Hello folks,

I realize it's been FOREVER since I wrote last in this blog. I think it's a natural progression. When E-mail went big back in the mid to late-90's I was all about Eudora and Postini... Then blogging came around in the early 2000's and I was all about Blogger. Then in the social networking explosion occurred in that 2003-2005 period. I was all over MySpace and Facebook. Blogging became secondary, then.

And since, Twitter has come around. I have two separate accounts, a personal account I use to provide random messages to friends and a second I use to expand on one of my favorite hobbies... Photography.

I grew up loving the outdoors and pretty much everything about it. Meteorology was my calling, because I loved anything and everything about the atmosphere and what came from it. But, I'm learning that even though Meteorology may have been my calling, photography is something I enjoy and love; immensely. It began, I think, when I began storm chasing back in 1996. Yes, 13 years ago!

While some find photography a strict art, initially, all I thought of it back then was a way to share what I saw on a chase with the storm chase community. I posted the photos up on my web-site and allowed others to view them. It was an innocent hobby and one I didn't really take too seriously. At least, as far as the quality of my photos was concerned.

Once I upgraded to digital in January of 2005, my interest expanded greatly and I began to appreciate the art of photography on a grander scale. No longer did I pay money for rolls of film or to get them processed. I could snap off hundreds of pictures a day and not even blink an eye. I snapped twice that, in fact, in the Badlands of South Dakota in late July of 2007. That record still stands, actually - 274 pictures in a single day. It may seem meager to the professionals in the crowd, but for me that's a lot!

Twitter takes me away from Blogger quite a bit. I communicate with most of my friends with it and those friends who aren't signed up, Facebook is a great alternative.

Twitter also provides a great opportunity to network with other photographers. And that is mostly the reason it distracts me from writing in my blog. Networking and receiving insight from these guys has allowed me to really grow into this industry. I'm coming into it self-taught and I realize that's not the ideal way of doing it. But, I've learned a lot about the in's and out's, the do's and don'ts and everything in between.

These photographers provide a lot of inspiration, just looking at their work. It provides great opportunities for me to diversify my photography portfolio. The ideas I get, the compositions I picture in my head, it's almost becoming second nature already. I'm certainly not just taking pictures of clouds anymore. In fact, I'm involved in a 365 Project currently, which is taking my camera and I on a wonderful journey through an entire year of daily photo-taking. It's been a great experience so far and I'm learning so much more about my camera just carrying it with me everyday. I'm learning how to look at the environment around me and what it would look like through a viewfinder and a lens. It's kind of neat, really...

What I'm getting at with all this... is that I really have become quite distracted with it all. It pushes me away from my computer and sitting and writing on the Internet. I almost feel it's a waste of time. It's been 25 minutes now that I've spent typing this entry, itself. I could have taken 50 pictures in this amount of time. Maybe more! ;)

Anyhow, so that's where I've been over the course of the last 2 months. I'm still meat-free, if you're wondering... :) I actually celebrated my 4-month anniversary of vegetarianism yesterday. I've got someone in my life. She hasn't exactly tugged at the strings of my heart yet, but we haven't exactly met in person, either. But, I've made some new friends outside of work and I've been hanging out with them quite a bit lately. We went hiking a couple of weeks ago and they've invited me to a couple of cookouts. If I had been a little more open about this earlier this summer, we could have been at the lake every weekend. Jared and Jason both have families with lake cottages - one is at Devils Lake, the other at Maple Lake, east of Grand Forks near Mentor, MN. They've got about a 4-5 member group that tend to hang out a lot. They're mostly friends of friends. Emily, a girl I dated about a year ago and have started to hang out with again, introduced me into the "circle." ;) So, my life has been going fairly well.

Work has been a little busy and will likely become even more so, with fall starting. We've got contracts winding up for the winter and that will make things even more hectic. Should be interesting, but I'm excited at the same time.


Well, I've got a couple of left over veggie burgers to warm up and some corn on the cob to cook. Dinner-time!

Also, if by chance, you are interested in following me along on this "Project 365" journey, hop on over to my photoblog. It's being updated everyday. In fact, I just posted my photo for today about an hour ago...!

Toodles for now...

So, I contracted a cold like 3 weeks ago... I take my typical "prescription" of NyQuil and a good 7 or 8 hours of sleep and viola, the cold is gone. But, here it is three weeks later - and I'm still hacking away. It's definitely not the way I'd like to be enjoying my days in late June or early July.

So, what have you all been up to? It's been a while, I know... While I've been fairly active over in the WeatherBlog over the past several weeks, my activity here in L.C.C. has suffered some. I apologize.

Random thoughts still swirl around in my head, believe me. I just haven't been motivated to write them out and explain them further. I may just decide to do just this, this weekend.

I have this weekend off work and really, it couldn't have come at a better time. If any of you have followed along, at all, over on the WeatherBlog, you've noticed that the last couple of weeks have been very active on the chase-front. So, as a result, I've been doing a lot of driving and traveling lately. I certainly don't mind (I always enjoy a good road trip, especially if it involves storm chasing), but it can burn out a brother, you know! :) Especially when you've done it 3 out of the last 5 days and five times over the course of the first eleven days of July!

Case in point, we were chasing Thursday out in central portions of North Dakota and had to bust ass to get back Grand Forks by midnight because I had to work the 12 to 8am shift! For the record, I was ten minutes late, I'll confess, but it didn't really affect my work for the rest of the shift. I then woke up Friday afternoon, only to head East - this time, to chase storms into Western areas of Minnesota. Needless to say, it's been a long past 24-48 hours for your's truly. I'm going to get some much needed rest tonight and plan on heading down to the Farmer's Market downtown to check out the local fare with Mr. Shaw during the afternoon. I'm hoping there will be some kind of selection of vegetables or maybe some fruit. The produce will probably be slightly limited given the time of year, but we'll see.

Tomorrow night - the only plans I have set involve myself, my couch, my television, a few DVD's and a gallon of ice cream. ;)

Sunday, I need to head down to Fargo to pick up my Debit Card that has been sitting at Thai Orchid. We went for Thai food a few nights ago and I left the card sitting on the table. I called the place and they were nice enough to seal the thing up in an envelope for me and told me they would hold it for me for as long as I needed. Which was great, since I didn't particularly want to drive all that way just to pick up a stinking credit/debit card. It will give me an opportunity to maybe get more Thai food and a reason to drop by the Asian Market. I'd love to get that Vietnamese Soup I used to get from my mom all the time. It's the only place I know of around here that stocks the stuff, so I really want to get some. Shaw wants to come along, as well, to check out the place and since he may come, I may as well invite Lawson and Heather, since they love the Thai.

It should be a good day - Thai food and Vietnamese soup. Two of my favorite foods, ever! Until then, though... I'll be working on post-processing and uploading of photos. I have four chase-days worth of photos I need to go through and get uploaded to my photo gallery. So, the weekend off will give me an opportunity to get that done...

Stay healthy, everyone else... And stay tuned...

Yes, that is right... He has returned to his hometown of Grand Forks.

It's been a little difficult to get back into my normal routine after been gone an entire week, but it's slowly coming back to me. I had my first shift at work last evening and it was actually not quite as bad as I thought it may be, getting back into the groove of forecasting.

I'm working on a few things late tonight and just finished up my last post from Saturday and Sunday over in the WeatherBlog. I hadn't yet written up my summary from the last two days of my chase-vacation.

I now just need to compile the posts into a log and post that to my web-site. I also need to work on getting photos and video up in the gallery and site from the trip. I have Thursday and Friday off this week, so I'm hoping to get to it then.

Good to see some of you, already and to those of you back home in Indiana, I'll see you all in August, when my next vacation is scheduled.

Ta-ta, for now!

Hope everyone is doing well this fine evening... I'll be hopping into bed here soon, but I wanted to let everyone know, that doesn't, that I've been keeping a chase diary of my days here on the plains over the past several days, over on my WeatherBlog. You can reach it by clicking on the tab above.

It's nothing entirely complete, but it does summarize what we've seen and where our travels have taken us. I don't have any pictures posted yet, but eventually I'll have some posted to the photo gallery. I'm hoping next week when I get some time off work, that I'll be able to process things and get them uploaded.

Jared and I are definitely getting pumped for tomorrow... Very nice flow in the models and with the thermo's setting up the way they are, it could turn into the best tornadic potential we've seen all week. Not to get too technical to you regular readers, but the new Day 1 Convective Outlook from the Storm Prediction Center late tonight is indicating a 15% "hatched" area for their tornado probabilities. The probabilities indicate confidence of a tornado report within 25 miles of a point in the outlined area. The "hatched" area is to indicate a higher concentration of reports or when a higher number of significant reports may be expected.

So, yes, we are definitely anxious to see how things turn out.

Take care, everyone...
I'll see or talk to you soon!

Hello folks,

Beginning early tomorrow morning, I will be out of town tending to my chase vacation with some former colleagues of mine. I plan on being on the road by 7:00am and will be driving southward towards Sioux Falls. From there, we will either target southeastern South Dakota or eastern portions of Nebraska.

My expeditions will continue through through May 31st, with my return coming either during the late evening of the 31st or early on June 1st.

So as long as I have a signal, I'll still be available via cell phone. So, if you need to reach me, just give me a jingle. My number can be found by navigating through the "Contact Me" tab above.

If you are curious as to our whereabouts, you may take a gander at Jared's tracking application at his web-site. As long as he has his GPS and web-cam in operation this page should update every 10 to 15 minutes. Obviously, we can't guarantee this will be operable the entire time we're on the road, but hopefully, we'll be able to update our position sporadically through the week.

Be prepared for photos, as I'm sure I'll have lots to share upon my return...

Have a great week, all!

I've been working on some photos this afternoon that I have had sitting on the computer for a couple of weeks. Here are a couple of views from the air-show yesterday...

A member of the "Happy Hooligans," out of Fargo, ND.

The Thunderbirds in formation on one of their many flight manuevers...

I'll have many more of these photos uploaded to my photo gallery at some point this afternoon. I'll also be uploading photos from my storm chase from June 30th across northeastern ND and northwestern MN, as well as photos from our forecaster picnic last week.

Enjoy!

Hi folks,

I realize I haven't posted in a while, so first off, I apologize. Not much is new up here in Grand Forks. I was able to chase some up here the past couple weeks and hopefully, I'll have all my logs and some pictures and video up from those in the near future. Until then, I just wanted to let you all know that I'll be heading out on my Chase Vacation here in a few hours (after some sleep, of course). So, while I won't be available thru eMail for the next week, I will have my cell phone with me, if you need to reach me. My cell phone number is on the Contact Info page, if you do not have it.

We don't have a tremendous setup for severe weather, but there should be, at least, the potential for storms. And really, you know, I am a 'storm' chaser, so if even if I see one storm on this entire trip, it'd be worth it. Ahh, who am I kiddin' I wanna see monster supercells shredding trees with 2" hail, intense inflow/outflow, and big tornadoes... ;) Will I see them? Probably nothing of that caliber, but you never know, tornadoes keep surprising us, when and where they form and well, hail and wind can come from any strong thunderstorm. I'll have cameras in stow, so hopefully upon return, I'll have some to share with you all!

Cheers -

Hi folks,

This is pretty rare, but I'm sitting here at work, with literally, nothing to do! Since high pressure is suppressing any type of precip over Montana this morning, I practically have my 6am forecast done already and it's only a quarter after 4:00! Still gotta do my sites, of course, but otherwise, I don't have much to do.

Nothing's new up here - and I haven't been doing a whole lot. With the exception of working and sleeping, I haven't really done much around the apartment or done anything outdoors. Our temperatures have taken a slide, unfortunately; and we're back to our "average" temperatures in the 50's and 60's the past couple days, with lows at night well into the 30s. I even had frost on my car yesterday morning, when I left work. And likely, it'll be there again this morning! Especially, considering it's even cooler this morning. Tonight will be even worse, with lows expected in the mid/upper 20s! Brrr... Oh, well, at least we won't see any chances of snow like in other parts of the country! It's looking like parts of the Great Lakes may see a decent chance for some snow, mostly over the northern parts of Wisconsin and Michigan. I just thought we were done with this cold weather for good. I guess I was a little premature in thinking that! The 88 degrees we hit here just a few short days ago (on Monday) was very nice and even made it out storm chasing that day. If you haven't seen the chase log and/or gallery, you can visit it on my storm chasing page on the main site. I didn't really see much,since there wasn't much support in the mid and upper-levels for severe weather, but I was in position to observe a couple thunderstorms that did earn Severe Thunderstorm Warnings. At least I got to see and hear my first lightning and thunder since like, last September... That was exciting enough to make it all worth it. I quickly found out, as well, there is a lot of beautiful chase country up here. I ended up northwest of Grand Forks, up near Grafton and that area, with the exception of trees has a lot of open space and surprisingly has many places to pull off and watch the skies. Now, I can't wait to have "real" storms to chase up here! ;)

Anyhow, since this post is getting a bit long, think I'll hop off here for now. Take care everyone... Have a great day and a great weekend!

Cheers!

Hey folks...

Well, I missed the severe weather again. I was stuck at work again this evening, as the severe weather rolled through Srn Indiana. It appears that a Tornado Watch was issued and there were reported tornadoes. Evidently, one has been confirmed in Rush County, IN. The 11:00 news here in Indy has shown some damage from a close-call in Rushville. Looks like a weak tornado hit, as the damage didn't look too extensive to me. The video on the news was obviously dark, since the storm hit at a late hour. It looked like it was mostly tree damage, with minimal structural damage to a farmstead.

Another botched chase! Ugh! Oh well... Maybe one of these days, I'll have that "decent" job that gives me those day shifts so I can have these afternoons and evenings to chase! After tonight, I'm hoping it'll be soon.

Even though it was a Friday night and considering Friday nights are a popular "pizza" night, we were swamped beyond reason. I was a little excited at the fact I'd be working "front of house" for the first time (for a whole shift, anyway). But, it really wasn't a great experience. Customers were complaining quite a bit about waiting on food and cold food. I'm sorry, folks, but when you get behind on 20 delivery orders, 30 dine-ins, and 10 or so carry-outs - there's only so much 3 people can do on a maketable to get pizzas made and into the oven!! If your THAT busy, of course you're not going to get things done as fast. C'mon...

Anywho, gonna keep this post short - I'm exhausted and my feet (and lower-back) are killing me. My lower back has been killing me for days now. I think I did something to it. The aspirin will hopefully take care of it, eventually.

Take care of yourselves...
73!