Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Yesterday it rained most of the day, and last night the temperatures were below freezing, making for an icy porch and sidewalks. Today we had intermittent rain and wind. Now I know the weather has been much worse for many other people, with blizzard conditions back east, but it's really unusual for us to get this much rain over a day or two. Or if we do get that much rain, it will happen all at once, with 20% of our annual precipitation falling in an hour.

During a break in the rain, Lisa moved wood from the large wood box to the small one on the porch and also filled up the smaller box in the living room. I offered to put on my work clothes and help, but she said she'd do it, as I'm still not supposed to do heavy lifting for a while. I've been carrying only two logs at a time rather than four, and that's still up from one log (they weigh around 3 kg each) when I first came home from the hospital.

It has been overcast most of today, which helps a lot with keeping the temperature down. A little while after the trash collection truck went through, light rain started falling. I decided a little rain wouldn't hurt me and went out to collect the bin. At that time, the heavens opened up with heavy rain including some hail as a thunderstorm rolled through.



I got the bin in and dashed back inside. It did cool things down quite a bit, though. I hope the rain soaks anything the lightning strikes.

I've been pretty lucky here in Fernley, as the worst impact of the series of winter storms moving through here is that my push-broom I use for clearing the walks broke while I was clearing ice from it. It has been of course much worse for lots of people, particularly in California, where they've gone from not enough water to too much of it, as seems to be the usual case. And naturally, those people who have to be out working in this weather, like railroad crews, have a very tough time of it.

Yesterday, I heard some of the talk on the radio scanner about a westbound train heading for Sparks. Due to various delays (mostly weather related), they were not going to be able to get to Sparks before their federally-mandated maximum 12 hours of service would expire. This happens a lot, and what usually happens is that the dispatcher has the crew park their train in a siding, while Sparks Yard sends out a "dogcatcher" crew by road to deliver a fresh crew and to collect the "dead" crew and return them to the yard. "Dead" crews are not allowed to move their train at all, and they have to sit where they tied down their train and wait to be relieved. Sometimes (rarely) this can be done by rail; a few days ago, I heard the dispatcher instruct a passing Amtrak train to pick up a "dead" crew so they could "ride the cushions" to the next crew base.

There was no problem getting a fresh "dogcatcher" crew out of Sparks. But there was no way to get them to the train, which was parked at one of the sidings between Fernley and Sparks. The problem: Eastbound Interstate 80 was closed east of Spark for what NVRoads reported vaguely as a natural disaster, which I speculate was a mud or rock slide. That stretch of road has no alternative routes. Lisa and I have been on multiple occasions on the wrong side of such a block (usually a traffic accident) and have had to make lengthy detours (either to the south through Carson City or the north through Pyramid Lake) to get between Reno and Fernley.

In this case, the dispatcher apologized to the "dead" crew and said that they'd just have to wait. However, after an hour or two, he reported that I-80 was finally open and the relief crew could get to them, albeit I'm sure the traffic was terrible.

Personally, I'm surprised that they didn't try to use a high-rail truck to transport the crews back and forth; however, I would not be surprised to learn that in general the maintenance of way people who operate those trucks aren't allowed to shuttle crews around that way, for any number of reasons.

We had a more typical desert rain storm this morning, i.e. a lot of rain in a relatively short period, coming in faster than the ground can absorb it. That's different than the storm a couple of days ago that washed the smoke away, in that it atypically lasted a long time but didn't drop a lot of rain at once, so nothing pooled. Fortunately, we live on relatively high ground near the railroad tracks, so all we get are a bunch of big puddles that typically drain away in a few hours. I have no complaints here. We can use the water.

Yesterday stayed cloudy all day and (relatively) cool. I decided to tackle digging up the growth in the field next to the house, which, once it dries out, is a hazard.

( Creating Defensible Space )

I was masked up while doing yard work, mostly against dust and pollen, but also from wildfire smoke that rolled back in. However, late in the evening, light winds cleared some of it out and cooled things off again. Lisa and I sat on the porch under the awning enjoying cooler air and being able to look at things more than a couple of meters away. A few drops of rain started to fall. As more rain fell, the air cleared some more and we mostly stayed dry, but even where we were getting rain falling on us, it seemed to dry quickly, which shows how dry the air is here.

Rain doesn't usually last very long around here, but this storm had some bite to it. There was also quite of bit of lightning in it, mostly cloud-to-cloud, and I hope that anything that hit the ground either didn't cause fires, or left ones that were extinguished by the rapidly increasing rain. After maybe 30 minutes, my phone blew up with a Flash Flood Warning from the National Weather Service. Water started to flow into the field where I had been cleaning brush earlier in the day. I couldn't get pictures, as it was too dark.

We pulled our chairs closer to the wall under the small awning, but after a while the wind also picked up and we had to head inside. Before we did so, we saw several trains passing through Fernley, all moving slowly. That was because Union Pacific had declared condition "FF" (Flash Flood) for the area, so all trains had to move at reduced speed, looking for washouts on the many small culverts along this stretch of track. We also heard a local maintainer in his hi-rail vehicle, when he pulled in behind the train stopped on the main in order to make room for a westbound train creeping from Hazen to Fernley to pass.

( Drama on the Railroad )

Today, the clouds cleared (too bad; it was nice and cool), the smoke started leaking back into town, and the water had soaked into the thirsty lakebed on which Fernley sits.

( After the Storm )

All in all, we're glad that we did not have to be out in that weather last night (although we would have liked having an enclosed porch from which we could have watched the rain) and that our property is not subject to flooding other than oversize puddles, thanks to the local lay of the land.

The predicted light snow did not happen. It's not cold enough. From the look of the nearby mountains, the snow level appears to have been around 300 meters above us. Here on the floor of the valley (really a section of the bed of prehistoric Lake Lahontan) in which Fernley sits, we had rain. Quite a lot of it by local standards, in fact. And because there's very little drainage here, it pools up where it can find low spots.

( Lake Imerys Returns )

The rain trailed off this morning, and inasmuch as Lisa says we're not having this year's Christmas Duck until pretty late this evening, I had breakfast at the Wigwam. I expressed my gratitude to the staff working the holiday there, of course.

A postscript to last night's Christmas Eve emergency services story: Ironically, about an hour later, there was a real search-and-rescue call for what sounded like someone who had driven out a road and got stuck where the pavement ended, but was no longer with their vehicle. I went to bed before hearing whether they found the lost person.