Tag Archives: weather modification program

Storm of The Full Moon

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Many of you long-term readers of the blog know that *The Institute has its own private highway, known as Hwy 287, here in Northern Colorado that connects us with the small hamlets in the area that support The Institute. By support we mean supplying us with foodstuffs, some services that we cannot or do not provide for ourselves such as nuclear power plant maintenance, a supply of interns drop-outs from the college located there, some medical services that our in-house clinic doesn’t provide, or for when we are over booked with those that we do. Just last month we had to send three intracranial reductions to the little medical facility in the largest hamlet in the area. Fortunately our helipad was not in use so we were able to get our patients out without having to ask the medevac helicopter to circle while we off-loaded some of our favorite guests.

Actually we need to clarify “owning” our private highway. It is a week to week lease arrangement with The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) which is a division of the United States Department of Transportation. They pay us a fee of several dollars a year to watch and “keep an eye out” for funny business on the stretch of highway that comes closest to The Institute’s holdings. That means watching for those using the highway and ascertain whether their use constitutes anything “funny”. The definition of “funny” is left up to our discretion. All we can say at this point is there has been a whole bunch of “funny” behavior that we have had to report. We have two full-time staff members on this program and they have their hands full, we can tell you. But we’re not here to talk about “funny business”. No we’re here to talk about the storm of the full moon.

Last night as we’re were returning to The Institute after having dinner with some of the visiting dignitaries in the area at a pizza joint nearby, not a chain, a local place, you wouldn’t know it, sorry we can’t divulge our friends names at this time but let it suffice to say that they are leaving office soon and leave it at that, they deserve their privacy just like you and we do. As we left they headed south, and we headed north up our highway when we were besieged by a fast-moving snow storm that came out of nowhere. This was a ground blizzard, a nasty little bugger, with high winds blowing horizontal snow across our highway causing extreme low visibility and ice on the road. Fortunately we were in one of The Institutes expedition vehicles that we use for our far northern explorations, so we were reasonably safe. However we were perplexed.

We had no storms scheduled in our weather modification department’s storm list. Again for those long-term readers of the blog you know about our huge weather modification program that has been in effect for some time here at The Institute. If you’re new to the blog simply type weather modification into the search box and you’ll have access to just about everything we’ve done, except for the secret stuff of course. The only people that can access that information is a legally sitting president that is not like totally nuts.

We hurried ahead slowly, reaching The main Institute grounds well after dark having had to crawl up the mountainside in double-low granny gear and headed up to the ready room in the weather department to find out what was happening. Sending our weather techs up to the observation deck way up on the third tower of the science wing they snapped the image above with our new weather intensive, highly functional digital DSL camera set at Holy Moley, which gave us some clues as to the make up of the storm.

Firstly, we didn’t do it. That alarmed us because it gave credence to what every one is calling that Global Warming. Global warming is apparently a phenomenon that is taking place where the weather goes all over wonky of a sudden on its own with no rhyme or reason. (Note to self: Get those weather guys on this global warming thing. We can’t be behind on this stuff. We’ll look like idiots.) Having had near total control over our local weather in the past this was a shock to us.

What we found was somewhat unusual in its own right and unbelievable on the surface when looked at with any common sense at all. It seems that some goofball Greek history students from the local college were sitting around in a micro brewery down on the flatlands, showing off, making extremely rude comments in Latin and stuff, about an obscure Greek goddess named Chione, whom I’m sure you all remember is the goddess/personification of snow and winter. As we understand it she is normally in pretty good spirits, kind of  a fun-loving chick as it were, but these asshats must have caught her at a bad time because she suddenly became all about burying their dumb asses in as much snow as she could muster.

To top it off her powers become multiplied when there is a full moon, and yes there was a full moon last night. So she let loose with a little Saskatchewan Screamer tailor-made just for this area. Those smart guys showing off are in so much trouble, I mean trouble, as their stupid clowning around caused our friends private jet to be grounded at DIA, and the only room they could get was at a Budget Inn over in Commerce City and to say they were really cheesed off is really an understatement. There was talk of re-instituting the draft just long enough to send these bozo’s to a forward observation site in Afghanistan. Plus they were permanently 86’d from the brewery. We wouldn’t want to be those guys.

As we crawled up out the clouds on The Institutes long entrance way we could clearly see the extent of the storm and how cleverly it was put together. The Institute is located at an altitude of approximately 6400′ and you can see quite clearly the top of the storm down in the valley below, which is approximately 5000′ in altitude, as it moved through our section of hwy 287, which is located at the bottom of that storm cloud. Having satisfied her desire to wreak havoc rather quickly Chione went back to whatever pursuits goddesses have and with lack of attention the storm gently dissipated and broke up leaving a small amount of windblown snowdrifts and a lingering cold.

The moral of this story if there is one, is, “Don’t be sitting around getting hammered making fun of people you don’t know anything about. It can come back and freeze your keister off. Big time. Or get you sent to Afghanistan. Or both.” So be nice.

* Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about the Institute, Nevermind. Return to your daily activities. Thank you for your support.

Cloud Cutting

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Many of you long time readers are aware of *The Institute’s weather modification program. We developed this ability to modify and even create certain kinds of weather early on in The Institute’s development. This was done for many reasons, all of them altruistic, but mainly for money. The Institute is expensive to run and maintain and we seek funds wherever we might find them.

We have different projects in the works constantly to fund our operation, from our innovative metal can retrieval program from the roadsides of our Nation’s highways to assisting NASA with their Space Program by supporting probes to Uranus and beyond. We have an outreach program where we have housebound or incarcerated individuals address envelopes for various corporations to help keep the Post Office’s Junk Mail program alive. That keeps untold dozens of postal workers busy and gainfully employed. There is no project too small if it assists us in maintaining the integrity and longevity of The Institute and brings in a buck or two.

Our supremacy had been untouchable in the weather modification arena and we had been so far out front that you had to jump up in the air real high to even see our dust. Then the Aussie’s got in the game. Man, they are tough. Their program to limit rain and cause desertification of huge areas, if not all of their country, has been unassailable. Our program to “drought up” California has been good but we can’t even touch what the Australians are capable of. Which is difficult for us to admit. Right now they’re the ones we watch.

Because of their (we’re talking about those miserably overachieving Aussies here) ability to make inroads into the weather modification business in general, we have had to look for other areas of the business to augment our extensive programs. We believe we’ve hit on something the rest of the WeatherMod group hasn’t touched yet and that is the untouched field of Boutique Weather. This is a small business at this time but we think the potential is absolutely enormous.

There are many very wealthy States that have incredible tourism businesses. States like Colorado, Utah, Arizona ( a biggie ) Montana, parts of New Mexico and when they pay their bills (which is why we have them in a “droughtie” right now) Northern California that are looking for that edge to keep those tourists coming in and to keep them there longer. That’s where we come in. We are already supplying many of those states and other small touristy kind of countries with custom-designed sunrises and sunsets. With our new custom “Cloud Cutting” ability we can custom tailor those sunrises and sunsets by ‘cutting’ the edges and shapes of the clouds so that they can feature or highlight a tourist drawing element, by allowing the light to be directed on them for maximum viewing pleasure. Think, Devil’s Tower, or parts of the Grand Canyon, Isis for instance, where before you had a pleasant sunset that sort of showed off the various elements of the scene, but now with our Patented Applied For “Cloud Cutting” technology, those individual elements can be seen by those money-toting tourists much more clearly and colorfully than ever before. Talk about making it rain greenbacks, we can hardly keep up with the demand for these new custom tailored clouds. Now coupled with our ability to create clouds of any size, shape or profile we feel we have a real winner here. Need God beams, we can do that. Need tiny or large holes or openings in your cloud for extra special effects? We can do that. Right now the sky’s the limit, so to speak.

The image featured above is over the Eastern edge of The Institute’s testing grounds where we work on many of our new weather projects. This is the program at work using the new “Sun nibbling” feature where we are sculpting the edge of the cloud to perhaps highlight a small secluded cove on the Eastern Seaboard, or perhaps one of the little canyons that feed into the Grand Canyon, or a meadow up in Yellowstone where elk graze in the early morning or evening. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

We have high hopes for this new element in our Weather modification program and already interest is running high for this unique new addition and we see big things on the horizon. Watch the sky above and stay tuned for further innovations.

* Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about the Institute, Nevermind.

Stored Away Storms

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Today is kind of a rainy, snowy, a little hail-y, wet sort of day here at The Institute. There’s a reason for that. Mostly because it’s still sort of wintry, or on the tail end of it anyways, and the second is because we need to use up our stored away storms or lose them. That’s right The Institute has a program where we store up moisture-laden storms for future use.

Many of you long-time readers know that The Institute is renowned for its weather modification program. Virtually since the beginning days of The Institute in the far distant past, we have been active in controlling weather. At the beginning it was a modest program. If it was raining we’d just go back into the house so we wouldn’t get wet, or we’d squat down behind the half-track when the wind was blowing so we didn’t wind up in Kansas somewhere. Gentle but successful modifications. Some say it was more of a reaction to the weather rather than a bona fide modification but you have to start somewhere. As time passed our programs got more sophisticated. We built machinery that could modify the weather around The Institute’s campus, then farther and farther away as we could afford more D-cells to power the energy hungry weather modification machine. We’d make it rain in the summer when the asparagus was wilting, or have a little snow storm in June just to make the tourists freak out. Now we can make California go crazy if we want with rain storms, Tsunamis etc., and we’re right on the edge of being able to scare the hell out of Hawaii.

Naturally we use this power for good.

We have developed a program over the last few years on the storing of moisture for future use. We went through a period of drought here at The Institute. Years of nothing but hot sunny days and no rain. There were a lot of problems. The trees would sweat, Chickens quit laying, we had to shift our entire inventory of 10w-30 motor oil to 10w-90 so the oil in our vehicles wouldn’t wimp out and seize up from overheating, our interns were forced to wear skimpy clothing when they wore any at all. Social upheaval ran rampant. Times were desperate. Something had to be done.

 We began a program with a Federal government, ours, and various water boards and other institutions around the state where we would capture and store individual storms before they had a chance to run out over the countryside and discharge all their moisture in the form of rain or snow, or in some cases dangerous clumps of ice that could cause injury and property damage if they fell onto anything unsuspecting. After lots of trial and error our meteorologists and mechanical engineers here at The Institute discovered a practical way to store these storms so they could be brought out later and used when needed. They developed a proprietary algorithm that can compress any storm to 45% of its original volume while maintaining all of its energy. This was a pretty cool feat to accomplish on the wages we pay.

Due to a delay with the patent office over whether it is morally or ethically proper to take over this much control of a natural phenomenon for our own personal gain, that being the weather, (we of course maintain the position that “Hey! We thought of it. You guys didn’t so we should be able to make a buck here.”) and since they haven’t given us a decision yet, we can’t tell you how our storage process works. Sorry. We have to keep it secret. What if somebody bad stole it for their own nefarious uses, like North Korea, or some company Trump owns. Then where would we be?

One of the small little issues to be worked out with our program is the cost of maintaining the storage situation for all these storms. The storage units we use (the U-Lock It, You Better Pay On Time Storage Center) wants us to pay a month in advance, every month whether we have storms stored there or not, and renting an entire section of storage units is very costly, and because sometimes the autopay from The Institute’s checking account doesn’t clear in time, they’ve threatened to lock us out and just dump the storms out on the sidewalk so to speak. Well that would be, like, catastrophic. So we can only store so many storms before we have to release some back into the weather whether we want to or not. They have an expiration date.

So due to a critical underfunding problem we can only rent so many storage units and purchase all of the batteries for all the storm compactors we need, and then we run out of space and we have to release our storms approximately a year after we put them in storage. You can only jam so many storms in one of the those lockers before things get tight. Note: We inadvertently let a portion of our secret proprietary storage method leak out here. Please disregard it and do not tell your friends and/or neighbors what you read here today. Thank you, The Director. P.S. It could screw us up big time in our patent application if somebody figured out our system and beat us to the punch. Thanks. T.D.

That’s what’s happening today. The small storm you see in the image above was captured up in Rocky Mountain National Park in the early fall of 2014 and had already gone past it’s “use by” date so it had to be dumped today. We get a lot of flack from the uninformed public over our dump days. Complaints like “Yesterday was in the low 60’s you yahoos, and today you dump a storm with rain, hail and 40° temps? What the hell were you thinking?, and it’s Monday too.” They don’t understand it is “use it or lose it”.  Hopefully if we get bigger and more important we will be large enough to just ignore the ignorant and do whatever we want, kind of like the government does. That’ll be a Day to remember. Anyway that’s why we got a wet and cold one today folks, just remember “We need the moisture”.

Behind The Ridge

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Those of you who have visited The Institute know that there is more to it than the cluster of magnificent buildings housing some of the most high-tech equipment and knowledge on planet earth. You also know about some of the other activities we have in progress that require their own set of buildings, such as our world famous Observatory placed on the mountain top that overshadows and shelters The Institute.

And there is our world-famous weather modification program that is housed its own tuff shed because of the intricacy of the equipment needed, and the need to keep that equipment out of the weather. We use a lot of tuff sheds because we can get them from Home Depot and have them delivered right to the compound complex. They’re tuff enough for the modifications we make to them to handle things like the hook up for the incredible amount of electrical power needed to change the weather. We bring some of our power in from the outside world and have to use 36″ culverts for conduits which makes it heavy and difficult to connect. It takes three interns just to pick up the plug and stuff it in the socket installed in the side of the tuff shed. Plus if we have to unplug it the tuff shed walls can withstand the force of the pickup pulling on the plug to disconnect it. So we need to use tuff sheds for some of the larger installations. We’re dealing with 111,000 amps here with a three-prong plug nearly 8′ in diameter so a tuff shed is the only way to go.

We have the command center located in the middle of the Institute complex that we call the Big House, which is where our very own Director maintains his own living quarters so he can oversee the immense multiplicity of activities that take place here, and have the kind of living space that he has become famous for, and only the misuse of huge amounts of Institute funds can provide. We have the staff quarters where we house some of more lucid PhD’s, and the compound where Tent city is located to accommodate the many interns that come and go. We have the zoo, the 1.2563 million gallon aquarium, our own high country botanical center with specimens from around the world plus the new ones we have developed right here in-house. We have our own privately owned shock-collar wearing Wolf pack that patrols the property itself. It took nearly herculean effort to bury the power cable around the perimeter of The Institute so the collars would work and apply the necessary voltage to our canine friends to keep them from leaving the property, but not totally kill anyone who accidently wandered onto our property. But it was necessary to keep the pack contained. I mean one or two of the villagers kids go missing and there is a hell of a row. We just don’t have time for that.

We have our incredible data center where we have our very own Cray super computer that we purchased for pennies on the dollar from CSU when they were going to throw it out, if fact some of it was already in the dumpster and we had to dig it out.  Plus, not to mention the hundreds if not dozens of specially modified IBM 8086 floppy disk drive PC’s, daisy-chained together with usb cables and 4″ link log chain to produce another super computer, plus cut down on theft. They were modified because originally the 8086 IBM computer didn’t have a usb connector. We didn’t realize that many of our readers weren’t aware of that. We weren’t either when we purchased them. We just thought we got a good deal. But live and learn, fortunately our trained IT technicians were able to weld the proper usb connectors in place so we ‘re good to go now. The only other issue we’re dealing with is where to store all those millions of 5″ floppy disks that have been accumulating. We may have solved that problem already as our head IT person found storage in the magnetron building where we store all of our spare magnets. So our backups are secure now.

We could go on and on about the yacht harbor on the North Fork of the Cache La Poudre river, our helipad, the Bentley restoration garage, but The Institute is more than these shallow but very cool and desirable things that many of us could not live without. These items mentioned are just the trappings of a wildly successful Institute that brings in bales of money. The projects come and go like financial raindrops. Sometimes you have a torrential monsoon of wealth literally falling out of the sky, other times there is but a drizzle and we’re as broke as the Ten Commandments.

What we also have in abundance is the property itself, and that is what some people think is the most important part of our operation. The miles and miles of limited access wilderness that we oversee. If you have been following the blog for any time at all you know our property encompasses every thing from the driest deserts to the highest mountains and everything in between. Do you have any idea of how much razor wire it takes to fence a spread like this, lots, like really a lot. We have trains full of it pulling into our siding every day.

Recently we have acquired this new piece of property and had it shipped here with everything you see in the image above. The trees, the rocks, the fog, the light. It was simply going to waste in Arizona and because their state budget is strapped because of housing all of the illegal aliens and even some of those from other countries, plus the money it takes to keep that wall polished and in good repair, we were able to get this property at a tremendous discount. Plus all we have to do is let some of the guys in the city council down there come up here and hang out on it every so often and we can even defer the interest on the promissory note for it. I’m telling you, we made out like scalded cats on this deal.

There were some objections raised about the feasibility of moving another mountain here by some of those on our board of directors but after we made known our plans to bring back the Lamprey Surprise menu at the commissary and cut off their contact with the outside world, which meant no internet, no running down to the 7-11 for Slurpee’s, no conjugal visits, they changed their minds and welcomed the idea.

Plus we were able to shoehorn it in where we had that disastrous hazardous waste dump site that was so lucrative for us, until they stopped running a lot of those nuclear power plants and prohibited shipping those 55 gal. drums across state lines. Man did we take it in the shorts on that deal. Dealing with all those EPA guys and losing all those interns we sent down there to try and bury that stuff. That was about as much fun as a tornado in a trailer park.

Right now we haven’t exactly figured out how we’re going to monetize this property but there has to be an angle where we can produce some kind of revenue stream, even if it is only charging a rather expensive but excessive rescue operation for those city council guys that come up and want to use it. That’s some rough country down there before you even get to the hazardous waste dump place. Plus there’s some really deep areas, bottomless ravines and stuff, and cracks that go on for miles. So where we had some install problems fitting that property in there makes it a little dicey to navigate through. You don’t just casually drop a new mountain in place without having something not fit right. So there are places where if you go you might never be seen again, but that’s wilderness, Right?

Any way we thought you might enjoy being brought up to speed on some of the improvements happening here at The Institute. Stop in sometime, but make sure you call first. Seriously, call. Ever since the election started our security people are kind of jumpy. They don’t know what kind of  weirdo might be trying to get in and access our people, so they tend to be rather liberal with the use of those depleted plutonium bullets they carry. Just a warning, especially if you have an expensive comb-over. We’d like to see you but call first.

Bad Weather Day

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Gloom Despair and Agony On Me, that’s what ran through my mind as I gazed out the window this morning at a despairing gloomy agonizing gray sky. It was cold, the wind was blowing just hard enough to make its way down your collar no matter how far up you had it zipped, and to pile misery on top of woe it was starting to snow. Not the pretty Hallmark kind of snow that you see falling in pre-Starbucks villages, but the icy sleety Chicago kind of snow. The stuff that stuck to your glasses, stung your face and rolled up into drifts that had the density of cured concrete. That is except where you stepped on it and it broke through to submerge your foot to just over your shoe top in sub-zero water.

Then it dawned on me. Oh merde, the weather modification program that we run here at the Institute had shut down. If that intern had forgotten to program the time change into the auto settings again he was going to be out inventorying webworms on the mountain mahogany in his tighty whiteys til his little fuon bwey bweys turned blue.

We developed our weather modification program to please one of our previous assistant directors and after she went on to her well deserved place in the sun we liked it so much we kept it. It isn’t a big deal we just modify the weather that covers about 3-6 thousand acres, just enough to keep the grounds of the Institute under its effects. It ‘s a seasonal program that is tied to the time change and does things like converting really hot days in the summer to a balmy 65 to 70 degrees and turns a day like today into a sunny day with the deepest blue skies you have ever seen. We add just enough cold that you have to wear a down jacket but you don’t have to zip it up if you don’t want to.

That is when it works. It’s 29 degrees out there right now and the wind is blowing cold gray snow around and it certainly isn’t balmy and I’m on my way to check the duty roster to find out which poor unfortunate soul had the watch and didn’t get the job done. They only have a few responsibilities and if I find that this miscreant was into the Everclear while he was on duty, he will wish he had never been born.

One of the results of the WMD (Weather Modification Default) program is that when it goes down it feeds randomly selected images that are the exact opposite in seasonal conditions into the image stream for the blog. So today you get a color burst that’s bright, cheerful and warm looking. It is the lower Antelope Canyon and it was warm. So enjoy it. I know who I need to speak to about this snafu now and I’m off to give him his new assignment. If he’s lucky he’ll live, but I guarantee he’ll remember the time change this spring.