You know, I’ve been blogging for almost nine years now. I figure I repeat myself from time-to-time, and generally if I think I’m saying something that’s been said before, I acknowledge it. But since I’ve moved my Internet Home around so often, eliminating the possibility of an exhaustive archive, I have to guess sometimes. So I may well have written about this topic before. My apologies if that’s the case.

The first thing I ever wanted to be was a weatherman. I remember when I was three or four, standing in front of a blank TV screen giving fake weather reports to approporiately delighted family members. I analyzed maps so I could figure out where the states were. And when the weather was actually on TV, I paid extra close attention to pick up new techniques for my own reports.

Fortunately, that career goal passed. Although there was a night or two in college, while I was contemplating my next change in major, that I scoped out the Meteorology curriculum. As I recall, there was way too much math and since I had already basically flunked out of pre-business, that didn’t seem like a wise choice.1

Anyway, I bring this up because Tuesday was a stormy evening in Indiana and while the girls watched ‘Good Luck Charlie’ and other fine Disney programming, I sat around monitoring the storms. On the iPad I had multiple radar feeds going, as well as the local storm chasers I follow on Twitter.2 On my iPhone, I was using the Emergency Radio app to monitor the local amateur radio storm network. I checked Google Maps to find tiny Indiana towns from which storm chasers were relaying their reports.

The geekiest (saddest) part about this post isn’t that I was doing all this stuff. No, the geekiest part is that I was loving it. It was better than prime time TV, and certainly better than watching the Royals get crushed in Detroit.

I am approaching the time when I need to begin making career decisions again. Maybe it’s not too late to catch up on my math and finally get that meteorology degree!

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  1. I wish I knew about these weak ‘general studies’ degrees that athletes get. That would have been perfect for me. I could have taken all the different, bizarre, unrelated classes I wanted and still ended up with a degree. The saddest part of my college transcript isn’t the poor grades in the semesters I didn’t care. No, it’s the many interesting classes I took that didn’t do a damn thing to help me eventually get my degree. ↩
  2. I know, I know. I do have a wife, so save the “blogger in the basement” jokes for someone else. ↩