About 20 hours after I posted about London being hammered by lake effect snow, I took another look at the Exeter weather radar to see how they’re doing.

Well, it looks like the streamers are finally starting to dissipate, even though there’s still some snow showing on the radar.

Judging by the TAF…

TAF CYXU 152344Z 1600/1624 26012KT P6SM BKN040 TEMPO 1600/1603 5SM
-SHSN OVC020
FM161200 25010KT P6SM FEW015 BKN030 TEMPO 1612/1616 BKN015 OVC030
RMK NXT FCST BY 160600Z=

…it looks like they might finally be getting a break from the snow.

Now they just have to finish cleaning up all the cars that were stranded on Highway 402.

Earlier today I took a look at the Exeter weather radar and watched the loop that showed the streamers of lake effect snow blowing across southwestern Ontario from Lake Huron. At the time, London was the lucky recipient of what looked like a continuous dumping of snow.

Eight hours later the radar loop looks almost exactly the same, with London still being the focus of the streamers.

A quick check of the TAF for London (CYXU) reveals that they are forecast for silly amounts of snow until sometime tomorrow (Wednesday) afternoon: …

(more…)

The recent winter storm in Southwestern Ontario has seen some people stuck in their cars for more than 24 hours. Hopefully, they have winter survival kits in their cars!

The Ontario Ministry of Transportation’s website has some advice on how to be prepared for driving in the winter, including a list of things that should be in your survival kit:

• Ice scraper/snowbrush
• Shovel
• Sand or other traction aid
• Tow rope or chain
• Booster cables
• Road flares or warning lights
• Gas line antifreeze
• Flashlight and batteries
• First aid kit
• Fire extinguisher
• Small tool kit
• Extra clothing and footwear
• Blanket
• Non-perishable energy foods – e.g., chocolate or granola bars, juice, soup, bottled water
• Candle and a small tin can
• Matches

Of the things on that list, I find the road flares sometimes difficult to find. There are different types available, but the ones I prefer are the CIL Safety Flares that are red tubes (which look like sticks of dynamite) that you pop the cap off and strike like a giant match. They burn in almost any weather condition and last for about 20 minutes (at least the ones I have). Because they’re not battery-powered, you don’t have to worry about the batteries not working in the cold or changing the batteries periodically. In the last couple of years, I’ve only been able to find them consistently at Home Hardware (click the link to take you to the product page). Acklands Grainger also has various road flare kits for reasonable prices.

If you’re going to be doing any driving this winter, you should seriously consider putting together a survival kit because you never know when you might need it.

“I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t accept reservations.”

This phrase was uttered by more than one restaurant that I called while looking for somewhere to go for lunch with my co-workers, and it’s a phrase that baffles me whenever I hear it. When a group of ten people want to eat out at lunch, it’s not really practical to herd everyone to the restaurant in the hopes that there’s enough space for everyone.

Fortunately, the restaurant we ended up going to did have room, but only because some of us showed up around 11:30 to hold the tables until the rest of the group showed up. I quizzed the hostess at the restaurant about it, but the only insight she could offer was “it’s the policy”, which really doesn’t explain anything.

I don’t understand why a restaurant wouldn’t want to take reservations, especially during the holiday season. If people are more than 5 minutes late, cancel their reservation and let some of the people waiting in line for “45 to 50 minutes” be seated instead.

For the restaurant that we ended up going to for lunch this “policy” almost cost them a table of 9 or 10 people. If it wasn’t for the fact that we had a limited number of choices because we left things to the last minute, we would have gone somewhere else that did take reservations. The reason we didn’t go somewhere else is that they had too many reservations to fit us in.

I couldn’t pass up sharing this xkcd…

A local cacher recently disabled all of his geocaches because it’s winter causing a number of geocachers questioning why the owner did this, particularly as some of the caches are not prone to being buried in the snow. Someone who asked the cache owner about it reported back that they prefer to disable their caches in the winter and  commented that they have also received some not-so-diplomatic emails from cachers not happy about their disabling of their geocaches. (Seriously? What’s with that?)

Naturally, this has made me think about the caches I own. Most of my caches are not winter-friendly, so I disable them once the snow falls and wait until spring arrives to re-enable them. I do this because the containers are plastic Lock-n-Locks, which tend to become brittle in the extreme cold common to Canadian winters. As well, the trails left by people walking up to the caches might attract other people to dig around, possibly damaging the container.

Most cachers probably respect a cache owner’s disabling of a cache and seek out other caches that aren’t disabled, but there are some cachers who are not deterred by a cache being disabled by its owner. Personally, I do not look for caches that are flagged as being disabled because that’s a conscious decision on the part of an owner. It doesn’t matter why the cache has been disabled – if it’s disabled, I leave it alone.

So this begs the question: Should people who actively seek out a disabled cache be allowed to log it?

I don’t think they should because they’re not respecting the rules (or at least the spirit) of the game.

Cache owners can delete logs posted for their caches, but I couldn’t find anything that talked one way or the other about deleting logs for disabled.

What do you think? Should people be allowed to keep finds they log for caches that have been disabled by the owner?

There’s a good chance that tomorrow morning is going to rank highly on the suck scale, particularly if you have to go to work:

TAF CYOW 252038Z 2521/2618 08010KT P6SM SCT030 OVC100 PROB30
2601/2603 P6SM -PL OVC030
FM260300 08010KT P6SM -SNPL OVC015 PROB40 2603/2605 6SM -FZRA BR
FM260500 08012KT 4SM -FZRA BR OVC010
FM260800 08012KT 2SM -FZRA BR OVC006
FM261100 VRB03KT 1/2SM FG VV002
FM261300 25012G25KT P6SM BKN020 TEMPO 2613/2615 3SM BR
RMK NXT FCST BY 260000Z=

Without using a whole lot of meterological jargon, basically this says that we’re going to see ice pellets (PL) and snow with ice pellets (SNPL) this evening. To break the monotony, there’s going to be a healthy dose of freezing rain (FZRA) and mist (BR) thrown in for good measure, followed by fog (FG) and more mist. And it’s going to be fairly windy (250@12G25KT [WSW@22 gusting to 46 km/h]), too.

Delightful.

And looking back to about this time last year, I see that we had similar, but not quite as sucky weather forecast for November 29th.

If you’re driving this evening or tomorrow morning, take your time and don’t forget your ice scraper.