Chewbacca Defense

I must admit I am not a Chevy fan (or any GM product for that matter) but that is a nice truck!! Quite the holiday for you and your family! Engagement, new puppy and new truck!!!

I am a Sr. Cost Analyst for a aircraft cabin interiors supplier, working on a Regional Jet development program that is trying to get Type Certification by the end of 2019 Things are getting pretty crazy as we try to get across the finish line. We supply a lot of the interior and crew/passenger safety hardware. I go in to work at around 6:15-6:30 to run reports and do costing analysis for other folks when they drift in between 7:30 and 8, and get prepared to brief the Director of the program on anything that came in overnight. Then in the late afternoon, I am on the phone with the customer as they are coming into their office, and I have a sit down with the Director to finalize any proposals we will be sending over at the end of the day. I am usually in the office until 5 or 6, then its not uncommon for me to get on the phone with them once I get home up until 8-9pm. A lot the work I do it technically Program Manager work... Its a grind, and I have been doing it for so long that I don't know what I would do with myself if I only had to work for 8 hours a day! Oh wait, yeah I do, I would kayak and ride my bike more!

Vitamin D is mandatory for me. I work 10-12 hour days, and rarely get outside for lunch, so I don't see the sun (or "daylight") 5 days out of the week in the winter time. It caught up to me about 6 years ago, I had no energy and my mood was in the sh****r. Doc checked my vitamin D levels and they were very low. I think she gave me a shot, and I definitely remember she gave me a prescription of high dose vitamin D that I had to take for about 5 weeks, and it took that long before I started feeling human again. I highly recommend anyone who is indoors a lot in the winter take vitamin D. As I am getting older, I am starting to think I am going to have to get one of those "grow lights" to get me through the winters.

I thought about putting them on then but time got away from me, besides, I....have a very fun car to drive,and I have a lot of fun driving it....and I hate the lack of grip with winter tires when its not winter conditions on the road. Aside from that, I have to turn left onto a 2 lane 55mph highway every morning, and I can either sit there for 5 minutes waiting for a gap or romp on it and shoot a gap. When I romp on it with winter tires, I get bad wheel spin/traction control battles up to about 20-30mph.

Hmm.....to get the winter tires put on tomorrow or not....I almost feel like if I get them put on I will *jinx* us...LOL as if mother nature is paying attention...."Wait! Chewbacca Defense just put his winter tires on....change that snow we scheduled for Whatcom County to plain 'ole rain"

CONGRATS MAN!!! Very happy for you!!

Had to run home briefly a little while ago, and it is raining tree branches on Mt. Baker Hwy. Lots of fences down in my neighborhood, and sounds like there are several trees down in the Hillsdale/Tweed Twenty area. We have some high tension transmission lines near my house, and they were emitting this crazy shreek/wail that I've never heard before. KBLI reporting sustained 41mph winds with gusts to 59mph as of 11:53am.

These will be some fun stations to watch through the day

Looks like KBLI is already getting gusts in the 40's and I've recorded a 30mph gust at my house. When is this supposed to peak in the north interior?

Yeah hopefully they can. They have a very tight window in which to get over there and do what they need to do... We were just joking that one of the folks traveling is Russian, so they should just put him behind the wheel and bomb on over the pass...it’s should be a cakewalk for him!

I’ve got co-workers trying to get to Moses Lake, we just texted them, and they were unaware of the closure and in the process of putting chains on.... Not sure what their next move is or how long the pass will be closed.

Yeah, I've seen those posts, and appreciated them, but I've also seen several posts where I felt like I needed to be drinking some of the "kool-aid" to properly appreciate them. It seemed like he went through a phase about a year or so where he completely lost me. Maybe I will have to give him another read...

Huh....and I quit reading his blog because I felt like he was becoming too much of a "climate change extremist"...I guess he was more of a moderate on climate change (in the grand scheme of things) than i gave him credit for. This is pretty disgusting to read about (and to be fair I would be saying the same thing if this was occurring with conservative extremists. I am really glad my son decided to go to Montana for school. Both Western Washington University and UW seem to have adopted a very toxic extremist liberal culture, and this just reinforces the point. My son is actually quite liberal, but in Montana, he said that he can have rational discussions about politics instead of being shouted down for his less than extremist view here in the 'Ham

Just before I moved up to Bellingham from the Willamette Valley (2000-2002 time frame, I didn't keep records then), we had a wicked storm with winds up in the 60+ mph range. I was driving a '69 VW bug at the time, and going on Hwy 34 from Corvallis to the freeway, I had the steering wheel turned 90 degrees to the right to stay on the road. Rain was getting blown past the passenger window seals and hitting me. I then turned to go north on I-5, and all of the cars had road spray "bubbles" around them because the wind speed relative to traffic. That was the one and only time I got that car above 75mph (just barely). I would venture to guess if I tried to go south I would have struggled to get it up to 40mph. Probably my favorite windstorm memory from living there. The second one was not so good, it was the surprise windstorm we had in December 1996. I was on the roof putting up Christmas lights and almost got blown off. We lived smack dab in the middle of the valley in an old grass seed field so there were no trees around. The forecast called for it to be "breezy" and it started that way, but went from breezy to "howling" at the blink of an eye. I don't do well with heights and ladders, so that was a pretty terrifying experience for me.

Sorry to hear, you guys are in my thoughts. Hopefully they can get things sorted out quickly.

Wind has really been howling the past 30 minutes or so, we went through a 5 minute period with the lights flickering a lot and we could heat power lines arcing off in the distance. Its starting to settle down some now. Unfortunately my weather station does not get the full strength of the wind with the direction its blowing tonight, but stuff was getting blown out of trees and hitting the side of the house, which does not happen very often. Just had the biggest gust of the night come through and take out my Christmas lights. Saw on the news that Clallum county has declared a state of emergency as the whole county is without power.

Yeah, I have a friend in Cashiers and couple more in Asheville, and I am not liking what I am seeing.....their good winters=craptasic winters here.....just waiting for my friends/family in the Atlanta area to start posting snow pictures...that would pretty much be the final nail in the coffin for any hope of snow out here....

Definitely, my wife works at a very large specialty clinic here in town, and I would say pretty much all of the docs drive a either a Subaru or 4wd SUV with the occasional Audi AWD thrown in. There is no calling in due to snow for those guys. There is one doc that drives a Bentley (he moved up from LA) but other than that, I am very surprised by the complete lack of "status" cars in the doctor's parking lot for this clinic. Some of the other clinics have your stereotypical Porsches and Mercedes filled parking lots, but most of the cars at my wife's work are very "ordinary." Hell one of the most senior docs (and his wife is a doctor too) drives an old 90's dodge diesel or a early 90's land cruiser that overheats if he drives it any further than the distance from his house to the clinic.

That is awesome, blast from the past. Never thought to look him up on you tube. Looked like there was a CZ going on up here in one of the national radar images (it was right behind his head in one of the shots). Just came across this video of one of the worst storms in my memory...."snowjam '82" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO8HTpFT4Fo It's pretty fun to look at all of the cars from the era....datsuns, VW bugs, a karmann ghia Chevy Chevettes. My mom got caught in the storm, took her something like 6-8 hours to get home (normally a 45 minute commute). We were all home alone so she had to get home. She went to bed when she got home and just cried...She was driving a Chevy Monza if I remember correctly, crappy little 4 cylinder that could barely get out of its own way...

For me it was Guy Sharp on WXIA channel 11 in Atlanta. The other news stations sucked. Of course it was more about thunderstorms and whatnot....with the occasional ice/snow storm to throw in. When it came to tracking a major weather event, I was almost as bad as the Rainman was regarding Judge Wapner when it came to catching Guy Sharp's forecast, my mom even started calling me Guy Sharp.....she still brings that up every once in a while...LOL

My boss is Canadian, so he is always pushing his extra "u"s on us. I write commercial proposal letters, and every once in a while (usually when he can't find anything else) he will start marking my draft letters for my "Canadian" spelling errors

I had to read that 4-5 times before I was able to wrap my head around what you were saying. Luckily I found the video further down to confirm what I was reading.... Wow........just........wow..........

I guess I would be surprised if that happened, but I'm wondering if the precip rates are high enough so that the snow starts piling up faster than it melts off....probably needs to get a few degrees cooler. Looks like it is all snow now.....wet heavy snow but still snow

First full frost this morning, sitting at 28 this morning. The ice on the windshield was quite thick!

Yeah that was pretty crazy. My son made the same observation and I was joking with him that we brought Bellingham with us. We did catch one quick glimpse of the sun just east of Whitehall which just made it seem that much darker and miserable as we drove towards Bozeman