Bob Chill

I'll see what I can do about PMs lol. Been a problem for years now I think I can't explain it but my intuition tells me who I align with and who I don't. It's a feeling and not a thought. I feel aligned with you. Who how why and all that stuff? Beats me

It all sounds so logical at the starting line right? It's just math. Do good math and check out. Simple... but that's not how it works here. It's near impossible to win the math game early because everything in the DC metro is designed to make sure it costs too much to do it along the way. Lol. My father gave me advice right before we bought our house in 2002. He said this area has a way of robbing you blind right under your nose. He also said that I will almost certainly increase expenses as my income grows so most months will look the same no matter how much goes in. He was 100% right and I'm certainly not a lavish spender. He was speaking from experience and also was 100% supportive of all of our early marriage decisions. He asked me in 2009 when he was sick if I had had enough yet. I didn't get the magnitude of question until 7 years after he passed. My answer to him was a resounding "nope i'm good" but that changed dramatically in the years following. By 2016 I had had enough but our family life was deeply woven into the fabric of the DMV's pick pocket action that there was STILL no way out without causing hardship on the people I love the most. Ugh See what I'm getting at? It's not really an equation or free will choice once your in and the grip has a hold. The emotional burden of packing up and leaving can be a titanium wall keeping you in too. Just be self aware and honest and make sure you put your heart and intuition first and not your wallet. That's a REAL blurry topic tho...

I'm all in now. I hopefully have 15+ solid years of good phys health. I'm finally light and strong for an old guy. That was harder than my driveway and I was already light and strong once lol. Everything a young person hears about getting old is true. They need to just accept that. I'm getting back to work here this spring with the contractor who did the initial clearing on our tract. 1 man show will become a 2 man show with machines. We're buying a 12k lb excavator and we both have trucks/trailers trackloaders already. I'm in for my love for the outdoors and also machines (lifetime gear head lol) I need to earn but my ambition doesn't have a single $ attached. I have a feeling it will all just naturally work out. The realtor who sold us our lot set us up to clear a 2 acre build site for a lot he sold. All I did was mention I'm buying excavator in passing. He lit up and here we are. Life is a GD trip sometimes. Nothing I'm doing is pre-planned. Just rollin downstream seeing what happens.

No doubt friend. I figured that out 3 years ago when I took the blinders off

I've always liked you as a poster. Even in the early pre-college days. As someone in their 50's who chased "the dream", I pulled it of in every way except true satisfaction. The most important part of life... I'm far from alone. I'm in the majority i think. I'm very self aware of why now. It clicked. Chasing "things and stuff and bank accounts and vacations and expensive dinners..." and whatever else can become a merry-go-round in living hell. If you are not feeling satisfaction from within, it's all a waste. The chase is insidious. You start off guns blazin. You know what you want and go for it. Over the coming decades it will beat on you. All of it. Traffic, stress, insane cost of living, surrounded by big ego jerks, etc. You start to ask yourself wtf you're doing. I realized I had no internal peace in my life. Always on alert and foot on the gas because it's the only way to play the money game Big money can often fuel a big ego and big ego's by default are very unhappy entities because it's typically house of cards inside. I realize now how wrong I had it and I was never brash or flashy. I've spent 2 months in (all of) my spare time building a 500' driveway bed by hand and a tractor. It was a real bitch. But I never wavered. I kept pushing, watching, thinking, adjusting. Gravel was delivered last week and it's all done. The happiest day of 2023 and it cost me $900 for 20 tons of gravel. This (for me) is true happiness with my life. I could have dropped 7-8k and had it done in a day but there is no way in hell I would feel such deep love and satisfaction for what I did. That one piece of work will make me smile inside until I leave the earth. Priceless really. I'm not telling a soul what to do other than be very aware that the "dream" has a very dark side that leaves an ocean sized pool of destroyed happiness in its wake. You can only understand pure satisfaction once you suffer greatly. Life is suffering by design. How much you balance suffering and internal happiness is 100% a choice. Friend, stay on the winning side of that. Whatever it takes. More money is an unlikely solution

It's near impossible to discern whether it's better data or simply shorter leads that adds the most accuracy. I'm a coin flip on this topic. Personally, I haven't seen much difference for years. Leads shorten and forecast improves is how I look at it. Big shifts in guidance as land based sensor data comes in has become pretty rare IME

I thought this scene last night was next level. Add 6-12" of mashed turnips and even the spirit of Bob Ross couldn't paint it ETA: this isn't our land. It's the shared lakeside landfor the 17 private properties in our "neighborhood" lol. Usually not a soul in sight.

I'm in VA this week. Looks like smith mtn jack east of the blue ridge. Should I post here or in the SE sub?

Boomer has unfinished business. I was so mad at montana. Everyone knew he would do it but dammit it still made me mad af lol

This hobby is a process similar to death by a thousand cuts without the death part. I mean you can die from it and stuff but it takes waaaay more than 1000 cuts. If you sit back and just look at winters for what they are as they progress, it gets much easier. I've been expecting everything to morph and fade like it has simply because it's been doing it basically all winter. Winter personality is something I mention often. It's a very subjective term but the essence of it is a quantum calculation in your head that produces a strong gut feel. No specifics. Just kind of an "aha! I see what's going on here!" feeling. I've grown to trust it and while I certainly get stuff plenty wrong in all directions, on avg my expectations seem to match conditions quite well and that removes negative emotions and all the "fun" circular thinking that goes with it. There's literally 7 weeks of solid snow climo left. Especially for bigger events. This is the beginning of prime time for that. It could easily snow here this year and we can get a big storm. But given this winter's incredibly persistent personality, it's unlikely to rush thru the door. Right now, "tracking" is just chasing the crack in the door at long ranges. It may never crack open. I'm waiting for that crack to be at hour -24 before getting excited. Until then, CAPE does a masterful job at updating morning thoughts and I trust his words 100%. I just read that daily and drive tractors

I do, will wear it this summer, will post pic, and will thoroughly enjoy the laughs. Haha

It's near perfect mechanically. I drove 10 miles on country roads to get it to our property. Lol. It was a fun/wild ride. Every person who saw me drive by smiled and waved or gave a thumbs up or whatever. It set in right then... I'm restoring everything cosmetic and keeping it until I'm gone. It's a special tractor. One farmer maintained it for its whole life. I'll do the same thing

Few steps ahead of you. Instead of watching wx models this week, I bought this bad ass 1967 diesel Massey Ferguson on Tuesday. A piece of local history as it spent 50 years on the same farm. Really cool machine. Rear hyrdros lift 3k lbs and it can tow 5k. I can't even break it lol. Now I'm rooting for dry weather. It can be cold or hot but need dry. I gotz lotza workz to do and I'm about sick AF of mud

I'll go out on a limb here. My intuition has been and is continuing to tell me our winter as far as snow threats go is about to start and probably be real for a while. I have my list of reasons but the big one is simple. Look at what mid level temps do in Canada on all ensembles over the next 2 weeks. The look at mean jet panels. Says a lot on a macro scale imo. Cold enough air source coast to coast just over the border. If you loop it you can see the tpv just rotating and distributing cold air. So I do believe snow chances will increase rapidly and probably hang around for than 30 seconds. But with the personality of winter and the type of northern stream dominant pattern on the means... clean events better not become a minimum bar lol

There's a difference between passively discussing and actively or exclusively focusing on it. 5 paragraph posts every day or 2 talking about isn't passive. Only a few are really interested in speculating "why". The rest just want to know whats possible with a specific setup with no mention of 1960 or "coulda woulda shoulda". There's a fatigue here about this and there are a lot of people directly or indirectly saying as much. It would go a long ways in improving the "fun factor" here if we simply just stopped debating/beating. Nobody wants to avoid topics and nobody wants to keep getting hit over the head with the same stuff. Everything has been said. Let's try and give it a rest

I pretty much just follow CAPE here lately. Every time I read his AM posts I don't need to do much else. Listen to him. It's not suddenly getting easy cold and snowing. That does happen and will happen again. Not right now. It's a carving process. The only reason the next couple waves have any chance is the primo climo calender. The setups are heavily flawed in the temp dept as it stands right now. There is potential for something but man, after what I've seen this winter, accumulating snow for 90% of the forum seems incredibly unlikely. Tracking the promise of accum snow has a negative roi for me. Later next week and beyond is much more interesting but only if a reinforcing cold pattern sets up. Like a string of 10 days where CAA keeps pushing return flow out of the way quickly. Overhead and west tracks do snow here but not when each cold period is a single moderating airmass lol Eta: I posted a few days ago about a really good d10 overrunning setup. My enthusiasm was avg at best because of winter's persistence... ridging and waa avection in front of every shortwave...

For now, things look like they want to shift into a pattern that has fewer problems than we've seen. Good time of year and the east in general is waaay behind. Little out of the basement rally would feel like a blizzard

I've been active a few times but the leads were long and nothing has come close so mostly quiet this year. Seeing confluent flow not only building in strength on ens but also staying put or speeding up in time is the best thing we've seen this year by far inside of d10. When the WAR and SE ridge have steered every single storm to our NW unabated, it gets really simple what to track and root for.... Confluence hammer!

VERY nice 48hr ens height trends. I don't give a single turd if d10 is a swva special (I'll send pics) because we aren't snowing until we are compressing and flattening to our east and north. Anyone who disagrees must really like the last 6 weeks

You realize this post is funny af right? .... wait a minute... I feel a treble hook in my lip... brb

He was referencing Bob Ryan's forecast right before the destruction was imminent

Gotta add my enthusiasm level to my last post... I'm only posting panels because it looks like a "real" way to snow. It will prob morph against us like every other long lead look but this one is at least logical and "normal" and it's showing up dead center prime climo. Doesn't seem too crazy to talk about

Imo only, best look this year for snow d10 on gefs. I've been watching like everyone but kept seeing the same stoopid tendency to pop a ridge in front of every stoopid shortwave... trend has shifted more confluent on basically all guidance. Big storm hunters won't like this setup too much because upside is limited. Personally, sitting at zero makes any upside at all pretty enticing.... Nice mean jet panel VERY nice mean 850 wind panel... we have not had this type of flow leading into any event... Any kind of mid level flow with a north vector can overcome temp flaws. This year it seems like an elusive requirement Connect the mid and upper flow in your brain with these panels and you have every ingredient on the table for a 3-6" TN valley overrunner with WNW flow in the mids... heh... wut tf does that even mean? Lol

If we are brutally honest... there has never really been a chance this year. Hostile everywhere around us. I don't think we've "wasted" anything because it was waste to begin with. Lol I like the implications for the end of the month and beyond but until that cold actually settles in, there isn't much worth slicing and dicing. I think it's safe to say this year, we aren't getting snow until cold makes its presence well known

I loved that movie. The family table scenes are second to none. Lol.