Yesterday, while helping Lisa unload the newly-filled propane bottle from the hand truck, I bent over awkwardly and heard an odd tone from my mobile phone on my new belt pouch. I didn't pay much attention to this until I got a call on that phone a few minutes later. It was Lyon County Emergency Dispatch saying that they'd gotten an emergency call ( Read more... )

Another chuckle from the Fire Department:

( Well, That's What He Said to Do )

Late last night, the forecast snow began falling. Lisa has been up all night of late and kept sweeping and shoveling snow. When I got up this morning, she measured the accumulation on the front porch rail: about 10 cm. That's not much compared the the large falls up in the Sierra Nevada, where Interstate 80 has been closed off and on much of the ( Read more... )

We have a radio scanner in the living room that has the local railroad and emergency services dispatch frequencies on it. As we're having a (by local standards) pretty fierce rain storm move through tonight, there have been a number of call-outs. For example, while our local fire station was investigating a possible house fire (it turned out to be ( Read more... )

Yesterday it got so cold that I had to re-kindle the fireplace, after having cleaned out all of the ash a couple of days earlier. Today, it was 5-10°C warmer. We unplugged the electric heater, and Lisa had to run the air conditioning in the travel trailer for a while. It's definitely spring-like now. We also took our first "long loop" walk of the ( Read more... )

There's been a substantial brush/structure fire here in Fernley about 1 km east of our house, on the other side of the railroad tracks. Multiple alarms, with mutual support called in from surrounding districts. From the radio traffic, it appears to have been a permitted controlled burn that got out of control. Given that there were high wind ( Read more... )

The leading edge of this storm system coming through pushed warm air in front of it followed by some high winds. According to the weather report, those winds were literally gale force (about 30 knots/55 km/h). When I went for a walk to the post office after lunch, I was nearly blown down by the wind, and I weigh about 125 kg (about 275 pounds ( Read more... )

When I walked to the Wigwam restaurant for breakfast this morning, I could hardly see the Pah-Rah Mountains for all of the smoky haze.

( Smoke in the Air )

Tuesday evening was probably the best weather we'll have this week: neither too cold nor too hot. We took advantage of the pleasant spring-like conditions to get some work done outside on the house. While we were doing so, we had a flyover.

( Formation of Helicopters )

Maybe we swapped the swamp cooler and the firewood a few days too soon, as snow came back overnight. A late storm out of the Gulf of Alaska came through yesterday and last night, putting a few inches of snow in the Sierra (chain controls went back up for a while) and giving us high winds and rain in Fernley.

( Not to the Valley Floor )