Here comes Ike

35 mph winds, 3-5 inches of rain and a possibility of tornadoes:

Update: the basement flooded again thanks to a couple of failures in our house's ancient infrastructure. We're not sure yet if the water rose high enough to empty our bank account again. Fortunately, Lisa's parents came over from Indiana today after hearing about our woes - her dad is an industrial electrician & should be able to take a professional look at the equipment downstairs tomorrow.

Ike and my boss

My boss went down to Houston, Texas, a couple of days ago to help his nephew's family with a newborn and to help do some hurricane weatherproofing of their house. Meanwhile, Brendan Loy, the Weathernerd, says "Get the hell out! Ike’s storm surge is a deadly threat!"

Tornado History Project

Wolfram Research co-worker Josh Lietz has a cool website devoted to tornados at the Tornado History Project. Here's the one that hit my hometown of Findlay, Illinois, on June 2, 1990 - the track on the map comes from the Storm Prediction Center's records, and it's about a mile too far south. It was one of 66 tornadoes that day.

Noah MacGyver

The basement flooded early this morning and somehow, thank God, the breaker tripped & shut off the power down there. It's the deepest I've seen it with still, dark, dirty standing water over the last step of the stairs. The hot water heater and the furnace are partially underwater, and with no power the sump pump isn't pumping water out to the flooded yard. Which is probably good, all things considered.

One of the causes of this round of flooding was a faulty downspout that poured a cascade of water right down on the ground beside the basement wall. I went out in the storm to take a look with the old anxious homeowner's eye and saw the problem, then spent half an hour in the downpour rigging up & monitoring a drainage system worthy of MacGyver. The junk in the garage yielded an old spice rack and a kids' inflatable swimming pool - the spice rack is now under the L bend of the downspout to send water shooting out away from the house into the deflated pool, which extends from the spout out to lower ground in the north yard. After a few minutes of that the north yard was under about 4 inches of water from the old garden area to the neighbor's yard.

That was round one, now over Indianapolis. Here comes round two, now over Peoria and heading east. Oh, and we're under a tornado watch and a severe thunderstorm warning:

Here we go

First big thunderstorms of the year. Number two of the evening is above us now with reports of giant hail to the west, and there are two nastier cells west between us and the Mississippi River heading east toward Small Town, Illinois.

UPDATE: Good news - the whole system is slowly moving south; bad news: a tornado was spotted a few miles west of Findlay, IL where Mom lives. On the phone just now she said she's getting ready to head to the Christian Church, the town's official tornado shelter.

That was cold

The kids noticed last night that the warm air from our gas furnace in the basement suddenly smelled hot, then it smelled disturbingly hot, as if things were going south in a real hurry. I killed it at the thermostat & went downstairs to cut the main power to the furnace and found water swirling around it - most of the county is flooded and yesterday's thunderstorm/sleet/blizzard/&c was the last straw. Water was coming in steadily through the ancient brick wall on the north side of the basement and heading straight down the old coaling area towards the furnace.

The websites I found said you should have a gas furnace checked by a technician after flooding, so I got in line with the local contractor and tried to work in the 54F downstairs library shivering in two flannel shirts, a jacket and sweat pants. Fortunately we have a separate heating & power system upstairs so the kids spent most of the day up there staying warm.

The contractor came by about 5 this evening - since 6:30 last night he's done nothing but climb down into flooded basements and check furnaces & hot water heaters. Some families lost the computer card that controls the furnace, one had a fire; we were mighty lucky - nothing was damaged, so now it's blasting blessed heat again.

It's always coldest at sunrise

It's 3 degrees out there now with a wind chill of -17. Our garage has a homebrew in-floor heating system devised by the previous owner - it's a hot-water heater, a pump hooked to a thermostat, and a lot of flexible plastic tubes filled with water & antifreeze and embedded in the concrete floor. It's odd but nice to feel the heat coming up from the floor. I've been keeping the temperature in the low 50s out there since last week when the sun heated the garage that much for free. Last night I knocked the temp down to the high 30s so the system could cope. At some point I figure the hot-water heater won't be able to keep up and it'll start pumping cold water through the system, like when you use all the hot water in the shower. From there, the thermostat never cuts off the pump and dire things happen. Or maybe not - I don't know too much about hot-water heaters.

A couple of Christmases ago we learned what happens when the garage isn't heated. I went to bathe the kids at 6am but there wasn't much water pressure. Looked around the house and found a fountain in the laundry room, a recent addition (previous owner, again) that half-hangs over a corner of the garage floor with a crawlspace of a foot or so and water pipes running under it. No garage heat = busted pipes, so I worry about it on cold nights like this.

It's just sitting there, grinding on central Illinois

They're saying 6-8 inches with 40mph winds by noon today. Thomas De Quincey got it right:

Surely everybody is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a winter fireside, candles at four o'clock, warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without...

Here it comes

Dang - I love these animated weather radar images from wunderground. Here comes 2-4 inches of snow:

First snow

There's a very light dusting on parts of our brick sidewalks and the edges of the streets this morning, but that was enough for the kids to burst out in joy - "happy first snow day!" they cried just now. You can barely see it in the last 3 frames here:

There's November for you

In this radar image the line between mixed and frozen runs right over our little town.

Some guides to old books

Memory dump before the power goes out with this advancing thunderstorm. Christopher is monitoring the weather websites.

• Medieval Christian Biblical Exegesis in English Translation
• Editions and Translations of Works of the Venerable Bede