Tony's Blogbach, Between the Isobars

As my cute, new little widget over there on the right shows, I’ve got several chase days lined up starting tomorrow.  Spent most of the afternoon yesterday getting the ride ready to rock.  She’s been dormant since returning from Illinois, so almost two weeks.  Actually managed to keep the driving limited to a single full tank of gas during that stretch, nice cause the 87 octane here is the mid-grade, so it’s $4+ right now here in northern Colorado without fuel points chipping away at some of that.  Fortunately the 87 octane becomes regular unleaded across the border, so that’ll somewhat alleviate that wallet thief.  It’s like 2022 all over again…

So quick and dirty as I have some honey-dos to knock out before I venture out.  Likely going to take the northern route via I-70 out to Kansas today; I’m leaning toward a play on Wednesday across western Oklahoma into southern Kansas, and the original out-of-the-box idea was to hit up Amarillo tonight, but I think I-70 works.  There’s also chatter, albeit limited compared to previous events, about potential northern lights, which would be much more attainable along I-70 as opposed to I-40, so we’ll keep that option open should that evolve tonight.  I haven’t looked at a cloud forecast, so who knows, but it’s pretty low on the go-get-‘er scale at this point.

WEDNESDAY: As I mentioned, likely western Oklahoma into southern Kansas.  I think there’s a very high ceiling to this event, but still pretty conditional for tornadic supercells.  Should have no issues getting on storms, so likely something to play with, but we’ll see how the tornado chances evolve.

THURSDAY: Northeast from Wednesday, probably looking east of Des Moines, maaaybbbeee as far as into Illinois?  I dunno; another high ceiling, messy setup, but honestly between the three days, COULD be the better of the three?  It’ll be a haul to get over there, so we’ll see where things end up tomorrow night, but that’s the going plan.

FRIDAY: Largely undecided at this point exactly how far south and west we’ll venture from end-of-day Thursday, so I don’t have a Hard Target (great movie, BTW) picked out for Friday yet, but plenty of time to make that adjustment.

SATURDAY: It’s a maybe… if a solid tornado threat lines up near Ohio and we’re within shooting distance, I’ll see if its worth taking the shot.  Right now, I’d say we’re at a soft 30% for that.

Should be able to get back home to Colorado by Monday, and likely get a couple day reset ahead of the next system that may come into play later next week.  But that’s so far in lala land that I am not even going to attempt to make sense of that crystal ball reading yet.  It’s April, it’s prime time now, so don’t expect a nothing burger out of the month.

That all said, I am going to finish my home obligations, then finish loading up and head down to grab Ed in Denver; we’ll pull the trigger on our routing out and off we’ll go.  A fun note, Ed and I first chased together back in 2007, so this marks 20 seasons of our shenanigans.  So that’s pretty cool 🙂  This will be the first time in 2026 we’ll get out together.

Remember this?  Nah, probably not… this was a feature in my older sites where I would change the icon site-wide to reflect my chase potential, which was often updated on a per-day basis… well, if you look over to the right side of the screen, you notice there’s a 10-Day chase outlook.  Inspired by the old one-icon look, I created a much more modern version that shows my next 10 days chasing potential.  I’ve been stewing over such an idea for a while, but didn’t want to simply write a code to switch an icon, and this was the version I came up with.  Right now, 10 days may be shrunk to a week, or even five days pending my thoughts as I use it, but it was coded to auto update each day, so it would slide up the outlooks to the current day and fill in the final day with a default, meaning I don’t have to update all ten days every single day, and when it’s quiet, I can just leave it alone.  So that’s a fun process.  We’ll see if it sticks, but right now, I am going to test drive it seeing as I have an active stretch coming this week.  More on that in another entry 🙂

YAY!  Success!  Not sure what the turn-around time would’ve been for a straight-up repair, but my work-around to just return the original purchase back to B&H paid off; certainly faster than the alternate, which would’ve seen me send the camera back on MONDAY, and likely still would be in transit back to Nikon, so the fact that I have the new body in hand today (Thursday), and it is NOT part of the recall, means that I absolutely made the right call.  I feel a bit bad, cause most photogs would agree, B&H is one of the best places to buy camera gear, and this certainly was NOT their fault, but in the end, it saved me weeks of NOT having this camera, which likely meant this initial stint that may begin as early as next week would’ve been done without my new upgrade.  But B&H was awesome, as always, and thus I can quickly put this behind me well ahead of where I would’ve been had I gone the Nikon recall route.  Just happy my idea worked, and I can quickly put that issue to bed!

Welp, the YouTube launch happens on Friday!  At 6:30pm, the first NEW video of the NEW rebrand premieres!  It’ll be the first time ever online I have detailed out my first chase and first tornado all the way back in 1997.  It was the chase/tornado that started this whole thing I’ve been doing for the last 30 seasons.  I poured a lot of time and ‘research’ into this; and by research, I mean digging through old tubs and boxes to find everything I still had in existence from that era.  That includes an old high school “time capsule” video I took, literally ONE WEEK before the tornado chase.  That’s so cool to me that video was shot when it was cause it just gives the video such an era.  The photos, including some from waaay back, plus some cover video I had to do, including radar and a very nifty TWC call-back to the late 90s.  I’m very proud of it, and it’s a perfect way to launch to the channel.  Meanwhile, I am going to go live on Facebook about 30 minutes prior to the launch to chat and generate a little buzz.  I am not expecting a big turn out, probably my mom and my aunt honestly haha I don’t have a huge captive audience, but you never know.  I don’t really care, I am just excited to have this going.  Even have a couple other VLOGs and chase stories in the can, ready for the every-other-Friday upload schedule.  The Fridays between are reserved for low-lift, more short-form type stuff; one of those things being called Storm Chase minis where I talk about an event that doesn’t deserve or need a full chase log, but may have happened on a chase that’s pretty cool.  Other ideas are behind-the-scenes type stuff, coverage of a certain event, maybe talking about non-storm-chase stuff like blizzards or hurricanes, etc.  Easy lifts, basically, that don’t require hours of investment to create.  I mean, hell, I got 30 seasons worth of stuff, plenty to keep the channel on at least a once a week schedule.

But that all said, if you have stumbled your way in here prior to Friday the 27th and you don’t have anything better to do Friday evening, drop in, say hi, and waste about 13 minutes of your life listening to me talk about my origin.  Yes, this is my origin story haha

If you’ve followed me for a long period of time, you know I compare chase season to football season; with March being the pre-season chsaes, April through June the regular season, the summer into early fall the post-season, and the winter the off-season.  If you believe the long-range models, the regular season may have a formidable kickoff.  Still 7-10 days out, but the general consensus among the longer-range models indicates a pattern change that’ll bump us from this stagnate, hot pattern we’re currently in.  There’s a small area outlooked for this coming Thursday, but right now that’s got all the makings of a crashing cold front event, so I am not particularly interested in that.  Figure I can squeeze in whatever down time I can here at home before we get rolling in April, as that period looks like it could be a decent stint.  The Nikon exchange I wrote about last week, my camera body arrived today for the exchange, so I am hopeful that gets processed and a new, NON-glitchy body gets sent out in the next day or so.  Obviously I would LOVE to have that in hand and set up ahead of whatever next week has in store.

Also worth a note that I have finished the edits of my first upload on my new rebranded YouTube Channel!  I am super excited to post this video this upcoming Friday; it covers the story about my first ever storm chase and tornado back in 1997!  As part of my 30th Season Celebration, I have had a variety of projects I have been working on in my off time, and the rebranded YouTube was one of those.  I recently cleaned up the channel, taking down a lot of the old stuff, and am prepping the site for a more structured channel.  This video will kick off that structure, and not a better way to do it than with the first chase and the story behind how it all came to be.  I am SUPER proud of what this looks like; and other than a few small polishes here and there, she’s ready to go.  I may do a Facebook live stream during the premiere, which will happen at 6:30pm MDT, so I may stream for an hour to celebrate it.  I don’t have a massive following and it’s on a Friday, so I won’t be expecting a huge turn out, but I am doing this more for me to scratch a bunch of itches I have developed over the last couple years regarding how to archive my career.  Season 30 seemed like a solid place to kick all that off.

That all said, I am going to get back to work… I took a ‘lunch break’, and wanted to put some words to paper while they were sloshing around in my melon.  Now that I’ve done that, I need to point my melon back to it!  Peace!