December 29, 2005

Watching Weather and Counting Down

Although the winter started on the dry side, it's making up for lost time by sending wave after wave of warm and cold rainstorms across the Pacific through the "storm gate." Most rainstorms drop from a few hundredths to several tenths of an inch of rain. The current storm arriving tonight is expected to drop up to three inches!

The reason we are watching it so carefully is that the freeway sometimes floods between home and the airport, and we don't want to miss that nice Hawaiian Air Lines flight on Sunday morning! (The airline maintains a flight tracker: just plug "Sacramento" into the departure city slot.)

The Sacramento International Airport's "conditions" report is my new favorite web site; we're fortunate that, even if our flight is delayed, we have no connecting flights to worry about! Now, I need to find a similar web site that will report conditions on I-5. The California Highway Patrol maintains an Incident Report web site that is pretty-much real-time, so hope that will work for us. You may need to change the city to "Sacramento".

So far, the meteorologists are predicting a window between storms Saturday night - Sunday morning. I hope they're right! Weather information updated hourly or more often is available at the Weather Underground. Use the text box at the top of the screen to type in the zip code of the place you need information about. (For Hawaii, 96734 will work for Kailua, and 96814 for Honolulu. For Sacramento use 95831 or 95814.)

Haven't let any of this slow down my packing schedule ...

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