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Monday, November 28, 2011 Lethbridge

5:30 am

The temperature is -6° C, with a high predicted of +5° C. From the Environment Canada website: Today Mainly sunny. High plus 5. Tonight A few clouds. Wind west 30 km/h. Low plus 1. Normals Max: 2°C Min: -10°C.

I cannot ever recall seeing a wind warning where the number was greater than 100. I will try to go geocaching as soon as it gets light.

5:40 Morning Musings

Yesterday evening turned into a bit of an adventure. By early afternoon the wind was really blowing and we were getting readings on a live weather web site of gusts of about 115 kph. Then about 5 PM we could see huge amounts of smoke out our back window. It was a solid bank of smoke about 10 - 15 blocks north-west of us. We could hear the sirens of the emergency vehicles but were not sure if it was a building or a grass fire. It seemed too close to be a grass fire. Then about an hour later we received a phone call from a neighbor who was helping a friend evacuate her house. There was no further information about any of this on the television or the radio or the internet. I assume twitter and facebook were active but we are not on that. We finally found a small article on the CBC web site that said there was a grass fire near Lethbridge but most of the news was about the damage the wind was doing to Calgary. The CBC site did indicate that further information was available on the CIty of Lethbridge web site. This did have a few sentences indicating that most major roads in the area were closed due to the fire but little else.

Here is a clip from this morning's CBC website:

Raging grass fire

In Lethbridge County, southeast of Calgary, a grass fire fuelled by the high winds forced at least 125 people from their homes just west of town. The fire scorched about 10 square kilometres before being brought under control.

RCMP officers went door-to-door telling people they had to leave their homes, and more than 100 people followed their instructions. Others were advised to stay away from affected areas and remain inside with their doors and windows closed.

Winds blew the flames to the outskirts of Lethbridge, but the winds abated late Sunday evening and firefighters were able to get the blaze under control.

Lethbridge County is in a state of emergency that remained in effect Monday morning as firefighters dealt with remaining flames in coulees and concerns over downed power lines.

 

My plans for today are pretty simple. I want to go looking for a geocache - this will be my last search until early December. I need one for today and then I will be able to say that I have found a cache for each day in November (spread out over 3 years). This will be the first month that I am able to say that. Clearly December and January are not in the picture for such a statement, but I will try to nibble away at it a little. There are about a half dozen caches still to look for in the nearby region.

Priority 2 is to continue reading "Infinite Jest". I am about 3/4 of the way through it but it is slow going. The prose is dense and the font is small so there is much to assimilate. Having said that, I am loving it. It is different but very effective. Yes, it could be shorter, but so could Joyce's "Ulysses" or Tolstoy's "War and Peace" or Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past". Which reminds me, I have a new translation of "War and Peace" that I should start.

I now have a complete set of operating instructions for running my trains. The next step is to use the Ship It! software to produce a set of switching commands for the second iteration of movement of cars with the 10 trains that I have in my timetable. This should go much quicker as I now need to only follow the operating instructions rather than create them. There will likely need to be some minor tweaks to this as I proceed.

Now that the winds have died down, I need to put up some outdoor Christmas lights. :-)

11:00 am Geocaching

Done. I have now found at least one geocache for each day of November. Here was the last one:

There are still a few caches (5) to look for in Lethbridge. I will wait until December 2 and then limit myself to one/day but not worry about which days I search since Dec 1 and 14 are the only 2 days that I have found a cache so far.

Here is the table that I have been trying to fill in for November:

cache

It is neat to see the one row completely filled in.

In order to maximize my filling in of the remaining cells, I need a strategy of only looking for local caches on days with a zero in the table. At the moment there are many more such cells than there are caches to find. There are presently about half a dozen caches that I have yet to search for that I would characterize as local.

1:00 PM Life

I received a coupon in the mail a week ago that offered me a discount on books at Chapters. I used the first half of the coupon last week and returned this morning to use the second half. Here is a list of my booty:

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