Tag: Weather

Posted on

The Leaves Turned

A friend up in Perry County called Monday to say I should get right up there before the leaves turned. When I got there on Tuesday, I said, “They look pretty good to me.”

“They’ve started falling today,” he said.

Wednesday was errand-running day, and Wednesday evening brought a cold front with gusty winds and frog-strangling rainfall. Somebody nearby said their rain gauge recorded 2-1/2 inches of the wet stuff. Mother’s yard was covered with fallen walnuts

The Jackson City Park leaves were still pretty, but the colors weren’t as vibrant as they were the day before.

Broke my rule

I broke my rule of “shoot it when you see it, otherwise the magic is liable to leak out.”

The temperatures were in the high 60s and felt great, but the color wasn’t as nice as two days ago. Click on the photos to make them larger.

Road to Tower Rock

The drive to Altenburg Tuesday was spectacular. Thursday, it was merely “nice.” The trees on the tiny road leading to Tower Rock were still pretty when the light was behind them.

Orange with persimmons

Perhaps the greatest victims of the high winds and rain were the super-sweet persimmons at the Tower Rock parking area. The ground and rocks were orange with squished persimmons and buzzing with bees. Persimmons from two trees on the south end of the picnic area have smaller, tougher fruit. I picked up about a pint of ripe, but not splattered pieces to take home to Mother as part of her extended Birthday Season.

Adding to my disappointment was a rise in the river levels. The river is at 9 feet and going up, two feet higher than the 7 feet it needs to be in order to walk out to The Rock.

Posted on

How Hot is Cape Girardeau?

It is PLENTY hot. Blast furnace hot. As hot as Texas was one summer I was there, and I use that as a gauge for hot.

I rented a bike in Dallas for a weekend ride, and the poor thing skittered from one pool of shade to another. It was so hot a highway work crew had to hang out in an air conditioned pickup until it was their turn to lean on the shovel. (Click on any photo to make it larger.)

100 degrees on the porch

Mother’s got one of the most comfortable porches in the universe. It faces east and is shaded, so you can generally sit out there in the hottest weather without even turning on the ceiling fan. Today, though, the thermometer on the wall registered just barely under an even 100 degrees.

That’s not a cardinal on the left; it was a bluebird. I TOLD you it was hot.

1969 high temperature record broken

A new high temperature reading of 106 degrees at the airport topped the previous high of 103 set in 1969. The bank sign at William and Mount Auburn thought it was 107.

It doesn’t look like we’re going to get much relief soon. The weather gurus have issued an excessive heat advisory to run through Monday evening.

Low reading on Mount Auburn

The lowest reading was just up Mount Auburn road from the 107 degree reading. I didn’t feel any pool of cool air when I stepped outside to photograph the sign showing 103 degrees.

108 in Jackson

This bank sign coming into Jackson from Cape says it’s 108 degrees. The grass is so brown and dry that it crunches when you step on it. This is not going to be a good year for shooting off fireworks.

Getting ready for hell and brimstone

The highest reading I found was at the Lutheran Church near the corner of Kingshighway and Cape Rock Drive. Maybe the pastor is getting the congregants ready for a real hell ‘n’ brimstone sermon on Sunday when temperatures are supposed to drop to a mild 104 degrees.

You can’t have this much heat without some big storms coming in behind it. I wonder if we’ll have a replay of last year. The ground is so dry and hard that a heavy rain would probably run off fast.

Posted on

Hats Off to Rain Art

The old newsroom at The Palm Beach Post was depressing. The walls at one time had been an institutional puke green, but tar from years of chain-smoking reporters and editors had coated them with a greasy brown film.

The desks, often shared by as many as three reporters would have been rejected by any self-respecting Salvation Army thrift shop. Dictionaries weren’t used to check spelling; they were used to prop up desks with the legs missing. The lighting was spotty and what ceiling tiles weren’t missing had been coated with cigarette tar like the walls, only worse. We could hear little feet scurrying around overhead and, from time to time, a rat would drop through one of the broken ceiling tiles and go scampering across the room, prompting otherwise worldly cop reporters to scream like little girls.

Purple-faced rage

The metal waste cans around the city desk were bent and twisted because the mercurial city editor would launch them through the air like a fieldgoal kicker. At least once a year, he’d lift a typewriter over his head and give it a heave in a purple-faced, vein-bulging rage. Some of the reporters had a pool going to bet how far the splatters would go if and when he turned into a fountain in the middle of the newsroom.

IBM Selectric typewriters had given way to an Atex publishing system with huge dumb terminals that probably exposed users to more radiation than a chest X-ray. These were hated and feared by the diehards who had only reluctantly given up their manual typewriters a couple of short years before.

The only good thing: room had no windows

The only good thing about the newsroom – from a photographer’s perspective – was that it had no windows.

In the good old days of Underwood typewriters that meant that an editor couldn’t look out the window, see it was raining and dispatch a photographer to shoot “rain art.” Modern technology spoiled that.

The company hadn’t thought to buy a building-wide UPS system to protect the Atex system from power flickers that turned the computers into expensive electronic canaries in our coal mine. Every summer afternoon, thunderboomers would build up and lightning would flash. Lights would flicker, the story on the green computer monitors would shrink down to a tiny dot, then wink out, and the room would turn blue with the waves of invective from reporters and editors who hadn’t followed the directive to save often.

THAT’S when the city editor would realize that weather was happening outside, dial Photo and demand rain art.

At least it wasn’t MY hat

I was convinced that the editor didn’t really care if you came back with a picture that could run in the paper. Geez, how much news is it if the reader can look out HIS window and say, “Look, Maude, it’s really comin’ down out there.”

No, the city editor just liked the idea of  smirking at a drowned-rat  photographer trailing water behind him as he walked though the newsroom on the way back to the darkroom. He REALLY liked it when your shoes squished.

The only consolation I could take was that I probably felt better than the guy who watched his favorite hat blow off his head, go floating down the street and get splashed by a passing car.

About Proudly powered by WordPress