Friday, January 18, 2013

Bad Weather

We've had a week of pretty bad weather in Knoxville, and I wanted to share a few random weather photos.

First, we had four days of continuous rain, which means we spent a lot of time on flood watch and flash flood warning. We reached the normal monthly rainfall total during the first day, so you can imagine how wet and soggy everything has been. Since they were all work days, I didn't really go anywhere but back and forth (and one day not even that, since I've also been slowly fighting a cold for about two weeks), but the other night I did take a few photos through my car windows at the railroad crossing:

rainy train

railroad lights

They're not spectacular photos, but that second one is kind of weird and moodily atmospheric.

Hot on the heels of our four days of rain (or cold on the heels, to be more accurate, even though that's not an expression that people use), yesterday during the day the rain slowly turned to sleet, and then snow:

parking lot #31

snowing in circle park

When I took this photo:

circle park window view

I remembered taking this photo through the same windows a few years ago:

desks, hallway

and thought, "Hey, this would be a good experiment for some Looking into the Past photography." Our computer systems were down for an upgrade, so I had some free time on my hands, and gave it a try, but it didn't turn out so well:

comparison

The hallway is pretty dark, so the printed picture has none of the ethereal bright color of the original shot, and it looks even darker against a bright white background. It was a good idea, but not so good in practice.

A lot more snow had fallen, and stuck, before I left and as I've mentioned before Tennessee has a lot of trouble dealing with snow, but I didn't stop to think about how much worse the regular snowmaggedon panic and driving would be on top of four days of flooding. The net result was that most of my ride home looked like this:

going home

and the normally twenty or so minute trip took a little over two hours, one of which was spent crawling through a one mile stretch of Neyland Drive.

This morning, of course, everything is iced over completely since the temperature dropped last night, and I don't know if I will make it in to work or not. My parking lot is at the bottom of a hill, and there is a lot of ice.

1 comment:

Marcheline said...

I never saw lightning storms like the ones in Nashville. Until I moved there, I never knew lightning came in blue, green, purple, and yellow. The balcony on my apartment faced a lake, and the light shows over the water during a storm were spectacular.

Nashville rain is something, too. Not so much individual drops falling in random places, more like an entire gargantuan bucket of water hurled to earth by the gods.

I remember when I first moved there and I was driving on the highway (of course I was, because you have to get on the highway to go everywhere down there), and it started to rain. I saw a bunch of people pulling off the road, and I thought to myself, "Why are all these people pulling off the.. HOLY SHIT I CAN'T SEE THROUGH THE WINDSHIELD!!!".