome. Dudes were so pumped to win a medal - any medal!

I despise squirrels, to be completely honest. Though we did have a very cute ginger squirrel that would clean up the sunflower seeds that fell out of our feeder this spring. Haven't seen it in a couple months, so I'm guessing its reddish fur drew too much attention from the local hawk or fox populations and it made a tasty supper for one of them.

I just threw a shoe at a squirrel that had one of my unripe tomatoes in its mouth. Then I chased it. Hope I scared the shit out of it and it doesn't come back, but that's unlikely. F'ing squirrels... Edit: I threw a shoe, not a show

I shouldn't complain because we got absolutely dumped on for like 15-20 minutes the other day, but missing like this in much the same way for days on end is incredibly frustrating!

I recall you mentioning your experiences before and I 100% understand where you're coming from. We have a family for whom swimming is *the* sport and one of their kids is one of our All Stars (the other is a coach and the other is one of the top in their age group). They're an absolutely wonderful family, but I get concerned that the kids might run into that burnout phase, which I don't want to have any responsibility for. There are a number of other year-round swimmers on the team - some of whom are quite good - but I don't have quite the same concerns about them flaming out...hard. I feel that a huge part of my job is to maintain that fun atmosphere - I dress up according to our themes, I dance (for a minute or two) after the meets or just on deck during meets, and I go out of my way to cheer each and every kid in the pool no matter their skill level. I'm a very competitive person (and was a very competitive athlete back in the day), so I feel that being competitive is a key to having fun, but winning at all costs and being competitive are two entirely separate things! Summer swim is supposed to be pure fun, so I've been doing my best to build the team so that we can actually fill lanes (we're still not quite there yet) while also making sure that the culture is built around enjoying every moment of an intense summer swim season! With all that said, I understand that teams need to go up and go down the ladder so that there's some semblance of parity in the divisions. It's not a perfect science, by any stretch (our season is testament to that), but I do think the league does its best to match up teams of similar size and ability (I won't get into what it's like in the top divisions because they're playing a completely different game than the rest of us). We might surprise some folks next year, but I also know that it's likelier we'll get knocked around a little, so I'll just set the expectations at the beginning of the season and emphasize (again) that we're all out there to have fun!

Our little team ended up with eight(!) swimmers in NVSL All Stars this year. Pretty incredible considering that I think the most we've ever had in one year was four! With a 5-0 record (all very convincing wins), a Division Relay win, an All Star relay team, and all those kids in Individual All Stars, there's really not much more we could have possibly done this season...except win the Sportsmanship Award! I came into the season feeling good about 5-0 and relays win, but never thought it would happen the way it did. Couldn't be more proud of what all of our kids - from the youngest first-year swimmers to our year-round senior swimmers - accomplished this year! I'm a little nervous about how many divisions we'll jump next year, but it should be a really nice challenge for our kids and coaches! Really looking forward to sewing up the season this Saturday at All Stars and taking a little break to get away...

Same thing has been happening for the last 3-4 days.

This time of year is too popcorn-y to reliably bust a rainfall deficit across the area. Agreed that we just need remnants or a coastal-type low to get a nice region-wide dousing.

This makes a lot of sense...and it appears that even the best long-rangers are using the experience of the last few years to hone in on things a bit better. You're one of the best and I really enjoy reading your write-ups each year, and while I'm not going to worry myself over what may or may not happen, I would certainly prefer to see bullish progs than bearish ones!

Concerned that the cells that popped up just to my east will rob the atmosphere of the energy needed to sustain that line out west. Too many close misses to the south and east in this period (except for one storm two days ago) has me a little on edge (no pun intended).

If the MD side of the Potomac trains again today, I'm going to kick a virtual puppy. Had that one big cell IMBY at about 7:00 pm or so yesterday, so that was good, but the really bug stuff at night slid to our south. Could definitely use some more rains today - the nearby creeks looked barely affected this morning!

Your mouth to God's ears!

Long-range guesscasting based on ENSO analogs hasn't worked too well recently. I think I'll continue to not worry about winter until it's here...and even then forecasting at shorter ranges has generally been unreliable so I'll probably just let things happen as they will without concerning myself over it!

Definitely a let down for those of us on the western side of the Potomac.

Always good to see some initiation *relatively* close by.

Not sure. It's been pretty damn dry over the last few weeks, but we were quite wet prior to that - we also lucked into a couple brief downpours in the last couple weeks, so maybe it's just enough to keep things going. I haven't watered the front lawn once and it's doing fine, but it gets a decent amount of shade throughout the day and doesn't grow terribly fast in general. The backyard gets a ton of shade now as neighbors' trees have gotten bigger in the last few years, so yeah...I guess that's a lot to do with it.

100% agreed. I don't know a lot of technical weather details, but this is one thing that I've learned from simple observation over many years.