What the hail!

A midnight hail storm came through the Bar B and scared the daylights out of me.

I’d been awake – my granddaughter’s flight to Japan was close to landing and I was watching the plane’s progress across Canada, over the Bering straight, skirt along the Sea of Okhotsk and finally make a right turn into the bay where Osaka sits.

I was drifting off when thunder rumbled down the valley and the hail began.

Blueberry-sized hail pounded the roof, covered my car and beat the tar out of my Acu-Rite weather station.

The next morning I went out and checked my recently planted petunias and realized my weather station looked … odd.

The wind cup unit had probably broken off the stand with the bad winds that accompanied the inch of hail. I climbed up the ladder and pulled the unit off and looked around for the missing piece. Super glue is an amazing thing but I couldn’t find the missing piece anywhere.

Acu-Rite is company that offers a wide variety of geek-level weather equipment and home monitoring. There’s a blog, support and wide variety of weather-related equipment.

I’m not a weather expert by any means but I love weather. I love radar images and barometers and stormchasing photos. Stormchasers are part of my social group and I love their energy and excitement at Mother Nature’s fury. I wouldn’t step foot in a tornado-prone county without keeping a wary eye on summer skies but I can live vicariously through their videos and photos.

Could I see myself riveted to radar and figuring upslope and dew point? Yah, that’s been fun but stupid me, I only thought meteorologists were the people who stood in front of green screen. My nose is too big for TV so I never considered it. There all kinds of weather-related jobs out there and I could see myself doing one of them. Oh, well.

So, ten minutes later I chat with a customer service representative names, Kaylee who knew the weather station lingo inside and out and hooked me up with a replacement wind cup unit so I can watch it spin and read the data of the windiest days at the Bar B.

I highly recommend using Acu-Rite weather systems. Check them out and see if one will fit into your own mini weather climate.