Fzzt—

There's a cold front coming our way. It's been really windy all week, and today is no exception. Looking at the national weather maps, I see it's very windy all across the southern U.S., with red flag warnings stretching from Texas to North Carolina.

Our electricity has gone out twice this morning. That's unusual — our power system is usually pretty wind resistant. Steady 60 mph winds in the middle of winter have seldom resulted in blackouts, and the National Weather Service station nearby is only reporting gusts in the 40 mph range. After today's outages, the power has usually been restored within two minutes, which suggests to me that the problem is at a substation and not in the local distribution network. Either way, the failure gets routed around pretty darn quickly. The substation for this area sits out by the highway in an area where the wind comes shooting over a hill, so it wouldn't surprise me if that's where the problem lies.

It's still annoying.

It's also a good example of the variety in Colorado weather at this time of year. Right now the temperature is 65F, but winds are steady at 28 mph gusting to about 40 mph. Tonight it's supposed to be 24F and we're due for 2 to 4 inches of snow. Tomorrow the high temperatures will be in the 30s F.

It has been unseasonably warm, I suppose. Next week will be more normal, ranging from the 30s to the 50s. We sure could use the precipitation.