Saturday, May 23, 2009

Can't Hurry Love (or Tornadoes)

I'm posting this late and without any pictures from the day because...well...we didn't really do anything. Before the weather briefing even started one of the hotel women announced to the room that we would be staying in the same hotels tonight that we did the night before. Dr. Paul Markowski took over as the designated leader today and gave a more optimistic discussion of the next few days than Josh had. Yesterday Josh had ended his tenure by saying that we could expect more hope from Markowski than we'd gotten from him.

Our initial departure time was 11:30 A.M. MST...which became 12:30 P.M. MST...which became...1:30 P.M. MST. Around 1:15 P.M. a few of us suddenly became aware that we hadn't had lunch and asked Karen if we had time to run to Subway. We did! Sadly, that was the most in-a-rush we'd been since I got here.

Of course we were in a rush with so many delicious options available to us!

Before that we spent our time tossing the frisbee or football around (I did so poorly with the frisbee I wasn't about to try the football) and...well that was about it. We talked too. As soon as the four of us (Probe 12 team and myself) got back with our Subway meals we headed west for about half an hour, then pulled over to watch DOW7 scan for, well, about half an hour. I managed to get on one vehicle's wireless and entertained myself that way. We then turned around and went completely the opposite direction, passing back through the town we started in.

We pulled over for DOW7 to scan again...next to a bee farm. I am not fond of bees. I managed to jerryrig the wifi again and made that comment on Twitter, which resulted in Mike Bettes (who is following us from The Weather Channel) letting me know he had his epi pen ready if I needed it. After awhile we moved back towards the hotel while the CSWR probes went with the TIV crew to do shots for the Discovery Channel. As they began filming, a bull went to charge at Probe 14.

Probably a different bull.

Thankfully Lindsay hit the gas and no one and no vehicle was harmed. I guess they wouldn't have been able to put the "No animals were harmed in the making of this film" if that had happened, huh? They probably don't put it anyway since I'm pretty sure tornadoes harm a few animals.

Anyway, then as the probes headed back the mobile mesonets took off to do their shots. I'm in the DOW Van (read: I ride in the vehicle that holds everyone's luggage) so I didn't get to do any film shots. I did, however, end up in a one second spot on The Weather Channel today:

Did you catch that? Me neither.

Tomorrow is likely a travel day. Hopefully within the next few days I'll have some weather to report on. And I'll try to give a little background explanations on some of the terms I use/will use frequently in here.

Til then!

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