Seize the storm

I’ve sit here all day doing an armchair chase of a new Tri-state system that started in Kansas and rocked all the way through Missouri and is now rocking Illinois.   Great day of watching everything pop up though and was a good test of my forecasting abilities.   It definitely looked like today was going to be a huge day.   I now wish I would have archived this data.

Out of the Area

Anyways, back to the purpose of the post.   I sit here under a Winter Storm warning.   Here’s what the driveway and surroundings look like:

We’re supposed to get 6-10 inches total.   Let’s think about this for a second, winter storm warning in South Dakota and tornado warnings in Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois.   Yeah it’s spring, and March is definitely in like a lion.

Out of commission

My vehicle is out of commission.   I have a worn out tie rod, a cracked serpentine belt and tires that will need replacing.   Preliminary cost estimates are $650 for all of this.   I’m thinking $800+.   It’s a sad, sad day.   The car still works and I’m driving it but safety-wise, I’m driving on borrowed time and there will be no chasing until all issues have been resolved.   All I can say is good thing we have three pay days this month.

Update

Well, it looks to be like it will be on target with my estimate.   The belt will cost about $70-80 and  the outer tie rod end will be about $85-95.   Most likely I will need new brakes & rotors along with that which will run about $170.  

The tires – Michelin Hydroedge – best deal is through Wal-Mart at $468 with install, taxes and all that jazz.   Plus I get free rotation, balancing and if I ever get a flat, then they will do all that for free – for the life of the tires.  

Grand total: $834

I figured why not – plus it’ll be nice to tell people at the NSCC in Denver this weekend.   I still have some things to do but I figure it’s worthy of posting to everyone now that I have it set up in a way I like it.   The only thing I’m still a little perterbed at is how you have to have the explorer window at a certain width for the blog to be in the middle.   I’ll eventually get it fixed.   It also appears really wierd in Firefox and Mozilla – to that I say, best viewed in Internet Explorer?   Thanks for coming and checking out the site – come back often

Got the main site up  along with all my existing chase accounts.   Hopefully all the pictures won’t gobble up the bandwidth that bad.   I still have to get an “On the Road” page set up.   I’m also waiting on some more banners – I can’t get the plugin to work for the rotating banners for some reason.   I’m also going to try and get up some video from 6-13-05.

Trying to get a weather page in as well that will give the weather conditions for Brookings – makes it easier for me to get my weather I guess.

Also going to make sure that people can subscribe to whatever kinds of posts they want to – have to do some more research on there to see if it is really easy or will take some work.

That’s all for now, we’ll see how much we can get done through this week.   Maybe we’ll be ready for release next week???