Snow accumulating along curbs
DEB K. OLSON • SIOUX FALLS • JANUARY 20, 2011

Could someone define curb-to-curb snow removal?

The snow in our neighborhood is 5 feet or more from the curb and not because cars were on the streets when they were plowed as we are diligent about moving them before the plows arrived.

Get it wrong the first time, and the snow gets farther from the curb with each new snowfall that requires plowing.

If I put the extra snow back in the street, all along my property line, could I call the street department and request someone to come get the leftover snow, or will the city put it back in my driveway because it had a do-over?

Or, could I call a private plow operator and send the bill to the city?

Mail is not being delivered to our curbside mailboxes because the mail trucks can’t get close enough. Why should homeowners be required to move the snow that shouldn’t have been left there in the first place? Maybe Mayor Mike Huether could pick up our mail at the post office and deliver it to us on his way to Whisk & Chop to discuss the events center.

When the city plowed the emergency snow route at the end of our block, twice, it left the extra snow at the end of the street. That made it pretty tough to get through, and the snow turns to concrete as we have to drive on it until we are blessed with a snowplow.

Does anyone at City Hall really listen when concerns are called in? What are we paying taxes for?

The work is half-baked at best.

I’ve been singing that tune ever since I became a homeowner and have had to park a vehicle on the street. At our house — with it’s narrow, short driveway and an attached single-car garage that rarely has room to fit a single car — four of the five vehicles we have are relegated to park on the street. Several of our neighbors also park on the street, so when the street narrows because of snow accumulation, we really notice it.

When the snowplows come by our house they typically have the edge of the blade a good foot or so from the curb. When they are pushing a good amount of snow, a lot of the snow falls back behind where the edge was, so the snow ends up even further from the curb. And when they’re not being especially careful about where they have the blade they can start out a good two feet from the curb, and then the lost space really starts to add up.

At our house we’ve resorted to going out after the snowplows have been by and digging the snow by hand right up to the curb. We pile the snow between the street and sidewalk, but that has its limits; right now the peak of the snow pile is a good five feet tall, and throwing more on it just lands it on the sidewalk. The photos above are from a year ago, but it looks the same this year; you can hardly see the roof of my 735 from the front window of the house, and the Hondas just disappear behind the pile. It’s a little ridiculous. It also makes clearing frost & snow from the windows interesting because there’s so little room between the car and vertical snowbank. And forget about opening the passenger-side door; just ain’t happening.

On the side streets the distance between the snow pile and the curb is one thing, but there are a couple of places near home — on 22nd and 26th Streets, near the VA Hospital and Children’s Care Center &mash; where the same street-narrowing thing happens, and many employees continue to choose to park their cars there anyway. With heavy traffic flowing in both directions through those areas, it gets a little dicey driving past those spots.

I can understand that the plow drivers need to keep their distance from the curb a bit to avoid damaging the curbs and their equipment, but it’s pretty annoying for them to keep moving further and further from the curb each time. Even though we go the extra step in clearing the snow right up to the curb for them, they still maintain their distance when passing our house, but even if they did push the snow up against the curb in front of our house, the snow would have nowhere to go anyway, so…

It’s there that I run out of steam on my rant. Beaten again by overthinking the issue.

Then I noticed the packages on the shelf right next to the 99¢ 4-packs; a 2 x 4-pack for $3.94 and a 6 x 4-pack for $9.98.

4-pack — 25¢ apiece
8-pack — 49.25¢ apiece
12-pack — 49.67¢ apiece
24-pack — 41.58¢ apiece (but it comes in a really nice corrugated paper box)

Either someone wasn’t thinking when they set the prices, or they were thinking & counting on customers to not think when they pick up light bulbs; counting on people making the false assumption that buying larger quantities automatically is a better deal. Menards is a pretty successful chain of stores, so I doubt they’d make a mistake like that by accident. Thinking about it kinda torques me off, because it’s not the first time I’ve seen that sort of shenanigans at Menards; when I was building a shed at our old house, I needed a 5lb box of nails. While shopping at Menards at the time, a 5lb box was priced at $11.99, while a 1lb box was 99¢.

These two examples are pretty obvious, but it makes me wonder how many other not-so-obvious but similar scams are hiding on the shelves at Menards, and every other big-box store. Yvonne really hates shopping, and is one who doesn’t pay much attention to price tags; if she needs it, she gets it. The problem is that I know some of the Sam’s Club “bulk deals” are only deals for Sam’s Coffers. Buyer beware.

A female cicada killer wasp in flight, approaching a prospective nest site.

The lifecycle of the cicada killer wasp sounds like something out of a Ridley Scott movie… The female cicada killer wasp hunts down a cicada and stings it to paralyze it. When the cicada is safely immobilized, the wasp carries the cicada back to its burrow — a hole dug in loose soil. The cicada is placed in a dead-end chamber of the burrow; the female then lays a single egg (sometimes two) on the still paralyzed but very much alive cicada, and seals up the chamber. When the egg hatches, the larva gnaws through the exoskeleton of the cicada and feeds on its internal organs, saving the nervous system for last so as to maximize the length of time that the cicada remains alive. Gruesome, no?

The same female digging in the loose dirt for a new nest site.

The female cicada wasp killers are very large; up to 2 inches long. I’ve had them buzz by my head a few times and the sound is pretty unnerving if you’re not expecting it. The males are supposedly much smaller, but I can’t say that I’ve seen any.

Very scary looking, but very cool. It’s this kind of thing that makes me really question the theory of evolution. The evolution of physical body parts is only part of the equation; what about complex behaviors like this? So the larvae that just happened to leave the nervous system for last gained an evolutionary advantage over the others? And how did that “just happened” get passed on to the progeny of those lucky larvae? Nah; not buying it. I wouldn’t need to believe in an omnipotent, omniscient Creator to know that something like that doesn’t happen by chance.

God makes some cool stuff!

We’ve got CFL’s installed in various places around the house, and I discovered one of them was out this morning. I went to replace it, and it had this brown gunk oozing from the base. When I first opened the fixture — an old recessed ceiling fixture that holds the bulb horizontally — I could see a drip of the brown at a seam in the base and some splatters on the inside of the fixture’s glass; great. When I unscrewed the bulb, the drip travelled around the base; wonderful.

Then once I got the bulb out of the fixture, I caught a whiff of the thing, and even now, more than an hour and two hand-washings later, I can still smell it. And I can feel a headache brewing too. It was most likely a failure of the starter circuit’s componentry, which in most cheaper bulbs is the weak link.

I still had one 23W CFL in the cabinet downstairs, so that’s what went in to replace it. It’s a higher-quality bulb than what it replaced (made by GE), but I’m pretty sure the dead one was supposed to last five years. I didn’t date it when it was installed, but I’m reasonably sure it was within the last two years. I marked the new one with today’s date, and I will be hanging onto the warranty card; it’s guaranteed to last five years, and by golly, if it gives out before then, they’ll hear from me.

Aside from the nastiness that comes from them when the electronics fails, you’ve got the mercury in them to deal with if the glass breaks. But I hate them most when they’re “working”; you flip a switch on, and the things take up to a minute to warm up & give full light. And that’s considered normal. I sure don’t think of it as normal. I flip a switch on & I want light now, not when the bulb gets around to it. And you can forget about using a

I think today’s will be the last CFL I install. To me, the leaking crap that comes out of them the disposal hazards and the operational goofiness and the crappy cool white light they give off make them completely not worth the bother. Unfortunately, our wonderful Congress passed a law a while back that sunsets the use of incandescent bulbs, so that may not be an option for much longer. Might start stockpiling now. That or look into LED’s, which may not be much better than CFL’s. Bother.

Like Pippin, Melody is a color-bred bird, but has a little more yellow than orange, which is Pippin’s primary coloration. Female canaries don’t sing like the males do, it’s more just peeps, chirps and squawks, but Melody has plenty of character all her own. The two of them get along pretty well, but we keep them in separate cages most of the time, mainly because (being a male) Pippin always thinks it’s mating time. If they’re in the same cage, he’ll start in on a song, strutting about with his throat feathers all puffed out and his wings slightly extended. Next thing you know he’s flying all around the cage in hot pursuit of Melody, who is doing her best to keep ahead of him. He usually catches her and pins her to the floor for a little, umm, roughhousing. Melody isn’t very appreciative of those little sessions, and when it’s done will chase him off, wings spread out, beak wide open; “Don’t you mess with me, buddy!” So, yeah; we keep them separated, for Melody’s sake. But nothing seems to faze Pippin; he’s totally twitterpated, and dotes over Melody terribly. He tears up paper from under the cage floor and carries it around, trying to give it to her as a present. He actually shows more interest in the nest and fitting it for eggs than she does.

This spring was a little different though. For the first time since we brought her home, Melody started to show some interest in the nest cup & started filling it with torn up newspaper, yarn, paper toweling, and whatever else she could get up there. It seemed mostly like a game to her as she’d carry something to the cup and goof around trying to put it in. After she’d get a bunch of it in there she’d pull it all out and start again. Either she’s frustrated that she can’t get it just right, or maybe she’s just not very serious after all.

Then on Monday, there was an egg in there! I was a little concerned because there was hardly any nesting material in the cup — the egg was sitting on bare plastic. Yvonne put some extra fluffy stuff in the cage, and Melody managed to pack the cup pretty well, but the egg was still underneath all the stuffing and she wasn’t spending much time on the nest. I pulled the nest out, rearranged some of the stuffing and got the egg on top, but she still wouldn’t spend much time on it. I didn’t have much hope for that egg that day.

But then Tuesday morning brought another egg, as did Wednesday. And Thursday. So now she has four eggs in the nest and is sitting on it pretty steadily. She’ll get up to have a bite to eat and drink, and to have an occasional splash in the water dish, but it’s right back to the nest without any playing. She’s turning out to be a great Mom!

Since all this started, Pippin hasn’t quite been himself; he still dotes over Melody like the lovesick thing he’s been since she came into his life, but he doesn’t sing much. He spends a lot of time flitting around chirping, and is pretty good about feeding Melody so she can stay in the nest longer, which makes me think he knows the score and that he needs to pitch in.

So now it’s a waiting game; keep them fed and see what happens. The incubation period for canaries is about two weeks, so that sets the ETH (Estimated Time of Hatching) at about May 25… Can’t. Wait.

Our set is a little more weather-worn than the one in the TV show, which isn’t surprising considering they’ve been sitting out in the weather for about 50 years. The bars were purchased by my parents and have been part of growing up since before I can remember. I recall hearing from someone that they were bought when my eldest sister was little, but I doubt that’s true, as that would make them 60 years old, and counting. When Mom & Dad moved from the house on Walts in 1977 I think the monkey bars went to Dick & Dawn’s house, where they stayed until Yvonne & I bought our house on Norton in 1991 or so. We’ve had them ever since, and they’ve been a fixture in our kids’ backyard playtime.

That’s Caleb, at about 18 months old, after having climbed to the top of the monkey bars. That horizontal bar near the top of his head is about 8 feet off the ground. Enough to make any mom a little nervous.

Yes, 50-plus years does a number on the paint covering the bars, and on the metal underneath. The leg ends get rustier every year, and two have broken loose. I’ve been planning to replace some metal and repaint the bars for years — I even went so far as to buy a few rattle-cans of Rustoleum for the job — but it’s the colors that have delayed me for these many years. The bars were originally painted red, yellow and green, but with the years of fading plus the coat of white paint that Dick applied over everything at some point, I’m just not sure which bar was painted what color.

And then I saw this show, Knight Rider, Season 1, Episode 6, broacast on RTN. My first thought was, “YES! I can finally nail down the colors and get it painted!” Problem was that the set was only seen in one short transition shot in the show, spanning maybe three seconds in the frame, and not very clear. I dug around online looking for the video without much luck. I finally tracked down a copy through Google Video last night; the video is actually hosted by a Japanese YouTube knock-off called YouKu.com, and even has Japanese subtitles! Too cool! (link)

But even after looking through the video frame by frame, the colors aren’t clear enough to make any solid determination. So I guess, to paint the thing accurately I’ll have to go back to my original plan to do some judicious sanding in obscure areas that have maybe been spared the fading effects of the sun & hopefully see what the original colors were. Maybe it’ll get done before it ends up as a heap of iron oxide bits in the grass. Maybe…

With the impending conversion to digital TV looming, I finally bit the bullet, applied for my rebate card, and bought the converter box. Thankfully, I had submitted my application some time ago and beat the rush that caused the shortage of rebates earlier this month. The money for the program is gone, so until they get more appropriated, it’s a waiting list.

But I got mine, and after buying the converter box a couple of weeks ago, I wasn’t in a hurry to set it up because according to the clueless salesguy at Best Buy, there were only one or two stations in Sioux Falls that were broadcasting digital anyway. Why bother if that’s all there was? So the converter sat on a shelf, still in the box…

Until last week, that is. I got a burr under my saddle & decided to try it out, and it actually works very, very nicely! Add to that the surprise of finding 10 stations broadcasting locally in the digital spectrum. The expected local stations are there — KELO (CBS), KSFY (ABC), KDLT (FOX), KDLT (NBC) & three PBS stations (your tax dollars at work) — plus a few others that I hadn’t expected. UTV is one (broadcast on a KELO subchannel), KWSD (CW & RTN), and two bonus PBS stations, PBS World & PBS Create. Not a lot more channel-wise that we got on analog, but it’s an improvement. When I first hooked it up, a couple of the stations had good signal but were broadcasting absolutely nothing, and a couple others had very weak signals; I rewired things a little so that the antenna feed was going directly to the DTV box, and that gives us solid signal on all 10, and they all work!

Another thing I hadn’t expected was the picture; much better than standard broadcast TV! Many of the channels broadcast in HD, and although ours definitely is not a high-definition TV, it does make a noticeable difference. And the functionality of the little set-top box is pretty incredible. I got the Insignia brand box, and the remote that comes with it can be programmed to turn the TV on & off and control the volume; it only controls the volume of the audio signal going to the TV, so it’s still necessary to tweak the volume on the TV from time to time, especially when using the DVD player. The really neat feature with this box and digital TV is you can push a button on the remote to get TV-Guide-type info on the fly. You can scroll through the channels without leaving the one you’re watching and see what’s on now and what’s coming up next. If you see something you like, push another button (just one) on the remote, and you’re there! So cool!

So all in all, things are looking good for digital TV in Sioux Falls. Many who are already using cable and or satellite TV with newer TV’s probably are thinking, , but for someone like me with a 6-7 year old TV, and is too cheap to buy cable, it’s a great thing. My kids even like it!

One last thing; found a nice listing of broadcast TV info for the Sioux Falls area at RabbitEars.com. Not complete, but helpful.

The second call she took while I was listening was from a young single mom, looking for advice on a job choice she was facing; she is currently in school and working at a coffee shop, and had an opportunity at a different job. Her toddler daughter was in daycare while she worked and was in class, and the dad wasn’t in the picture. Dr. Laura didn’t even let her describe the two jobs; she was told in no uncertain terms that her place was at home with the kid, and if she needed to work it should be at night when her daughter is sleeping. Her job at this critical time in her daughter’s life was with her daughter, being the Mom, teaching her about life, having lunch with her, playing with her… Just being a mom. Period. End of discussion. Without that, the child grows up without a mom or dad and knows nothing but being shuffled from daycare to grandma’s to home or whatever, and that can lead to far worse difficulties later on. The poor girl on the phone could say nothing but, “OK” in a resigned tone, and you could just tell that she thought that plan was totally unreasonable. Dr. Laura was coming across as the parent that this girl perhaps never had, and was not going to let this old bitty tell her what to do.

I couldn’t agree more with Dr. Laura; that girl needed to be home with her kid as much as possible. It won’t be easy for her to do, and the messages she gets from society tell her that she needs to be working.

But as I listened to Dr. Laura’s rant, I couldn’t help but think of my own kids, and how much I’ve missed… Sure, we’ve worked hard to have one of us home with the kids as much as possible, but what I wouldn’t give to have been able to be home with the kids full-time, even if it were only a year or two.

I guess that’s the older, wiser, more mature Me talking; I don’t know if I would’ve gone for it ten years ago, even if Yvonne had suggested it. I know I suggested something like that a number of times; as a nurse, Yvonne’s job has always paid more per hour than any job I’ve had, so it wouldn’t have made any difference for us financially. I still give her a hard time on occasion, asking her why it’s always me working full-time… but she’s pretty insistent on wanting to be home for the kids and to be the ‘glue’ that holds the family together. I dunno; I think I could be pretty sticky too. And I think I might know my kids a little better.

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That’s the same as -30.55° Celsius. Brrr. But that seems balmy to Aberdeen’s low of -42° this morning.

According to the National Weather Service office in Sioux Falls, that’s the coldest it’s been since sometime in the mid 1990′s (didn’t catch the exact date) but it’s still not a record low. The record on this date in 1972 was -32°.

Even now, at almost noon, the temp has risen to only -13°, shooting for a ‘high’ of -1°. Can’t wait. But it’s supposed to be in the 20′s or 30′s by the weekend. We’ll be running around in shirtsleeves by then I’m sure.

About 4 a.m. this morning I woke to the sound of shrieking winds and tree branches falling on the roof. I looked outside & saw that a good-sized branch had fallen from the maple tree, so I went outside to check & see if there was any damage. One step outside the back door and I knew something was up; it was like walking into a sauna — hot!

The wind was still howling and it was beginning to rain, but thankfully, there wasn’t any damage to the house & the large branch had fallen between our house and the neighbor’s garage on the fence & but small branches were scattered everywhere. The wind died down shortly afterward, and I could feel the temperature dropping while I was out there. It was strange; really strange.

This afternoon I went digging around on the Internet to see what I could find out about what went on this morning; KELO-TV had a blurb on their website and their blog about it which provided me with its name, and of course Wikipedia has a page on it, which was even updated with this morning’s event; how about that! I posted a question to the KELO blog about it and Tony Barlow responded with a little more information on it and a link to another website describing the phenomena. The graph below (click on the image for a slightly larger version) also came from Tony and the KELO blog.

Turns out that meteorologists don’t know for sure what causes a heat burst but they always happen when a thunderstorm cell is dying. It’s theorized that it starts when rain hits a pocket of dry air at about 10-20,000 feet and quickly evaporates. The evaporating moisture causes the air to become more dense than the surrounding air, which causes it to descend rapidly. During the rapid descent the air mass is compressed, which causes its temperature to rise sharply. When that mass of air hits the ground, you get high winds and hot, dry air. The link provided by Tony mentions that the hot dry air is capable of killing vegetation by quickly pulling the moisture out of it, and in some cases the heat can stick around for quite some time.

According to the chart above the temperature was about 73° prior to the event. Within a very short time period the temp jumped to the 101° high, then drifted back down to about 72°. According to the Wikipedia entry, a heat burst occurred in Brazil in 1949 causing the temp to jump from 100°F to 158°F in two minutes!

I had never even heard of a heat burst before, much less experienced one, so in a way I’m glad for the large downed branch laying in my yard, in spite of the extra work it means… If it weren’t for that I wouldn’t have been outside at 4a.m. to experience the heat; and if it weren’t for that I wouldn’t have been curious enough to go looking for the reason behind that and the wind accompanying it.

Update:
The National Weather Service posted a report on the heat burst event; not sure whether they’ll keep it online or not, so here’s the text and images from that site, just in case.

Convective Heat Burst moves across Sioux Falls

Between 415 am and 445 am CDT this Sunday morning August 3rd, the city of Sioux Falls experienced a convective heat burst. Temperatures rose rapidly from the lower 70s to 101 degrees in a very short time. This rapid rise in temperature was also associated with wind gusts of 50 to 60 mph, as well as a rapid drop in dew points. The official high temperature will be 99 degrees as with automated weather stations, only the 5 minute mean temperature and dew point are used.

Here is an analysis sounding for Sioux Falls from the 09z Rapid Update Cycle model. Note the presence of the warm and dry layer aloft.

At this time, a dissipating thunderstorm complex which originated late evening across northern Nebraska was approaching from the southwest. The image below is the Sioux Falls base reflectivity scan, intercepting the returns at around 16,000 ft above ground level (AGL). While not shown, the returns weakened considerably below this level, and continued to weaken after this 3 a.m. CDT image.

As this rain evaporated into the warm and dry layer shown in the sounding above, the air cooled a bit and continued to subside. However, the evaporation cooling was not significant enough to offset the warming which occurs when an air parcel sinks, therefore, the parcel warms and dries on its continued descent to the surface. The red arrow on the analysis sounding above represents the necessary parcel trajectory to reach a temperature of 101 F, which occurred at 426 am CDT.

The first report of this phenomenon was received at around 3:45 am, when campers at Wall Lake called to report strong winds, and unusually warm temperature. Here is a radar velocity image from around this time. Note the area of bright green around Wall Lake, which represents the strong inbound winds reaching the surface, or here indicated at an altitude of 400 feet AGL.

The area of enhanced velocity was noted to be moving toward Sioux Falls after this time. The first report of the heat burst around Sioux Falls was some tree damage in central Sioux Falls at around 415 am CDT.