SharonA

(South Forsyth county, just south of Stony Point airfield) There's about 2" now on top of the deck railings, furniture and tree limbs. The lawn is starting to become smooth-white instead of patchy-white bumps where it stuck to the grass and melted on the ground. Still coming down, although not as intensely as an hour ago.

It's finally switched over to big fat flakes, and lots of them, about 15 minutes ago. The elevated deck is *almost* white covered ... another 5 minutes, perhaps? We'd been getting tease with little flurries of white specks off an on for an hour+ until it finally committed. This is South Forsyth county a bit south of Stony Point Airfield ...

You can click on the map below to get Lat/Long/Elevation, or key in a specific address: https://elevation.maplogs.com/poi/cumming_ga_usa.62930.html

Not as bad as 2009's week-of-rain, but the flood warnings and water levels in northern Georgia were pretty amazing. We ended up with what looks like about 5.5" in south Cumming/north Alpharetta. I missed the first part due to driving home from a road trip Weds evening, during which (unintentionally) my timing was perfect for the maximum time spent in torrential rain as the line crossed I-75. From about 50-60 miles north of the FL/GA border until nearly the Perimeter, it was continual rain ranging from near-whiteout to just heavy. Husband reported that we had 1-2 minutes of light snow flurry early this morning.

Impressive how widespread the high wind reports are in Florida. It is going to be an unholy mess, all those gorgeous old live oaks. Couplet that passed through Pinellas/St Pete and is about to hit Tampa looks nerve-wracking for friends near there.

What's happening today is that I get radar data fine, but am not getting the warnings. The warning window is empty, no polygons plot, and there are no counters next to the tickboxes for which warnings to display on the map. I've got paid versions of GRLevel3 and GR2Analyst, and a few months ago purchased a new Windows 10 system, downloaded then-current versions of the programs from the website and successfully installed them. Or so I thought. This machine doesn't get used much and today I'm using it for what I think is the first time in an active severe event - and warnings do not plot. It's possible that the warnings didn't work before but I didn't catch it. I've tried the GR site forums but get taken to a Facebook group - I don't do Facebook. Google is producing results that aren't working ... so ... help please? Under Warning Settings, for the server, so far I've tried both warnings.cod.edu/ and warnings.allisonhouse.com, with and without the https: instead of http: Thanks!

Speaking of fishing, anyone gone striper fishing on Lake Lanier? I've been thinking of trying out one of the guide services, but that sort of thing is more fun (and less expensive!) with a group so I've never actually called one of the services to book.

Welcome to the joys of BGE ownership! LoveloveLOVE mine! Pricey but it was worth every penny. I went to the Atlanta EggToberFest several years ago out of curiousity about BGEs, bought a demo, and called husband to tell him to clear a path from garage to back deck, be prepared for some heavy lifting, and by the way he was off the hook, he'd just bought me a Big Green Egg for anniversary, birthday, and Christmas that year. His coworkers the next week: "Surrrrrrre she wanted it for her birthday. What are you getting her next, an outboard motor?" What kind of gasket do you have on it? That picture didn't look like the usual factory-felt or silver-gray high-temp replacement. One suggestion - move that puppy further away from the siding. The heat that comes off of them can get very intense and they stay hot for a long time (which is great when you are doing 800F sears and quick fired-pizzas). I've seen many a photo of siding that was discovered to be warped when they moved the Egg for cleaning or whatever. Downside: It's ruined us for going to to fancy steakhouse dinners. When my team was taken out to Morton's, I found myself realizing the steak we'd grilled at home the previous weekend was much tastier than the $50+ cut they were buying us. Now when I have to eat out I find I'm always analyzing the meal with an eye towards "what did I like / what was neat here that we could try at home?".

Last night around midnight it had tapered off here (Freeport) ... now it's snowing again. Not heavily, but at about the same clip as the early stages yesterday morning. Hard to guesttimate the snowfall considering the high winds we had for a bunch of it. Lots of scouring of areas then huge drifts at the edges.

I'm envious of those of you with the 20+ totals. We in Freeport had a late start, nothing showing when I peeked out the window at 7:50 then about 40 minutes later it was going OK. It's basically been continuous all-day with light to moderate snow in between spurts/bands of heavier stuff, vis about 1/4-1/2 mile when it gets heavier? There were a couple of memorable moments of a minute or so white-out. I'm going to guess about 6-8", tops, so far, over the previous stuff that hadn't yet melted. Snowblower sidewalk cuts are > a foot deep but some of that is the leftovers from last week. The wind has been strong to blast-gusty, 40mph+ IME at times. Cars in the parking lot facing into the wind are snowless on the front and huge piles on the back windows and rears. The wind was strong enough to blow enough snow under the overhang that it kept triggering the automatic doors to open. So much for working from the lobby, I quickly got tired of a freezing blast of air every minute or five. Hopefully we'll get more in the next few hours ... late to start, late to stop?

I eliminated them here w/out baiting but it is fairly manual. I set up a sprinkler-head hose overhead that like a light-moderate rain to saturate the mound and flood a bit underneath (amazing how much water it can take!). Turned the thing off and the colony quickly rebuilt an above-ground mound and moved the queen(s) and eggs up there. Then I scoop up the entire above-ground mound with a shovel and plop it into a bucket half-full of water to which a good squirt of dishwashing liquid had been added to break up the surface tension. Sometimes I don't get the queen and have to do it again later. Depending upon how sensitive you are to their bites, you may want to have the hose on and immediately wash off the handle of the shovel before the ants crawl up it to your hands (and remember to back away) That worked in Texas, too, but they'd come back from neighboring yards after a few months. Ongoing battle.

Yea, if they had been available in a smaller size I'd have jumped at it. Unfortunately I didn't think to collect the fruit/seeds from my own few wild trees before they succumbed to wind/deer/aggressive-right-of-way-clearing. I'd love to get about a dozen, then clear out a few spots along the treeline and line them up. Today might involve getting a post hole digger. My arthritic knees won't let me use a shovel so I've had to dig the holes by hand with a trowel while sitting down, and that's tough going even without having to sift out a big pile of rocks.

Ugh. Finally dig a somewhat-bigger-than-recommended hole for the crabapple, because I wanted to give it plenty of gravel-free room to spread, filled the hole with water to test the drainage, and 30 minutes later the hole still has standing water in it. It drained in reasonable time right up until the surface got down below the level where I'd dug into the solid red Georgia clay. So the poor tree is going to find itself sitting on top of a clay saucer of sorts - but at least it's got a foot+ in each direction rock-free and ready to expand into. This will be a bit of a happy surprise to the poor thing, because right now it is horribly root-bound, over 8' tall and still in a 5 gallon pot with huge cut-off roots poking out of each drainage hole. I'll of course be cutting off the pot rather than pulling it, and teasing out as much of the outer layer of roots as I can so that it starts off right.

I'd forgotten all about this thread This week has been landscaping & garden-y type stuff in between the rounds of wx. No hummingbirds yet. The native jessamine has been blooming for a while, and the invasive Japanese honeysuckle that I'm working on yanking out this year is just starting to bloom. I've got a variety of natives that hummers and pollinators like, all ready to plant when I get to that point in the process. Getting to that point is slow going. It's taken me way too many hours just to dig ONE hole appropriate for replanting a 10-gallon-potted tree. Turns out there was a gravel driveway or pad or something in the area I had picked for the crapapples. I got through the top 2" of years of leaves and some grass - mostly semi-shade grass-natives debris stuff, and hit 4-6" of tightly packed gravel. Getting through THAT was an adventure in stabbity-stab-stab-pry-pry-stab. Then I hit a couple of inches of nice soil, then deep red thick clay. On the bright side, I won't have the big mound of leftover dirt that I often have after removing a lot for a hole and not needing it all to fill in around the transplant afterwards ... I'll have a couple big buckets of gravel instead. It's been nice getting outside in the sun and doing some work. But ouch every part of me aches now.

Nope. I've had safe deposit boxes in a number of institutions and they all required use of two keys to access - one held by the customer (me) and the other by the bank. I go in, sign a card/fill out a form that records who accessed it when (one bank always checked my photo ID, others took my word that I was who I claimed to be), sometimes had the signature compared to the one on file, put my key in one lock and they put their key in the other. Even though in theory the paperwork specified who had access to the box, the fine print covered their butts with wording to the effect that "anyone possessing the key is assumed to be authorized to access the box contents", and the ID/signature-check just to make sure it's not someone pretending to be *me*. The signup and disclosure forms made a huge deal out of making sure I knew I had to bring my key every time, they couldn't do it with just their key, and "don't lose your key, we can't open the box. You have to fill out paperwork and pay us in advance a fee to cover both drilling the lock and then replacing it and issuing new keys because that's going to destroy it". Now what would be interesting is how the bank handles this without the backup paperwork ... who/what has the backup copy of the records of who's got what box number, the cards with accountholder info and alternate accesses and access history and so on. My previous bank went from small-local to itty-bitty-branch-of-huge-one to bankrupt-huge-one-gets-bought-by-even-bigger-one, yet the original account open cards, signatures, info, etc, were always in the same beat-up old box in an office that wasn't inside the vault. If this branch had been in Joplin, those records would be in a field a few dozen miles away. Things are quite different with safe deposit boxes vs stuff left at a hotel office, for example. Anyhow, sorry to digress so much. Business continuity after disaster is sort of an interest of mine.

The official stuff: 000 NOUS43 KSGF 242259 AAA PNSSGF KSZ073-097-101-MOZ055>058-066>071-077>083-088>098-101>106-250445-...UPDATED PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE SPRINGFIELD MO 559 PM CDT TUE MAY 24 2011 ..EF-5 TORNADO CONFIRMED IN JOPLIN... THE JOPLIN TORNADO HAS BEEN UPGRADED TO AN EF-5 TORNADO. * DATE...22 MAY 2011 * MAXIMUM EF-SCALE RATING...EF-5 * ESTIMATED MAXIMUM WIND SPEED...IN EXCESS OF 200 MPH * ESTIMATED PATH WIDTH...3/4 MILE * FATALITIES...122 * INJURIES...750 * THIS PRELIMINARY INFORMATION WAS DETERMINED BY A NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE SURVEY TEAM AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE PENDING FINAL REVIEW OF THE EVENT AND PUBLICATION IN NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE STORM DATA. AN EF-5 TORNADO IMPACTED A LARGE PORTION OF THE CITY OF JOPLIN. WIND SPEEDS WERE ESTIMATED IN EXCESS OF 200 MPH. THE PATH WIDTH WAS ESTIMATED AT THREE QUARTERS OF A MILE WIDE. FOR REFERENCE...THE ENHANCED FUJITA SCALE CLASSIFIES TORNADOES INTO THE FOLLOWING CATEGORIES: EF0...WIND SPEEDS 65 TO 85 MPH. EF1...WIND SPEEDS 86 TO 110 MPH. EF2...WIND SPEEDS 111 TO 135 MPH. EF3...WIND SPEEDS 136 TO 165 MPH. EF4...WIND SPEEDS 166 TO 200 MPH. EF5...WIND SPEEDS GREATER THAN 200 MPH. $$ WISE

There is a thread here dedicated to the surveys .... I don't know about the Wiki page nor who is handling it. Many of the surveys are preliminary