Tag: Weather

The Forecast for Today

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Truly, one of the wordiest forecasts I’ve seen on NOAA’s website. Here’s the weather for the rest of today and tomorrow…

Rest Of Today…Becoming windy and turning much colder. A period of rain…snow…sleet…or freezing rain early this afternoon…then snow. Snow may be heavy at times. A chance of thunderstorms. Widespread blowing snow this afternoon. New snow and sleet accumulation 2 to 3 inches. Temperatures falling to around 10 by late in the afternoon. Northwest winds 5 to 10 mph increasing to 15 to 25 mph with gusts to around 45 mph in the afternoon. Chance of precipitation near 100 percent.

Tonight…Bitterly cold. Much colder. Windy. Mostly cloudy with light snow likely in the evening…then partly cloudy after midnight. Blowing snow through the night. Snow accumulation around 1 inch. Total snow accumulation 3 to 4 inches. Lows around 8 below. West winds 15 to 30 mph with gusts to around 45 mph. Chance of snow 70 percent. Lowest wind chill readings 18 below to 28 below zero after midnight.

Wednesday…Bitterly cold. Much colder. Partly sunny. Areas of blowing snow in the morning. Highs around 10. West winds 5 to 20 mph with gusts to around 35 mph decreasing to 5 to 10 mph late in the afternoon. Lowest wind chill readings 18 below to 28 below zero in the morning.

In summary… 40 degrees this morning and, with wind chill, it’ll be 30 below tomorrow morning. Gotta love the 70 degree temperature swing in 1 day.

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Wintering in Wisco

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I guess technically winter is half way over. The days are getting longer now. In reality, we still have to get through the month of January, which is normally cold and snowy.

Lately, we’ve been dealing with a full dose of winter. Lots of snow, then some more snow, and then after that, some additional snow.

Then this week we’ve had lots of fog. Thick fog. For example driving home the other night, looking at the dashed lines on the highway… I could only see one dash at a time. Which means I couldn’t see very far at all. Other than the fog, the weather wasn’t bad… upper 30s were nice.

Then this weekend it changed… dramatically. We were suppose to get 3 to 6 inches of snow, but that didn’t happen. First it rained for about 24 hours. Then it got cold and very windy. Then we got some snow, but not much… mainly lots of wind blowing the snow over the sheets of ice that are roads were becoming. Rain… then cold… then snow over the now frozen rain makes for very bad road conditions.

The boat’s been put away for a little more than a month now and hopefully I’ll be putting it back on the water in a couple months. Until then, I’ll need to my mind off water skiing and try to keep myself distracted until the deep freeze ends.

Anyways, Merry Christmas everybody. Enjoy the holidays…. I’ll be snow blowing in the morning then heading to the rents for the first of many Christmas dinners.

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And Now Back to Our Regular Broadcast Schedule…

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OK, so my schedule is anything but regular… The computer is back together with a new hard drive, new operating system and a better backup plan… still re-organizing some stuff from before the crash, but basically, things are up and running again. Still trying to decide how to organize and backup the 100’s of gigabytes of ski team video that I have… Still bummed about some of the stuff I lost (skiing log from the last few years and good crash videos to mention just a couple things that other people might care about.)

I’ll be posting an update soon with pictures from the couple shows we did with the Must-Skis and video of some heli’s I tried up there last week.

For those that need a sport or comedy fix, check out the links on the right in the “What I’m Reading” section… They’re mainly random things from around the web that I found entertaining. One guy in the UK is trying to patent a hydrofoil wakeboard… they’ve been towed behind boats for a long time in the form of an Air-Chair or Sky Ski and now he’s trying to patent it just because now they are standing on it. They’ve even taken the Air Chair & Sky Ski and chopped off the chair to surf on the things (Laird Hamilton been doing this for years)… he isn’t doing anything new.

There’s also a post titled Rankings and Other Stuff about the UW game in Vegas this past weekend. Seems they held the world’s largest tailgate party and the Wisconsinites drank a lot of beer. The Vegas Notes post is pretty good too.

The water is still high in Madison, although they did open up Lakes Mendota and Kegonsa to just a 500 foot no wake limit, I feel it is still hard to go out in the middle of the lake, and with good conscious, start making a big fat wake to go surfing with while people are still dealing with high water in the yards. So I’ll still be road-tripping for a while. [Z- I’m looking for a place to jump on Wednesday night. -W] In case you didn’t notice, it rained today for pretty much the whole day. Not helping my cause.

It is late and it time for some shut-eye. Watch for a new post with pictures and video soon.

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A Pet Peeve

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I want to bring up a pet peeve of mine… the other night at practice, the team is running through acts on the water and I’m working on the sound & show with the announcers and it is a little cool out. Definitely not the 80/90 degree plus weather we had just had. At the end of the night someone made the comment you’re lucky you’re not skiing tonight, it’s cold out… I never consider it to be lucky to not be skiing, I’d rather be on the water than watching from shore. Even on the nights when it isn’t that nice out.

Plus, when you starting skiing in March and end in November, there really isn’t a day in the summer that you’ll consider “cold”.

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It is Officially Go Time!!!

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I’ve been sitting in the Cleveland airport waiting for my plane from Syracuse to take me home to Madison (apparently they are getting some rain there today) and my buddy Dale has been sending me emails & text messages all weekend describing the glass calm water in the bay, the blinding glare of the sun of the lake and the warm sunny weather that I’ve been missing while I’ve been here in the cold, rain and snow, so it is time to issue an ultimatum…

I’ll be back on the water (again) skiing this week. One of these next two nights, I’ll be footing with a big shit eating grin on my face, enjoying the adrenaline rush and then I’ll back out there on the weekend.

Yes, I sneaked in a run in March, but the weather, after teasing for a couple days, took a turn for the worse and brought back a taste of winter to remind us where we live. Now I need to start getting my weekly fix of footing and it is going to start being weekly this week.

I have just a few weeks to get my but in to some sort of shape for the Beaver Dam Barefoot Race.

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Midwest Deep Freeze

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Deep freeze may be a bit drastic, but when we’ve had a taste of warm weather (temps in the 60 & 70s) going back to highs in the 20s suck… especially in April. I skied in March, but haven’t touched the water since. Last year Easter weekend was awesome, high of 85 & I put the dry suit away. This year, granted it is a mere two weeks earlier, we have snow flurries in Wisconsin. ARGH!

Needless to say, this is probably putting a damper on the midwest collegiate ski teams’ water time.

The one redeeming part of this, my suffering is not alone. Looking a the national weather map, temps are in the 20s, 30s & 40s for most of the country. You need to go west of Texas/Rocky Mountains to find warmth, or right on the coast or in Florida. Most of the country is suffering through this weather… it just hits water skiers a little closer to the heart.

Links: NOAA

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The Guy with the Red & White Nautique

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So a few days ago I’m talking to a friend of mine, Cory, who is a bartender at The Bar Next Door. He was talking with customers who happened to live near Lake Monona. I’m not sure how they got on to the subject, but I guess at some point they started talking about how they would see this guy with a red & white Nautique show up early in the spring or late in the fall and go footing. They’d see him all summer long and see him a lot. They even mentioned they saw him footing on Thanksgiving last year.

That was when Cory went, “I know that guy. That’s Wedge!”

So the home owners on Lake Monona have noticed my love of barefooting. Life’s kinda funny.

In a similar story about a year ago I was talking to a girl I had just met, it was the first week of April, and we got to talking about what we like to do for fun and I mentioned I like to go water skiing, a lot. I hadn’t even mentioned that I had already been out skiing the previous weekend. She mentioned, “You know, I saw some people skiing last Saturday afternoon… They were in a red and white boat. It looked to be pretty cold out there still.”

I replied… “That was probably me. I don’t think there are that many people out skiing yet. And yes, it was cold. But it was fun.”

In weather related news… I’ve been closely watching the lake this week to see if it’ll open up. Forecast is looking decent for this weekend. Things go right, I’ll be on the water.

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Spring

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Well, according to the calenders, spring is officially here. March 20th marks the spring equinox. Yea, I should have known that earlier since I’ve been so eargerly waiting for it, but I found out when I went to play You Don’t Know Jack today. It’s a computer quiz game from the 90’s that recently resurfaced on the web. I’ll warn you now, it is addicting…

Go play it, have fun, and think warm thoughts… I need the ice to melt.

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