Well, the Weather outside is Frightful, but the Fire is so Delightful

[Snargfargle]

[Slammer58]

Wait, I don't see a toasty BB.  😄

(as spoken by a cruiser main)

Edited January 12 by Slammer58

[Snargfargle]

It's a balmy 8 F right now. For our non-US viewers, that's -13 C.

[Justin_Simpleton]

I'm in the middle of a blizzard that's supposed to last until tomorrow morning.  I'm listening to the creaking of the shop addition I built 10 yrs. ago as the snow is adding to the  snow from a couple of days ago up on the roof.

Will it hold up?  

[HogHammer]

Two tornado sirens decided to go off last night at 11 pm and another at 1:30 am.  (Make a great night of sleep). Strong winds and very heavy rain - very much springtime weather.  The forecast for Sunday and Monday is 3-6 inches of snow and temps in the low teens and high single digits.  So about a 50-degree swing for central Arkansas.

[Snargfargle]

40 minutes ago, HogHammer said:

central Arkansas.

When I was a kid, my grandpa and grandma hauled me along on a summer trip with them to Arkansas to look for a plot of land by a new lake that was just filling up so grandpa could build a little vacation house there. There was a Discount City at Rogers that grandpa liked so we went there. He wondered though if the concept of a shopping center would ever take off. Grandpa bought me a fishing pole and took me fishing on the White River, where I caught my first brown trout. We also visited a Civil War battlefield and a branch of the family that still lived around there as Grandpa's grandpa had been born in the area and had served with the 1st Arkansas Cavalry (Union) before marrying a war widow and moving to the Choctaw Nation. When the lake full and the house was built, Grandpa went in with some other fishermen and built one of the first floating boat docks there. I spent a week at Beaver Lake pretty much every summer for the next thirty years.

Edited January 12 by Snargfargle

[HogHammer]

22 minutes ago, Snargfargle said:

Grandpa bought me a fishing pole and took me fishing on the White River, where I caught my first brown trout.

I have caught many rainbow and especially brown trout on the White River.  

John Ross, in Trout Unlimited’s Guide to America’s 100 Best Trout Streams, said the White River “is perhaps the longest and arguably the best series of tailwater trout fisheries in the United States.” The area below Bull Shoals Dam is especially well-known for big browns.

Before moving here years ago, I would never have thought about trout fishing in Arkansas, having lived in the northern Midwest and Pacific Northwest parts of the country.  The Little Red and Norfolk Rivers are also excellent for catching trout.

World-Record Rewind: Remembering Rip Collins' Arkansas Brown - Game & Fish (gameandfishmag.com)

A 40-pound, 4-ounce brown trout from the Little Red River on 4-pound test line is still a world record.

Northwest and Northcentral Arkansas are really something to see, especially if you like the outdoors.

[Snargfargle]

32 minutes ago, HogHammer said:

John Ross, in Trout Unlimited’s Guide to America’s 100 Best Trout Streams, said the White River “is perhaps the longest and arguably the best series of tailwater trout fisheries in the United States.” The area below Bull Shoals Dam is especially well-known for big browns.

If you go up onto the Beaver Lake dam and look down to the river, you will see huge brown trout congregating in the cold water at the base of the dam. Unfortunately, there's no way to get to them. I've caught some nice brown trout further along where you can wade though. That water is cold even in the summer.

Edited January 12 by Snargfargle

[Snargfargle]

34 minutes ago, HogHammer said:

Northwest and Northcentral Arkansas are really something to see, especially if you like the outdoors.

One winter, I stayed at grandma's place (grandpa was long gone by then) and fixed it up as it was getting pretty run down. By that time the village had quite a few people living there. However, it didn't seem to effect the wildlife much. I had an armadillo that would come up and want for me to feed it eggs in the evenings and a striped skunk that hung around. That skunk's stripes were so wide that was almost entirely white. There were deer and a bobcat family that I'd see every day too. And don't get me started on raccoons. My aunt, who also had a place there, started feeding a baby racoon and in a couple of years had about two dozen that would come around in the evenings to be fed. I told her to stop feeding them and she said that she was scared not to.

[Wolfswetpaws]

19 minutes ago, Snargfargle said:

If you go up onto the Beaver Lake dam and look down to the river, you will see huge brown trout congregating in the cold water at the base of the dam. Unfortunately, there's no way to get to them. I've caught some nice brown trout further along where you can wade though. That water is cold even in the summer.

I don't suppose an inflatable canoe is possible?

[Snargfargle]

39 minutes ago, Wolfswetpaws said:

I don't suppose an inflatable canoe is possible?

You can't take a boat right up to the base of the dam because it's hydroelectric. People boat the river up from just downstream of Beaver Lake (yes, that's grammatically correct because the river runs north there) to the next lake though, which is Table Rock. I've known a few people who caught some really nice browns on worms from boats along there. The river has lots of rainbows too. Interestingly, neither browns nor rainbows are native to that river.

The same thing the other way around went for the Pacific Northwest, where I taught fisheries biology. We seined up some of the largest brook trout I've ever seen up near Timothy Lake when we were working with kokanee salmon (landlocked sockeyes) but they weren't native to that area either, as they are a north-eastern US species (brookies are actually a char). They have been stocked all over the western US though, as has the European brown trout, which is a close relative of the Atlantic salmon.

Some states like browns and brookies and some are trying to get rid of them. I have mixed feelings about the issue because they provide a good year-round fishery as salmon fishing is seasonal. Pacific salmon migrate up streams to lay their eggs and then most of them die, providing nutrients for the insects upon which the hatchling salmon feed. However, brookies and browns do tend to eat salmon fry and compete with the native cutthroats.

I did a lot of scuba diving in Timothy Lake because it was clear and deep I didn't have to worry about sharks. A lot of people go there to catch crayfish in traps. That lake has some of the biggest and cleanest-tasting crawdads I've ever seen.

Edited January 12 by Snargfargle

[clammboy]

2 minutes ago, Snargfargle said:

The same thing the other way around went for the Pacific Northwest, where I taught fisheries biology. We seined up some of the largest brook trout I've ever seen up near Timothy Lake when we were working with kokanee salmon (landlocked sockeyes) but they weren't native to that area either, as they are a north-eastern US species (brookies are actually a char). They have been stocked all over the western US though, as has the European brown trout, which is a close relative of the Atlantic salmon.

Lol Snargfargle where haven't you been ,worked, taught or served.  I truly wish I lived half the life you have god bless you and thanks for your service in Nam as a medic I believe.

[Admiral_Karasu]

Let it snow...

We had something like 15 to 20 cm's of snow last night (that's about 6 to 8 inches for those who are metrically challenged).

[Snargfargle]

Just now, clammboy said:

Lol Snargfargle where haven't you been ,worked, taught or served.  I truly wish I lived half the life you have god bless you and thanks for your service in Nam as a medic I believe.

No, I went in a year after that war ended, thank goodness. As for the other stuff, yes, I have been sort of a wanderer but that applies to a lot of my family. My second cousin came home from school one day and informed her dad that she was going to take a boat to New Zealand and bicycle the north and south islands. Her dad said "fine by me" because he had been fighting in WWII when he wasn't much older than she was. After high school, she and her brother rented a sailboat and sailed around the Caribbean all summer. She later worked in Alaska as a hydrologist for the EPA. My nieces have actually seen more of the world than I have, thanks to being the only two grandkids of my parents, who were retired but still liked to travel as they had gone on senior trips all over the place as class sponsors for 40 years. My nieces have been to Hawaii, Alaska, Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, Europe, and all over the US.

[Guest]

I like snow but snow has avoided the St. Louis area for 2 years now, just little dustings. This weekend snow to the north, snow to the south, no snow for us. Gonna be VERY cold though.

[Efros]

[Admiral_Karasu]

29 minutes ago, Efros said:

Berlin?

[HogHammer]

7 minutes ago, Admiral_Karasu said:

Berlin?

Why you did not know, they moved over the past weekend.

[Snargfargle]

5 hours ago, Kalishnikat said:

I like snow but snow has avoided the St. Louis area for 2 years now, just little dustings. This weekend snow to the north, snow to the south, no snow for us. Gonna be VERY cold though.

There is some weirdness going on with the jet stream right now as it's dipping way farther to the south than normal, which allows the northern cold air to sweep in. Add to this we are in an El Nino winter with more moisture and you get a lot of snow in places that don't normally see it.

[Asym]

  Records are gonna be set temp wise I think....  The weather outside is Frightful...

[Snargfargle]

20 hours ago, clammboy said:

Lol Snargfargle where haven't you been ,worked, taught or served.

Speaking of world travelers, when I was just starting graduate school there was a guy in the department who did his research project on African mammals. I asked him how many countries he'd worked in and he said "all of them." You could tell he'd spent a lot of time in Africa when we flushed a coyote once on a night-trapping expedition in the Midwest US and he called out "Look, a jackal!" He just retired this year after 40 years as a biology professor at a Midwestern university.

Most of my grad-school colleges became full professors. I never did because I dabbled around too much. I took three years off after grad school and rode around the US and Canada on a motorcycle while doing maintenance and home construction to pay my gas bills, I then did a year of post-grad geology and, after that, four years of graduate-level philosophy. After I got fed up with philosophy, I picked up an electronics degree for the fun of it before going back to biology and getting a fisheries degree and my master diver card in scuba. I did finally settle down and taught but only as an adjunct (part time) professor. It was fun though because I could pretty much teach what ever I wanted to. The college would give me a list of courses that needed a professor to teach them and I'd pick and choose the ones I wanted to teach. I taught cellular biology, genetics, ecology, environmental science, mammalogy, fisheries biology, stream habitat assessment and improvement, boating safety, and all the associated labs. I also worked at a fish hatchery and was asked to work at a dive shop teaching scuba but I was just too busy. As my first career was in allied health, I would have taught in the allied health department too but I didn't have enough hours available as they capped me at one credit shy of a full load so that didn't have to pay me as a full-time professor, although I also taught summer school so I was actually more than full time. Those are the "Walmart politics" that colleges play to keep from paying half of their professors what they should be paid.

Edited January 13 by Snargfargle

[Snargfargle]

20 minutes ago, Asym said:

  Records are gonna be set temp wise I think....  The weather outside is Frightful...

I'm pretty sure that we live in the same area of the US. The year I was in paramedic school at the KU Med Center we had a really cold winter too. It was 5 to 10 degrees there for several weeks that winter. Several years before that at Ft. Leonard Wood when I was in Basic it was one of the coldest winters on record in Missouri at the time. The Midwest can get really cold in the winter.

Edited January 12 by Snargfargle

[Snargfargle]

Stop whining, you pansy, it only "feels" like -20.

[Snargfargle]

Since this game is of a nautical bent and I've been talking about fish, here's the web page of a guy I went to grad school with. He comes from a long line of artists and has combined his innate artistic talent with his knowledge of biology to become one of America's most renowned wildlife artists. He does this all with colored pencil. 

https://www.americanfishes.com/en/

 

[Snargfargle]

Went over to the shop to check if the pipes had frozen. Fortunately, they hadn't but I cranked the hot water heater in the bathroom up to provide it a bit more heat. It's nice to have a bathroom, shower, and hot and cold running water in the shop but it's sort of a hassle in the winter too because I have to heat it to keep it above freezing. Not to mention that I have to pay double utilities as the shop is on a different tax lot from the house. It wasn't fun wading through four-foot drifts of snow with a -20 F wind chill to get to the door but I'm glad I did for my peace of mind. Weather like this makes me glad that I'm no longer working as a firefighter-paramedic and don't have to be out in it anymore. If you see a lineman too, buy him a drink, because he's been out in weather like this keeping your power on as well.

Edited January 13 by Snargfargle