RDM

Rain at 35-37 all day.

CWG is showing rn/sn/sleet for Sunday in their "At-a-glance forecast" If only...

Murphy strikes again... Heat in the house went out yesterday evening. Kept things reasonable overnight with a couple portable IR and radiant heaters. Down to 64 inside the house now. Just fired up the fireplace insert with wood I split this morning. (Locust burns great). The ONE time I don't have any firewood split and the heat goes out. Split about a half cord this morning to get through until the technician can get here to troubleshoot the heater controls.

Worked outside on a retaining wall project all day. Was great having a few mood flakes around to accompany the awesome temps in the low 30's. Love "cold" days in the 20's and 30's while doing manual labor outside. Have about 45k lbs of prefab concrete block installed so far. Only 120k lbs more to go...

In most of FFCO that storm was a sleet fest. about 6 inches of it. Took place most of 13 Feb and overnight into the morning of 14 Feb. Will never forget it. My family and I moved to Bangkok that morning. IAD was closed but we still had to check out of our hotel in Tysons and take our chances. Eventually IAD opened and our flight to Tokyo was the first international flight to depart, albeit 2 hours late, which meant we missed our connecting flight from NRT to BKK. It was hell getting a taxi (van) to pick us up at the Intercon big enough to accommodate the three of us and our 8 bags.

Low of 24 here too just outside Vienna.

Light graupel in Vienna a few mins ago. The event is so rare even the auto-spell checker here does not recognize the word. lol

Indeed. There's a book about the '78 blizzard too. Someone here brought it to my attention several years ago so I bought a copy. Brought back lots of memories. My hometown about 12 miles N of Dayton (where Ohio gets really flat) was essentially isolated for several days until the plows and blowers could get through the drifts on a couple of routes into/out of town. It was getting ugly when the one grocery store in town sold out of everything edible.

My father grew up just outside of Dubuque, Iowa and often talked about that storm. His family was running out of coal and his dad took their two Belgian draft horse to get coal with a large wood sled. Said his dad almost didn't make it home because the horses were exhausted and stopped about a half mile from the house. He took them across the fields because most of the snow blew off in the wind. He managed to get the horses back to the barn or the horses would have froze to death in the cold and wind. They lived on High Ridge Road in Joe Davies Co. Illinois. The "High Ridge" name for the road was because it was the highest road around, with nothing to block the wind. Said it howled for days and was the only storm he ever encountered that was on par with the mid-west blizzard of 78, which we lived through in Ohio. That is the one I'll never forget because of the wind. We had drifts 20+ feet high too. Many roads were closed for weeks until the snowblowers from Dayton Airport and Wright Patterson AFB came out to dig through the drifts.

Blizzard Warning up now for WVA - regrets if this was already posted.

.48" in a few mins - the most rain in months. Temp dropped from mid 60's to 48 now - in less than an hour. Not bad.

T&L here in Vienna/Oakton

Thunder here in Vienna/Oakton.

.24" so far from round 1. Round 2 looks inbound in a couple hours.

Yes - worked outside all afternoon yesterday on a retaining wall project (160k lbs of 82lb prefab concrete blocks). It was almost cool in the shade but the physical labor make it feel great. Much better than a couple of months ago trying to do the same in the 90's and humidity. Going out again shortly for another round of "exercise".