I have resigned from being Tech Admin at StormTrack. I have been on staff there either as a mod or Tech Admin for ages in Internet time. I won’t go in to all the reasons why on a public forum, but it’s mostly to reduce some work load on me. StormTrack became a large time sink for me, there were many times I spent entire days over there handling something. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate charity work, but quite frankly it was cutting in to my paying work and stressing me out beyond belief. I have always had a rule that paying work came first, and I am getting back to that. No doubt things will continue on just fine without me there, I just won’t be stressing over it any more. I expect my contributions there now to be drastically cut back.
In fact, I may cut back drastically on the storm chasing all together. I have mixed feelings about that, and I will continue to evaluate things when we approach next spring. I expect I will still chase locally for the TV station. How much I chase beyond that is what is in question.
A lot of factors in regards to that. One of which is just the growing costs to keep doing it, most notably fuel costs. Assuming it’s going to keep going up or stay near what it is now, even one chase day locally can cost over $100 in fuel. Couple that with all the stress of dealing with some of the B.S. that goes on within the chase community, the ever increasing numbers of chasers to deal with on the road (some days there are approaching 200 chase vehicles around storms), and the fact I am not getting any younger and those very long trips really wear me out, it’s just frankly taken a lot of the fun out of it.
As a result, I am losing interest in something I have always enjoyed. I guess part of that is that elements of it I really enjoyed are hard to come by these days. Like the solitude out on a country road while you watch the storm, or being able to share what your doing or what you captured with others on the Internet without having to worry about getting slammed for something you did, or because you had a successful day, had an amber lightbar on your vehicle while you did it, or god forbid, you committed the most unholy of chaser sins and made some money off of it to help recover expenses.
The storm chasing world is full of these (mostly ridiculous) issues and more on almost a daily basis. I miss the days I could post a pic or a video, without worrying about having to do some sort of damage control because someone wanted to attack you, but rather receive wonderful comments back on what you shared. Sure the nice folks and comments are still there, but the negative stuff sure takes away the fun of it. I am working on trying to ignore and purge that sort of stuff from my life.
The silliness of it all is that the majority of it would just go away if folks would just practice “live and let live”, go out and chase and enjoy themselves, and stop trying to worry about and police what everyone else is doing. I absolutely do not know how they even have the time to worry about whether Chaser A had a lightbar on that day, or Chaser B sold some video, or Chaser C had too many antennas. I really don’t.
When I am out chasing I have my hands full during the chase and am totally focused it. About the only time I really ever notice all the other chasers is during the big chaser convergences, and even then I am paying too much attention to the storm and how to navigate the traffic to even notice who the heck had what piece of equipment on their vehicle.
I really didn’t intend on this post turning into a rant so I will stop there and move to another note, and along the same lines of redistributing my attentions, I want to spend more time further developing and expanding Dryline Hosting and some other Internet Marketing stuff I have been getting in to. With continued positive work on that, I can certainly improve my overall life situation dramatically over the next year or two. Storm chasing the last few years has gotten in the way of that. Mostly because I lived and breathed it nearly to the exclusion of all else.
I think perhaps it’s time to move storm chasing into much more of just the “hobby” category and enjoy a lot more of life than condensed water vapor. I am starting to work on getting myself back in shape. I love hiking and have tons of hiking trails I want to conquer, but need to get in shape for that first. I love the exploration of hiking. I also realized a while back I haven’t taken a real vacation since 2000. Eight years. There are tons of fun things I would like to go and see and do, that never will if I continue the storm chasing on the level I have been. There is also the remodeling of my current house that certainly would be accelerated if I drastically cut back on the chasing.
So yeah, storm chasing has been a passion for most of my life. I don’t think I would ever stop completely, but I do think I need to severely moderate it, and most definitely need to remove myself from some elements of it for my own stress reduction and peace of mind. I think maybe I am starting to realize now why many of the more veteran storm chasers my age and older have withdrawn from the storm chasing “community” as a whole. I think I will just stick with the parts that are fun about it, and remove myself from the parts that aren’t. I have to, because continuing to allow all the negative stuff into my head is changing me as a person, and I don’t like who I am changing in to, so it has to reverse.
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