We were at BB's finishing dinner at around 9pm, when the severe weather alerts started rolling in. Checking the weather radar showed a storm about 10 minutes away heading right for us. Initially we decided to wait for it to hit us, but just as it started to rain decibel45 remembered that he left the window open at home, so we split.

As I drove north on 183, the rain started coming down harder and harder, until I could see sheets of it illuminated by the streetlights. I had to set the windshield wipers to extra-fast and it hardly helped. I could only see the tail lights of the SUV in front of me going slower and slower. Cars were pulled off to the side of the freeway, but I decided it was safer to keep moving and to exit the freeway as soon as I could.

The exit ramp was essentially stop and go traffic, but I couldn't see anything at all further than one car ahead. The picture on the right shows many cars and trucks huddled under a gas station canopy, for protection from the elements. There was golf ball size hail in other parts of town, so I guess people wanted to avoid that possibility. (I didn't notice any hail.)

Driving on the surface roads was interesting because the rain was coming down so fast the water didn't even have a chance to drain off the road. There was several inches of water in places where water normally wouldn't collect at all. Fortunately, I didn't have to drive through any places where it would collect, as I probably would have had to stop or go around.

I've never driven in conditions quite that intense before. It would also have been fun to stay at BB's on the patio and watch it go by, but I suspect we would have been drenched.

After I finally made it home, half an hour later the sky was almost completely clear. I love Texas weather!

On saturday I went up to Mansfield Dam to see the open floodgates and take some pictures. The amount of water coming through there is pretty amazing. Apparently the flow rate is currently 40,000 cubic feet per second, or 17 million gallons per minute.

Two nights ago we got a lot of rain in the Austin area. Yesterday morning on my way to work, I got a chance to take some pictures of Brushy Creek as it flooded its banks. There was water over the road on my normal route and it was closed, so I had to turn around and take another route. But I got some pictures of the flooding water.

It's really cool to get email like this. This is the first feedback that I've got regarding my NOAA Weather Radio feed for the Austin, TX area.

Hi,
I'm writing from Los Angeles, where I'm away on work (as I often am
during the week).
Just wanted to thank you for your weather stream out of Austin.  My
wife is alone at home in Hays County, and with tonight's storms, it
gave us both peace of mind to monitor WX radio off your site.
Again, many thanks and all best,
David

On saturday a bunch of people celebrated Pam's birthday on a party boat on Lake Austin. The trip was on again, off again because of threatening weather, but ultimately we decided to brave the rain anyway. I was glad we did, because I got a bunch of cool pictures of Lake Austin and the 360 Pennybacker bridge in the fog and rain. The weather was much more interesting than what you'd normally expect in june (sunny and hot).

Because of the rain, soaring was cancelled all weekend so I didn't get to fly. If this rain keeps up it might be too wet next weekend too, which would be disappointing. But I'm getting ready to take my written knowledge test in preparation for my private pilot license, hopefully I will complete that this week.

My parents celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary yesterday. If I had planned things better I might have been able to be there, but the cost of a plane ticket was out of range. My brother has just returned from his round-the-world trip and is staying with my parents for just a few days before he leaves for an internship in Prince Rupert.

The Insight would not be a wise choice of primary vehicle in any place where winter weather is a regular occurrence. Here in south-central Texas, one need not worry about actual winter weather more than once every few years. But shortly after midnight on saturday morning, it started to snow significantly.

I was over at paradox0220's place watching movies until after midnight, knowing full well that snow was in the forecast. By the time we left, ther was already almost an inch of snow on the cars and road. We brushed the snow off our cars and set out on the trek home.

Now, it was dark and snowing pretty heavily, yet it took me a while to realize that the main reason I couldn't see very far ahead was that my headlights were covered in snow and just accumulating more. I had to stop and brush them off a couple of times.

The Insight did not do well in those conditions for a couple of reasons. One is that the tires are made of a hard compound (for better fuel efficiency) and are quite narrow, leaving little opportunity for traction. The other is that an electric motor offers full torque even at the lowest engine speeds. So no matter how gently I pushed on the accelerator, I was always getting too much torque. Torque, of course, is what breaks tires loose and I sure was doing a lot of that. Fortunately, I was able to get enough traction after stopping at lights to continue on my way home.

The most difficult part of the trip was climbing the last hill into my neighborhood. I got about a quarter the way up the hill when I lost forward momentum. Whenever I tried to go forward, I would instead slide closer to the edge of the road. Fortunately however, when one wheel dropped into the gutter, I noticed I had some traction again. I guess the rough road edge, combined with a limited slip transaxle, worked together to allow me to make it up the hill. I'm sure that wasn't good for the transaxle, but I just wanted to get home. I realized later that it wouldn't have been a big deal just to park the car in the parking lot at the bottom of the hill and walk the rest of the way home, but oh well.

Now, I'm sure all you non-Texans are laughing at all this excitement, but I just have to remind you that I grew up in Canada and snow is nothing unusual to me, but it's been about 12 years since I've had to deal with it much.

Rain makes me smile. Snow makes me positively giddy!

It snowed in Austin! I took some pictures. More later, I'm going to go see if I can jump out of a plane today.

I love the rain. I'm sitting here listening to its soothing pitter-patter, as it gets louder and softer over time as the clouds roll by.

I got several good lightning pictures this evening. Here's one:



You can see the rest of them in my gallery.

Although I didn't have a chance to fly, this was certainly an enjoyable weekend anyway. Most of the enjoyable parts were spent in the company of friends, the rest of it was me procrastinating about doing some yardwork (which I eventually did get around to doing). I was considering doing some geocaching but didn't get to it. Maybe the next non-flying weekend. I'm going to load a bunch of local cache coordinates into my GPS so geocaching can be more spontaneous. Less planning, more doing. (Thanks openmynd :)

In case you were wondering, the title of this post ("fulmo bonegas") is Esperanto and essentially means "lightning is awesome".

Yesterday we had some good storms come through in north Austin. Every time a storm comes through I try to get lightning pictures, and got a nice one this time:



If you look at the larger picture, you can see drops of water. Although I was indoors when I took this picture, the drops are not on the outside of the window. These are raindrops falling through the air, captured in freefall by the strobe-like illumination of the lightning strike! Very cool. This is a great demonstration that falling raindrops do not take on a "teardrop" shape, as is commonly depicted.