Weather Underground

[davinheckman]

His dad sent him to the basement to retrieve a stepladder.  He saw a sparkling string of beads arranged along a crack at the bottom of the steps and crouched down to look more closely.  He pressed his finger and the bead vanished, spread thin, becoming a darkened patch on the basement floor.  He sniffed his finger.  Rubbed it against its thumb.  Water.

"Dad... Daaaad?"

From the kitchen, "It's down there, just grab it and bring it up."

He grabbed the stepladder and ran up the stairs.

"Thanks!"

"Dad, there's a crack with some water coming through it in the basement."

"Another thing! Honey, we should have rented a house!" He said to mom. He trotted downstairs.  A moment passed.  He came back up. "Yep, there's water in the basement. Just a little, but what the hell?"

"Well, maybe it's just from the rain or something?" She was taking dishes out of a box and setting them on the shelves.

"No, it's not raining.  But more importantly, we are on a hill.  The soil is sandy.  The inspector said that around here, basements are dry.  No sump pump. Gotta go down 20 feet to hit water."

He we went outside.  The sky was crustal clear.  But he could see their swing set was sitting in a pond.  The water up to the seats of the swings.  "Daad?"

"Wait a second. I gotta figure out if there's something up with the water main." Dad was running the sink.  Looking at the stream of water.  Holding a glass of water up to the light.  

"No, Dad!  There's water in the yard."

"Really? Aw, cripes! What the hell? Honey, look at this."

"Just call the city," Mom was mad at Dad. "I'm sure they were fixing something and they broke something."

---

He looked in the basement, it was water all the way across.  He could hear his dad on the phone.

"No, I get it, you are busy.  But can you tell me with what?  You don't know?  I mean, seriously, did a water main break? Well, when will you know?" 

"It's on the radio." Mom had unpacked the radio.

Widespread reports of flooding reported in Trempeleau, LaCrosse, Monroe, and Jackson Counties. A flood advisory is in effect. As of yet, officials are investigating the causes…  

"Is it the river?  Check your phone?" Dad looked worried.

"OK, let's see. Well, the river is level red flood stage, so I assume the river."  

"Yeah, so, is it like raining somewhere or is snow melting?"

"In July?"

"I don't know. I'm not from here. Google it."

"I can't make sense of this.  Found a bunch of posts on it.  But they are garbage.  'No rain…  why is the river rising? Maybe they are letting water out of the dams... Glaciers are melting in Canada... Most likely rainstorms… Fracking... The EPA is trying to drive people out of the region… blah, blah, blah.' Oh, here's some stuff in the paper.  People are commenting.  Whoa, 'three feet of water in my yard… same here, house submerged up to windows…  not weather related…  I reported seepage a week ago on a construction project… etc.' Whatever it is, it's not only here."  

"Well, it's getting worse."  He could tell his dad was getting grumpy.  

---

He went to his room.  He was happy that his bedroom was on the second story.  He looked out the window at the little lake that now engulfed the yard and the road below.  I wonder if it ever rains in caves, he thought.  In the distance, he could see a neighbor wading into the water with a yardstick. He heard his parents carrying boxes up from the basement.

[Rob Wittig]

Amazing what we can get used to.

Here's the biggest difference:

A year ago I would check my weather app before I made the 20 minute walk to work (rain? wind? snow?) just to see how to dress.

Now I check two apps: Atmo Weather and Geo Weather. What's going on above? What's going on below?

Is today going to be a lower-body workout day (hike? dry? mud?) or an upper-body workout day (kayak? portage or row all the way?)

Should we ask that neighbor kid to mow, shovel, or bail?

[davinheckman]

His grandpa used to say, "The man who invented the paperclip is a millionaire."

"A millionaire?"

"A millionaire!  For making a little thing people could use."

And then, the old man'd rifle through back of his van, a yellow box, that looked like an ice cream truck without any ice cream.  Next to his little bedroll and the black and white tv, somewhere under toolboxes and odd bins of odder odds and ends, "Here it is, he'd say…" And he'd pull out some object he'd been working on.  One time, he pulled out an empty Folger's Coffee can, with holes punched all the way around at even intervals.  Inside, another canister.  "It's a pinhole camera, but instead of taking a picture in one direction, it takes em in all directions.  Then you get a slide projector and you can make a photo that people can walk around in. Better than Cat-Women of the Moon! You ever see Cat-Women of the Moon? Three dimensional!  This could be my paperclip."

He handed me a book,  Professional Amateur: the Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering.  It was grimy, like his hands, many of its pages marked by one of the stubby little pencils that were scattered about his van.  I looked at his missing finger.  My mom told me it was buried somewhere in Highland Park. 

---

This could be my paperclip.  I had moved my basement workbench to my son's bedroom.  His toys were still there.  I had managed to pull data from the National Weather Service and US Geological Survey, using the Digital Weather Markup Language to create Deep Weather Markup Language.  Pull in information from the NOAA's flood map. Make an app that would tell people the weather above and the weather below. People need something like this. Though he had lived in a house and had a job and managed to keep all his fingers, even though he had all the things his grandpa, even his mother, didn't have... he found himself back in that yellow van.  He worried that the very foundation would collapse, picturing his bank statements, his mortgage underwater.  Hoping against hope for some way out, frantically fussing over things he couldn't understand, in the way that some men will spend twenty dollars on lottery tickets, scratch them off in the parking lot, and then walk back into the Kwik Trip and buy another 20.  A paperclip. Maybe she could move back. No, he would move to them. Take them all some place, maybe the Rockies.  Buy solar cells and windmills.  Food to last a year, more!  

---

Determined, he set to work, tracking down the last stray pieces of his paperclip. He typed, "Cave Flood Data." The first search result hit him like a tsunami:

Download the World's Only Geo Weather App! 

[davinheckman]

His grandpa used to say, "The man who invented the paperclip is a millionaire."

"A millionaire?"

"A millionaire!  For making a little thing people could use."

And then, the old man'd rifle through back of his van, a yellow box, that looked like an ice cream truck without any ice cream.  Next to his little bedroll and the black and white tv, somewhere under toolboxes and odd bins of odder odds and ends, "Here it is," he'd say… And he'd pull out some object he'd been working on.  One time, he pulled out an empty Folger's Coffee can, with holes punched all the way around at even intervals.  Inside, another canister.  "It's a pinhole camera, but instead of taking a picture in one direction, it takes em in all directions.  Then you get a slide projector and you can make a photo that people can walk around in. Better than Cat-Women of the Moon! You ever see Cat-Women of the Moon? Three dimensional!  This could be my paperclip."

He handed me a book,  Professional Amateur: the Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering.  It was grimy, like his hands, many of its pages marked by one of the stubby little pencils that were scattered about his van.  I looked at his missing finger.  My mom told me it was buried somewhere in Highland Park. 

---

This could be my paperclip.  I had moved my basement workbench to my son's bedroom.  His toys were still there.  I started sleeping in his bed, it was closer to my workbench.  I had managed to pull data from the National Weather Service and US Geological Survey, using the Digital Weather Markup Language to create Deep Weather Markup Language.  Pull in information from the NOAA's flood map. Make an app that would tell people the weather above and the weather below. People need something like this. Though he had lived in a house and had a job and managed to keep all his fingers, even though he had all the things his grandpa, even his mother, didn't have... he found himself back in that yellow van.  He worried that the very foundation would collapse, picturing his bank statements, his mortgage underwater.  Hoping against hope for some way out, frantically fussing over things he couldn't understand, in the way that some men will spend twenty dollars on lottery tickets, scratch them off in the parking lot, and then walk back into the Kwik Trip and buy another 20.  A paperclip. Maybe she could move back. No, he would move to them. Take them all some place, maybe the Rockies.  Buy solar cells and windmills.  Food to last a year, more!  

[Jeremy Hight]

He later found that some kid had done the same in linux and made it free years back but the sucker had a wicked embedding worm in its guts like the poison in the spider with the dying time reference hourglass shining on its very skin.   The kid had taken the idea just to make it a great impossible, to solve a riddle then lock it away.  

Ok. Fine.   New shoe lace,  Yeah.  Let's work on that metaphor  he thought.