Last night, the computer I started making payments on earlier this year suddenly quit working. It seems I decided against a warranty when I bought it. 

And there are too many overwhelming circumstances for me to continue this blog on a regular basis in the near future. 

Yesterday there was a tornado warning in our region, and the one person who made a donation to my "Buy Me a Coffee" link on here, ever, was in the polygon. I slept right through it because I assumed the risk for severe weather to be so low yesterday and because my weather radio does not alert for Madison County. I don't live there anymore, and to get alerts for my county, I have to tune to a different channel. Nobody called to wake me up, and I do know more than one person in or around Huntsville. I got a text from someone about it when I woke up and was really startled. I thought it must have been delayed from days ago. And then I saw that no, I'd totally missed a tornado warning yesterday, which verified with minor damage on Redstone Arsenal. 

I have certain standards for my work, and that is not up to them. 

I also think one reason this laptop didn't last long was that it originally came out more than 10 years ago and was not built to keep up with the speed of a lot of data like now, when I do coverage of severe weather for hours at a time. 

The one I'm writing from is a backup that I'm glad I held on to. But it is not fully functional. The only fully functional computer I have is the one that just died. This one is even older and clunkier. If I don't treat it gently, it will probably get fried prematurely too. 

Ever since I dropped out of college, I've known that my strength was more in writing anyway. Maybe as far as meteorology goes, it is enough to be a volunteer member of the SKYWARN network. A lot of people don't even know what that is. So maybe that is the extent of my contribution to this science. It's better than nothing. 

Just a few days ago, I was determined to make this into a living, the way some others like Ryan Hall and Max Velocity have done. And there's no harm in studying it on my own, from books, or going back and learning higher math on my own. But having that computer crash all of a sudden was a harsh dose of reality. I have very real limitations compared to when I was in college, and if there is a way around them, I do not see that way. 

So I think I'm going to make my last post in a while, and it's going to be a paper I wrote for a college class about illegal immigration. At the time I wrote it, the subject was not as hot as it's become since. 

I think my attempts at meteorology were all failures, and it's time to just accept that and move on . . . even if there is not much to move on to. Should have done that more than 10 years ago. And I did try. I guess the main reason I never totally gave it up is that people kept asking me about the weather. And there were times I thought if I put another blog or website online, I wouldn't have to send half a dozen text messages to different people when the weather got crazy, could just let them know in advance to read the site. 

So yeah, the weather will continue to change, off and on, for a long long time. With all due respect to Al Sleet. 

This paper is not the masterpiece I'd romanticized it to be in my memory, and has its flaws. But in the same breath, I haven't read any articles on the subject recently that made as much sense. 

So if you want to read it, here it is. 

I'm just curious as to what reception my non-weather writing might get online. I am going to have to live a more analog than digital life in the near future anyway, which really suits my temperament more. It's just that modern life seems to demand a ton of digital. Even the one homeless person I know right now carries a "smart" phone around with all kinds of "apps" on it. 

But maybe a lot of that demand is all in my head. Anyway, writing words isn't nearly as much wear and tear on a computer as gathering lots of graphics, scrolling Twitter, or trying to put together videos. And I was experimenting with videos again. 

If you follow the Substack link, you can read about half the essay for free. To read the full thing where I go into my own opinions with a personal story, you'd have to pay about five dollars I think, or do a free trial. And I just want to see how that goes. If anybody is interested in it, I might end up doing a blog on there that is not limited to weather reports. If I do have a future in meteorology, it is probably in the long-term. There is no indication that I should be trying to work my way into this field in the short-term. It is important to me, but there are other things that are more important. And where I can be more honest . . . beyond cold, hard logic. 

The essay may contain a serious inaccuracy though. The professor didn't contradict the idea, but I'm not sure it is against the law to have a Hispanic doing all the janitor work at a grocery store. It was against company policy though, I remembered, because I'd worked at one of those stores before. The utility clerk duties were supposed to be rotated among the various workers. Like I say, it's not perfect, but it's nice to read some good sense once in a while. Most of what's out there now is tripe.