It had gone unnoticed by me until now that the weather station stopped recording wind speed and direction a couple of days ago. The reason I looked at the weather station is that it recorded rain this afternoon, despite clear skies. A closer inspection reveals the cause of the fault to be, not gremlins, but rabbits! The wascally wabbits have eaten my cables!

Not wild rabbits, rather my pet rabbit, Dude!

Dude! So cute & innocent looking, but so destructive!

This is not the first time he has chewed cables. He is a bit of a serial offender! He has gone out of his way to get to these though and had to pull them away from where they were securely fixed!

A job for the weekend! Apologies for the lack of wind & rain data for the time being.

5 days ago I closed WSM Weather following equipment failure and my lack of funds to repair the weather station.

Well, the situation has changed somewhat…

On Saturday I received an email from Martyn Hicks of Horfield Weather (& the host of top sites). He offered me an old weather station that he had to get my site back up & running. I gladly accepted and said we would arrange to meet so I could collect it from him.

In another twist of events, I was up a ladder today dismantling the old weather station when a neighbour called me across to ask “would this be any good to you” – and handed me a box containing an old weather station with an identical anemometer & rain guage – the 2 parts of mine that had failed! The indoor unit was faulty and different to mine, but he believed the outdoor units worked – and they do! So, thanks Bill (who had also seen my “closed” notice on the site) and thanks to Martyn for your very generous offer also.

It’s business as usual for now. Hopefully no more catastrophic failures for the time being!

Appropriate given the current widespread snow!

December 8:
6:00 PM. It started to snow. The first snow of the season and the wife and I took our cocktails and sat for hours by the window, watching the huge soft flakes drift down from heaven. It looked like a Grandma Moses Print. So romantic we felt like newlyweds again. I love snow!

December 9:
We woke to a beautiful blanket of crystal white snow covering every inch of the landscape. What a fantastic sight! Can there be a more lovely place in the Whole World? Moving here was the best idea I’ve ever had. Shoveled for the first time in years and felt like a boy again. I did both our driveway and the sidewalks. This afternoon the snow plow came along and covered up the sidewalks and closed in the driveway, so I got to shovel again. What a perfect life!

December 12:
The sun has melted all our lovely snow. Such a disappointment. My neighbor tells me not to worry, we’ll definitely have a white Christmas. No snow on Christmas would be awful! Bob says we’ll have so much snow by the end of winter, that I’ll never want to see snow again. I don’t think that’s possible. Bob is such a nice man. I’m glad he’s our neighbor.

December 14:
Snow, lovely snow! 8″ last night. The temperature dropped to *20. The cold makes everything sparkle so. The wind took my breath away, but I warmed up by shoveling the driveway and sidewalks. This is the life! The snowplow came back this afternoon and buried everything again. I didn’t realize I would have to do quite this much shoveling, but I’ll certainly get back in shape this way. I wish I wouldn’t huff and puff so.

December 15:
20 inches forecast. Sold my van and bought a 4×4 Blazer. Bought snow tires for the wife’s car and 2 extra shovels. Stocked the freezer. The wife wants a wood stove in case the electricity goes out. I think that’s silly. We aren’t in Alaska, after all.

December 16:
Ice storm this morning. Fell on my arse on the ice in the driveway putting down salt. Hurt like hell. The wife laughed for an hour, which I think was very cruel.

December 17:
Still way below freezing. Roads are too icy to go anywhere. Electricity was off for 5 hours. I had to pile the blankets on to stay warm. Nothing to do but stare at the wife and try not to irritate her. Guess I should’ve bought a wood stove, but won’t admit it to her. God I hate it when she’s right. I can’t believe I’m freezing to death in my own living room.

December 20:
Electricity’s back on, but had another 14″ of the damn stuff last night. More shoveling. Took all day. freakin’ snowplow came by twice. Tried to find a neighbor kid to shovel, but they said they’re too busy playing hockey. I think they’re lying. Called the only hardware store around to see about buying a snow blower and they’re out. Might have another shipment in March. I think they’re lying. Bob says I have to shovel or the city will have it done and bill me. I think he’s lying.

December 22:
Bob was right about a white Christmas because 13 more inches of the white Number 2 fell today, and it’s so cold it probably won’t melt till August. Took me 45 minutes to get all dressed up to go out to shovel and then I had to piss. By the time I got undressed, pissed and dressed again. I was too tired to shovel. Tried to hire Bob who has a plow on his truck for the rest of the winter; but he says he’s too busy. I think the arse is lying.

December 23:
Only 2″ of snow today. And it warmed up to 0. The wife wanted me to decorate the front of the house this morning. What is she…nuts??? Why didn’t she tell me to do that a month ago? She says she did but I think she’s damn well lying.

December 24:
6″. Snow packed so hard by snowplow, I broke the shovel. Thought I was having a heart attack. If I ever catch the son of a bitch who drives that snowplow, I’ll drag him through the snow by his balls. I know he hides around the corner and waits for me to finish shoveling and then he comes down the street at a 100 miles an hour and throws snow all over where I’ve just been! Tonight the wife wanted me to sing Christmas carols with her and open our presents, but I was busy watching for the freakin’ snowplow.

December 25:
Merry Christmas. 20 more inches of the @#$%^& slop tonight. Snowed in. The idea of shoveling makes my blood boil. God I hate the snow! Then the snowplow driver came by asking for a donation and I hit him over the head with my shovel. The wife says I have a bad attitude. I think she’s an idiot. If I have to watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” one more time, I’m going to kill her.

December 26:
Still snowed in. Why the hell did I ever move here? It was all HER idea. She’s really getting on my nerves.

December 27:
Temperature dropped to -30 and the pipes froze.

December 28:
Warmed up to above-50. Still snowed in. THE BITCH is driving me crazy!!!

December 29:
10 more inches. Bob says I have to shovel the roof or it could cave-in. That’s the silliest thing I ever heard. How dumb does he think I am?

December 30:
Roof caved in. The snow plow driver is suing me for a million dollars for the bump on his head. The wife went home to her mother. 9″ predicted.

December 31:
Set fire to what’s left of the house. No more shoveling!

January 8:
I feel so good. I just love those little white pills they keep giving me. Why am I tied to the bed?

I was sent this link earlier, so thought it only right to share with weather enthusiasts everywhere.

CAUTION: STRONG LANGUAGE!

Awww look! The cute Gremlins are back < grrr >

OK, so not unplanned, but unexpected at 2:00am!

I have changed ISPs and was expecting the cut over to happen “some time on the 1st of September” – but I wasn’t expecting that to be at 2:00am (else I’d have waited up! Not!)

Still, the deed is done. Woke up this morning to find all of my sites down and no email in my inbox and soon realised what had happened. I have changed the IPs on all the name servers, but as ever, it will take a while to filter around the net, so today could be a slow traffic day for the server!

Hopefully this ISP will prove to be a little more reliable than the last – I won’t even start to tell you the sleepless nights they caused me!

So far, so good, looks to be much faster and responsive across the net from this end

The observant reader may well have noticed there was no Daily Stats update yesterday, well, that’s because there wern’t any recorded in the archive Why?…human error!

The computers that run wsmweather (there are 2 of them) have to run 24/7 to capture the data from the weather station, archive it and to publish it automatically onto the internet. To ensure that things run smoothly the computers both have RAID hard drive arrays (i.e. backups) and are powered from a Uninterpretable Power Supply. However, despite that, wsmweather’s computers suffered a rather abrupt power fail – and it was my fault! This resulted in data corruption. The culprit was a faulty PSU on a clock that I plugged in, in the office. The socket I used was the UPS socket which feeds both of the computers that run this website. It seemed a reasonable thing, not to want the clock to reset every time there is a power cut, but I never imagined the clock’s PSU would fail and wipe out the incoming supply with it

So, there you have it. Best laid plans, lots of money spent and things can STILL go wrong!

Fortunately, there IS still an archive of sorts!

I share my data every 5 minutes with WUNDERGROUND and PWSWEATHER so the daily weather is always available on those sites too.

Here is the data for the 28th August 2009 on WUNDERGROUND.

Here is the data for the 28th August 2009 on the PWSWEATHER site.

Lesson learned – don’t plug things in on the UPS, leave it for the critical devices that run the web sites!