Here are the images of the driveway in Grand Forks, ND. I am trying to make enough room for 2 veichles.

The next image is me on the other side of the house IN a snow drift. I was trying to find the gas meter to clear out around it. I am standing upright and I have only the snow bib. I could not find my boots so I am wearing only slip on shoes and socks. Yes, they are full of snow!

Blizzzard "Alvin" 2009

Well, we finally got back to Grand Forks after a week long visit with family over the Christmas Holiday. We had to wait an extra day because of the HUGE winter storm. For the Red River Valley the blizzard was named "Alvin". It dumped over 2 feet of the snow!
So as we drove in to our neighborhood, there was little room between snow piles to drive down the road! We had a 5 foot snow drift along the driveway and someone was nice enough to have cleared the snow from the driveway. And that was no small feat even with a snow blower.
The blizzard has overwhelmed even the natives!

It’s going to take us three to four weeks to get it to where it looks like just a normal winter’s day. Grand Forks Streets Superintendent Mark Aubol, 27 December 2009

I am sure Zeke will have a blast in the morning. I will be spending several hours shoveling the rest of the driveway, mailboxes, sidewalks, and gas meter. Images are forthcoming.

Trip to Duluth, MN...The Quest for Mexican Food

Back in late October, we took the family to Duluth, MN while I attended a conference. Nice little conference and got to meet many of the GIS/RS and flood response people on the Minnesota side. Zeke and Buffie I thinked enjoyed getting out of Grand Forks and we all were really wanting some Mexican food! Got a few good images of the big ocean going ships coming into the harbor. The place has a lot of history, great geology, ok food, and cold wet weather.

Late update... by the way winter is here

Wow, the weather has changed. We have been running highs around zero for the past few weeks. Other good news, no realy it could be colder, is that snow fall is less than last year. We had record snowfall in 2008 over 30 inches. So far we have had only about 4-6 inches.

Zeke and I have brought in the train model table. Buffie wanted the garage for the car so we cleaned things up. We made good progress on the models and here are a few images.

Here are a few images showing the detail of the rock cliff face and the bridge Zeke and I built. The rock coloring was difficult at first but a few messups make a more realistic final product.

Zeke and Dad's model railroad

Zeke and I finally did it...we have been talking about it and I have planned it for nearly 1 year now. We have started a model railroad. I decided on N-scale (1:600) just because of the size issue. We can fit SO much on a 36 inch door blank, while in HO (1:86) we would need at a minimum a 4x8 sheet of plywood.
Zeke is holding the shunter engine we bought. It is just like the ones we see at the Grand Forks Rail yard in the middle of town. The model and coloring has amazing detail and likeness. I decided to use the foam board method for the bench work. It seemed the cheapest and I could change my mind about many of the terrain elements throughout the development.
Zeke loves running the engine at full throttle and I am amazed by the amount of work and technical/artistic issues in model railroading. You could spend less than $200 and have a track stuck to a board and run and few cars in a small oval, or you could spend a little less $1,000 and have a nice well detailed layout or go on for years and spend thousands of dollars. It is up to the modeler. Zeke and I are going to start on this 36 x 80 inch tabletop layout and see where it takes us. Hopefully, a good portion of the layout will be completed by Christmas.
Here is a look at the layout looking west. Zeke and I have all the track temporally in place and we are using a track design similar to an published layout so we didn't have to figure out the wiring. The two tracks to the north (right) will be hidden behind a large hill and be a staging area and not have any scenery. Zeke and I wanted to have some prototypes from the Grand Forks and still have hills in the layout so we are modeling "smiley" the water tower from Grand Forks and the terrain will be typically those you see in mid-Missouri. We put together a small blue yard building to help guide us in the scale. You can see the blue building (40x60 feet in scale). Zeke mapped out where he wanted the river and roads and we cut out areas and then added more foam to create the hills and cliffs. Here is a shot of the detail on the northwest corner of the layout. This is where the tracks cross the river on a soon-to-be-built pile bridge and heads into a narrow cliffed area. Zeke and I are going to create a lot of rock cliff and overhangs along the river bank.

The Fall is coming

Well, the summer has been amazing and little rain. Most days have been blue skies and just beautiful. We are starting to have a few more days of rain and the sugar beet harvest is in two weeks. A friend of ours tells us that the sugar beet harvested will take until next May to be completely processed. So all of you who eat sugar and especially "Crystal" brand sugar most of it comes from around here. Tomorrow the temperature will be near 80 and we are looking forward to it. Zeke and I are working on our N-scale model train layout (images are on the way). Well, things are doing well and hopefully post again soon.

Flooding, Winter Storms, Wind, Snow, Blinding Sun...

Well, just last week the Grand Forks area was in the upper 40s and thawing out from all the snow and ice. We could see all the grass and all but the largest snow piles had melted. Now here is the first time in many years that UND has closed its doors for the entire day due to weather. There was nearly 4 inches last night and more on the way. The drifting was incredible. It took nearly 2 hours, 3 adults, 1 wheel barrow, 1 snow blower, and assorted snow shovels to dig out the driveway.
Fargo to our south and upstream is sandbagging like crazy in anticipation of a near-record flood water height. In Grand Forks, they have closed two of the three bridges and installed all the stop logs in the flood wall through the city. The ice pack is insane and no one knows if we will flood or not.

Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care. Theodore Roosevelt

Spring is coming...Maybe

More sun than Mississippi?

We had a great day today. The temperature was +17 F and winds were calm. The sun on the new snow is intense and when we got home this evening around 7pm, I noticed the sun was bright and still fairly high above the horizon.

I started to wonder if Oxford still had sun. Surely, the south has more sun this time of year. But the fact is the spring equinox is almost here and northern latitude get a whole lot of sun. The sun sat in northern Mississippi today at 7:11 pm, while in North Dakota it went down at 7:43 pm. Yeah, a half hour of sun! And there is still twilight to account for. In Mississippi, twilight ended tonight at 7:36 while NoDak ended at 8:14. So you get an extra 45 minutes before dark.

Ok, some might already be thinking that there has to be a simple explanation. How can northern latitudes get more sun in the winter. Well in the morning, Mississippi sun rise is 7:00 today and NoDak was at 7:29. So both places have about 12 hours and 11 minutes of sun. It is just that NoDak has more in the evening where is counts.

But what about the Solstice in June?
NoDak recieves about 1 hour and 35 minutes more sun in the June than does Mississippi. Also, don't forget about twilight. NoDak has longer twilights natural sunlight can be seen from 4:48 am to 10:12 pm in June. Here is a table for comparison:

Summer Solstice (June 21)
	Twilight Begin	Sunrise	Sunset	Twilight End
Grand Forks, ND	4:48am	5:29am	9:31pm	10:12pm
Oxford, MS	5:17am	5:46am	8:14pm	8:43pm

The First Blizzard of 2009

Well, here we are in March 2009 and Grand Forks is getting its first blizzard of the year. They announced yesterday that school would be cancelled today. UND shut down at 3:30 this afternoon and that give me to work on things at the office.

The wind is incredible this time around. It is continually howling outside and creating 1-2 feet tall drifts in the most inconvenient places. I have been lucky to get the family from door to car and back to door again in short distances. Also, I have become adept at locating the “just-right” location and car orientation so I can get back into the car when I return. The drifting snow has kept us from opening the garage door and created a driving hazard.

On my way back home, the winds strength increased and I was unable to see more than about a half-a-block in front of me. For the most part, I have been sheltered from the wind and I wanted experience the full force of a sustained 40 MPH wind with a -35 F wind chill factor. Here is the video:

Sundogs!

Well, this is our first parhelion (sundog) in North Dakota. Very cool! The temp is only -2F so going outside and getting a good image was easy. In the foreground is Zeke's school. You can see the gym just left of the sun. The two "false suns" to each side are caused by reflection and refraction of sunlight by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. And the landscape is very BRIGHT. The exposure in the image was the fastest shutter speed on my camera so you could see the sundogs in the intense light. Unfortunately, the speed was too fast to capture the foreground. I need a filter next time to make a better exposure. If you don't have sunglasses, your eyes will be smoldering sockets and flames will burst forth. Also this week was a very dense fog that blanketed the area. With it being between 0 and 20 degree F the last few nights, the fog created a beautiful coating of ice on everything. Every little branch had a perfect 1/4 inch coating of ice all around it. Here is an everygreen in our yard.

Our cat Tom-Tom is just chilling in his favorite spot watching Zeke dig a tunnel. This weekend is great. A little snow every now and then with temps in the mid 20s! Beautiful.

Family Image

With our buzy schedules we never had the time to make a family photo in North Dakota. So after waiting for the sun to come up around 9am we headed outside to snap this image. Enjoy.

OH MY! I may have to ware a pair of longies* in the morning.

* North Dakota colloquialism for thermal underwear

Also, I think we need to get another outdoor thermometer. The temperature at the airport is -24 and I have not seen the red ever go below the little staple you see in the image. I think I have reached the operational limits of this equipment. The mechanical, round, dial-type thermometer is not doing well either. I just checked and it is only -10.

C-C-C-COLD! At 37 below, Grand Forks airport temperature sinks to new low Herald Staff and Wire Report

I went outside to lunch and on the way back I was walking into the wind. I was carrying things in my hands so I could not cover my face. I only had a wool scarf covering my neck and face with a wool cap on my head. The wind was so cold my eyes began to tear up because they were drying out. I was squinting hard to find some comfort during my short 2-block walk. I felt small tear fall from the corner of my eye. I looked and it partially caught on my lower eye lash. The surface tension was sufficient to hold the tear while it froze solid! It was about half the size of a BB.

Locals say that this is nothing. Wait until February. Well alrighty!

Hard day playing requires a little spa treatment for the seven-year old. The cucumbers were his idea. No clue where he learned about them.

Happy New Year!

Welcome to the New Year. We are currently in a wind chill advisory. No surprise. We had an additional 5 inches of snow today and we have no idea where to put it. Here is Zeke building a tunnel in a pile next to the driveway.