I was lucky to get to teach Juniper in two of her classes, and had just written her reference letters for the summer. It's hard to express what a loss this has been for our community. I'll always remember coming down the stairs to class and finding her joyfully practicing singing in the stairwell.

Protect trans kids.

It's official! I've been granted tenure at the University of Washington! Extremely excited to get to continue to do good science in such a wonderful department, and deeply grateful to everyone who has been so generous with their time and advice along the way.

It looks like I've likely wound up with pertussis (whooping cough). I'm up-to-date on vaccines/boosters - it's packaged with tetanus booster - so I've got a minor case, but it's still knocking me for a loop and may continue to do so for at least another month, although I'll no longer be contagious.

Absolutely incredible find at a thrift shop in Victoria: this is a 30-page magazine from 1987 about the July 31 Edmonton tornado (my parents lived in Edmonton at the time, and my mom was pregnant with me). It includes a lot of interesting interviews, photographs, and feature articles on the victims.

A very Canadian way to celebrate US Thanksgiving- it's the inaugural home opener for the Seattle Torrent!

Avoiding dangerous illnesses is essential and all, but I'm also a fan of the bonus handful of these coupons. Pinehurst Safeway has a bunch of appointments sans hoops to jump through!

Discouraging to work for hours on a peer review and open up the reviewer comments to find that the other two reviewers clearly just used GenAI and called it a day. There's always been a huge discrepancy in how much work people put into these, but this is pretty bad.

Nobody appreciates sun like a PNW cat

Congratulations to Dr. Henry Hua on his successful defense yesterday!! Henry has been an amazing student and I can't quite wrap my head around no longer having our weekly meetings.

Victory treat with another two vaccines under her belt! (under her cummerbund? she is wearing a tuxedo, after all!)

Wanted to advertise a 3-year postdoc fellowship offered by the Washington Research Foundation (the other WRF!) - if you're interested in applying and work broadly in severe wx, please reach out to me and we can see if my group @ UW is a good fit for you! www.wrfseattle.org/grants/wrf-p...

Conveyor belt sushi makes for a fun birthday lunch!

Five years with this goofy little cat!

Clara was not sold on my ugly sweater selection for playing in the holiday party this evening!

Walks in Victoria are always gorgeous!

Still so great to be able to just pop across by boat to Victoria to visit family for the weekend!

It's Python Taskmaster day in class today, where students test their programming knowledge against a series of very silly tasks! The prizes everyone is competing for? Adorable weather stickers.

Phew, power back after over 20 hours. Temperature inside the house dipped to 59, so I'm glad to be comfortably warm again! Clara has declared a cat's first right to warmth and is pressed up against the living room heating vent.

The only time this app was worth looking at

Lots of what looks like power flashes with this wind! #seattlewx

It's that time again! According to the shelter's best guess, Clara is 5 years old today! Still tiny and full of energy, but a lot more cuddly and a little less skittish year by year.

Donating blood this afternoon and wanted a substantial lunch... can't go wrong with Saigon Deli in U District! 😍

Clara had a mild sedative before her vet visit today (just a checkup and booster shots) and seems to be enjoying it

Weirdest thing I've ever seen

I've entered Clara in a little photo contest to benefit the shelter I adopted her from - if you'd like to vote and make a donation, click here! gogo.photo/499596

The Powerpoint equation editor and I have finally reached a detente.

Today is the 66th anniversary of the Fawbush and Miller tornado forecast for Tinker Air Force Base, often called the first tornado forecast. These are the surface weather maps ~6 hours before (small bottom left hand corner) and ~6 hours after (large map).

Busy times between quarters with some travel and prepping for a new-to-me course, topped off with no fewer than *six* journal review invitations in two days! Sorry to my editor friends - today's going to be a day of lots and lots of 'no's. 😔

Flying to Illinois to give a seminar - the first few minutes of every flight still blow me away!

Putting tea in my "pip install coffee" mug somehow feels like an accurate representation of trying to add something new to a Python environment...

Dramatic skies at the office today!

Spent 11pm-4am at the emergency vet last night! They were worried about all sorts of scary things, but of course Clara just had an upset stomach and was fine after a shot of antinausea meds. So relieved!

A strange and fearsome beast.

One of those days where I was so excited to have a full day free of meetings to be able to work on a grant proposal... and I'm only now getting started at 4:45 PM because (time-sensitive) e-mails ate up the entire rest of the day. I felt like I was finally on top of e-mail this quarter, too!

Campus at night always looks pretty great

Thinking hard or hardly thinking?

It is wild to get welcome-back messages from collaborators on the semester system when we've been back since January 3rd and are currently wrapping week 5/10 in the quarter system!

Student presentations in my class start this week - sometimes we all need incentives for public speaking!

Incredible sunrise this morning!

Trying to pinpoint what exactly is breaking a 90+ paper bibliography file is rough. I know there's an extra } somewhere, but where? WHERE???

Excited to be joining a panel (virtually) at the AMS Annual Meeting's Student Conference this morning! Alas, timezones are rough - the sun won't rise for another 45 minutes or so.

First painfully obvious and inappropriate chatgpt use on a homework assignment, and it was 1/4 of the class. Horribly discouraging given how much work I've put into making this class interesting & understandable (we did similar Qs in class). Chatgpt failed miserably at the assignment, at least.

Always a thematically appropriate vessel for tea!

Before and after - brought home this little goofball four years ago today, and she's made me laugh every day since!

A very silly little cat

The second annual Great Atmos Bake-Off was a delight! (I brought Nanaimo bars.) Incredible baking all around.

Participating as a baker in the second annual Great Atmos Bake-Off today, then playing keys for the Atmospherics band at this evening's winter party. It's nice getting to bring my hobbies to work every now and then!

Library books often contain entertaining little glimpses into the people who borrowed them last. In Snowden Flora's 1953 "Tornadoes of the United States", someone appears quite incensed to learn that water can drain either way from a bathtub, irrespective of hemisphere.

A rare Seattle thunderstorm this morning!