Seize the storm

The tire dream (sooner to become a reality) 

It was confirmed again that I need new tires on the first chase of the season. My car rather complained as I was heading into Yankton and I hydroplaned a bit. It helps to have tread on the tires to channel the water. I’m still biding my time to get all the other repairs paid off which ended up costing me $383.

The new tires will be $112.43 a piece and that includes installation. I was going to go with the Goodyear TripleTred but they don’t come in the 185/65/14 size that I need. I even emailed Goodyear and they told me there were no plans to expand the 14 inch size line. So, in keeping with my warning to Goodyear, I informed them that I would be purchasing their competitor’s tire - Michelin Hydroedge. I’m kind of saddened by this because the TripleTred clearly beat out the Hydroedge in all my research. Now my goal is to see just how far these 90,000 mile warranty tires will carry me. The guy at the repair shop I go to was pretty much dumbfounded, “I just don’t know how they can make it that high. What the heck are they putting in there?!?!”

The “Santa would sure be cool if…” dream

1. $ 500 - Antenna system for data
2. $ 800 - Video Camera
3. $ 130 - Pinnacle Video Editing
4. $1000 - Digital Rebel
5. $ 500 - Photoshop
6. $ 250 - Scanner/HAM radio
7. $ 300 - In-car mounting, power solutions

Donations?

Have you heard of those e-panhandling sites?  Some girl got $20,000 of her debt paid off that way.  Maybe I should setup a “Donate to a Worthy Cause” button on my website…hahaha. If only Bill Gates would swing by carpetempestas…stop dreaming Ed.

****UPDATED BELOW****

352 miles @ $2.59 a gallon = Getting the car wet

Oh well, I got the first chase of the season out of the way.  Got out of Brookings at about 4 pm and booked down I-29 to Sioux City where I made the usual stop at Chick Fil-A. Noticed some towers going up just after they issued a tornado watch for Turner County in SD. It was getting darker already so I decided to get back to SD and meet the storms in Yankton. Saw one good CG strike there and some pretty intense rain, and a smidgeoning of hail. Headed back home with an annoying crosswind that totally sucked on my mileage getting back to 29 from 90. My arm began to hurt after a while because I was pulling against the wind.  I got back at 10:30 pm.

It was my first chase with SwiftWX Professional 2.5 (I bought it at v2.1). It handled excellent. There were only a few problems that I had and that was because my internet connection dropped because my wife was calling me. Rory has done a great job with Swift. I’m glad he’s putting a lot of time into and getting a good beta group together to iron out all the issues.

UPDATE:

So apparently I got a little closer than I thought to the action.  Without data, I was driving along and to my left (south), I noticed some lower clouds and perhaps some sort of rotation.  Since the storm motion was to the northwest and I was northwest of it, I continued on in order to get out of the way.  It didn’t look too serious and the radio station I was listening to wasn’t issuing any warnings.  Now I smack myself for being without data.  Anyways, the reason for this update was that I got forwarded this screenshot from Wally Hollander, a guy from Indiana that was checking out the action that night.