Life Changes

There's been a whole hell of a lot of upheaval in the Z world lately. A lot of downers, truth be told.

GfZ was let go from her new job with no notice. "You're not a good fit for us." Well ... shit. Until a week later, when GfZ got a call from NY that her grandfather had a stroke and was in the ER. Immediate flight back, a week of keeping Grandpa company and comfortable, then a week or so of funeral and estate stuff. Suddenly losing the job looked pretty insignificant. On the upside, he's back with Grandma, and not suffering.

About five hours after my last post I went in to work for a scheduled mandatory staff meeting. The top brass and the union board were all present. Not a good sign. Short form: due to budget constraints, the department is closing the comm center and contracting out those services to another agency. There may be jobs for some of you but it's not in concrete yet. Estimated time frame: 90-120 days. Well ... shit.

MrsZ is fighting back and forth with an orthopod and an imaging center to get an MRI done on her shoulder, which has been bothering her for months - sometimes to the point of non-function. She's still trying to find a job out here and getting frustrated by the lack of response.

Now, to turn it around...
GfZ has a new "temp" job lined up. Starts next week. Unfortunately, it's three hours away. We went and scouted the area last weekend and checked out a room she's renting from a young soldier. He's squared away, the house is squared away, the commute from there to work is tolerable. She should be home with us for a day or two every week, although schedule changes may sometimes prevent that.

I will have a severance package and I'm cautiously optimistic about being hired on by the new agency. There are some speed bumps and it will likely be a pay cut, but it's a job with benefits. If that's the case, I can stuff the severance check in the bank and not worry about it.

In parallel with that, I'm starting to seriously consider going back to school. I'm hoping to take at least one class in fall semester, with an eye towards going back full-time in a year or so. The flavor of the week ... is nursing.

Don't get me wrong. I (usually) love dispatching. I'm a damn good dispatcher. But one point was driven home to me over the last eighteen months of job hunting and moving: the skillset is eminently portable... and the pay generally sucks. I read dozens if not hundreds of openings for dispatchers when I was looking last year. Most agencies were paying in the low-teens per hour or less. I was making the same money working for BBHIS, with far less responsibility.

But that's a rant for a whole different post.

Right now, we're addressing a few expenses we'd been putting off, while we know we have an income to handle them. We're making a few conscious splurges - nothing extravagant, but important to us. We plan to spend a day on a rental boat this week. My suppressor is still in the works. And, unfortunately, we're car shopping. (More on that in another post, soon.) The belts are being tightened, because we don't know what's coming ... but we'll get through it together.

Review: Radarscope

Warning: weather geekery below.

I first heard about RadarScope when I went to the National Weather Service's Spotter class a couple months ago. It was mentioned almost as an aside by the instructor - for those who wanted more and/or better radar info, particularly for mobile spotting/chasing.

It's an app available for Android, iOS, and MacOS... and their site is not terribly informative. A few screen shots, some buzzwords, but not a lot of meat. Not particularly encouraging, and the app is ten bucks. No, not a lot in the scheme of things, but ten bucks on an unknown is... well, a bit of a gamble.

Before we went chasing a couple weeks ago, I decided to bite the bullet and get the app. I figured if a meteorologist from NOAA/NWS had recommended it, there must be something to it.

Worth. Every. Penny.

Fingertip panning, standard pinch-to-zoom, access to most weather radars in the country, and a lot of the features you won't see on your local news.

Most of us are used to the standard weather radar, showing reflectivity (precipitation) and the standard color scale:

How about the same image, but available in hi-res:

When you're looking at hazardous weather, being able to see finer details matters.

Other imaging info available includes "HCA", or "Hydrometeor classification". In English, "what's actually falling". Tap-and-hold on the scale on the bottom shows what each color signifies (and this works in all modes). This shows graupel/gropple as a pinkish tan:

A simple tap on the "sweep" icon changes the map from radar sites to city names, and back:

(That image, by the by, is "storm base velocity". Green indicates flow towards the radar site and red is moving away from the radar site. This is particularly useful for identifying rotation...)

Storm warnings are shown in yellow, tornado warnings are shown in red, and flood warnings are green. The little red number-in-an-oval in the top right indicates the total number of watches/warnings across the country. This is unedited, straight from the iPhone. Radarscope will draw the predicted storm path (white line), outline warning areas, and so forth. Below is a classic example of a tornado "hook echo" near Knoxville, TN on 4/29/14:

And here's the storm base velocity for the same storm. See the little swirl-blob just northeast of Rockford? That's the vortex signature; the change in coloring (to red) shows there is "something" moving against the flow of everything else.

Other radar modes (that I haven't taken screen caps of) include rainfall totals, Vertical Integrated Liquid (another chaser favorite; great for identifying hail cores), Echo Tops (how tall is the storm?), and some dual-polarization stuff that I don't pretend to understand yet.

Location services work beautifully and will automagically select the closest radar, and will even show a triangle depicting what your approximate field of view is:

Data usage is VERY frugal - a solid day of chasing and constantly referring to the radar for storm info only used about 40MB of data.

If you're a weather geek, or spotter, or chaser, this is absolutely worth having on your mobile device. Yes, it's one of the more expensive things in the app store, but honestly? Ten bucks is a couple of mocha-frappa-froo-froos, or a box of 5.56.

White truck of happy...

Normally it's the brown truck, but this box came USPS.

I've got a few things I need to do quick write-ups on and get posted here.

And I need to order some AR tools... I've got the start of an upper to build!

Delays...

When I first got in touch with the dealer about the can I was looking for, he had them in stock. That changed between then (admittedly a couple months back) and yesterday when I went to his shop to buy one.

So, I have ordered and paid for a Silencerco Sparrow. He has placed the order with his distributor (or with Silencerco direct? Not sure.), who will have to Form-3 it to him, and then I can do the Form 4 and send the ATF $200 and begin to wait.

If eForms aren't back up by the time it's here, I'm going to paper file and be prepared to wait. If they come back up after I've paper-filed, I'll either consider another can (unlikely) or start a Form 1 to "manufacture" an SBR or two.

For those keeping track at home, the timeline and costs thus far have been:
- Forming an NFA Trust (so MrsZ and GfZ can take the cans out without me): $350, 2 weeks
- Sparrow: $485 inc. sales tax

ATF has announced they have doubled the number of examiners doing NFA stuff, and temp-dutied people from other offices in the agency to help clear the backlog. I'm cautiously optimistic that I may see this suppressor by the new year - eight months away.

NFA

My NFA trust is complete. I'm going to the pusher on Sunday to pay and do paperwork for my first item, a .22 suppressor. Unfortunately, eForms are still down. Such is life. 

I see this being a danger to my wallet. I plan on the can ASAP, and I'm already looking at SBR stuff. I'm strongly considering doing a Form 1 on the 15-22 and then threading it. Because damn that'd be sweet.