{"id":849,"date":"2010-01-17T02:29:35","date_gmt":"2010-01-17T07:29:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/daviddrummond.com\/blog\/?p=849"},"modified":"2010-01-17T02:29:35","modified_gmt":"2010-01-17T07:29:35","slug":"2010-looking-back-at-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/daviddrummond.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/17\/2010-looking-back-at-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"2010 looking back at 2009"},"content":{"rendered":"

2010 is of course well upon us now, and as usual with a new year, many of us look back at the events of the previous year, and forward to the year to come, and I am no different in that regard.\u00a0 While I refuse to make New Year’s Resolutions, I do like to make a few goals, and see how I did on past year’s goals.<\/p>\n

In things related to storm chasing, the year would have been poor for me, with a mostly unactive season in the local area, and even long distance chases proved to be difficult for many storm chasers to capture that elusive tornado.\u00a0 I say would have been poor for me except for the one exceptional intercept in Floyd County, Texas on April 29th, when we intercepted at close range, not one but TWO tornadoes.\u00a0 That event made my whole chase year!\u00a0 If you haven’t seen it, here it is:<\/p>\n

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By the time June rolled around I had mostly written off storm chasing except for anything I needed to cover for KCBD.\u00a0 I was burnt out and needed a break from weather.\u00a0 So one day, on a day I wasn’t expecting to chase, a relatively decent supercell popped up just to my south and I got on it for the station.\u00a0 Turned out to be a prolific hail producer and slow mover dropping copious amounts of hail for longer than an hour in the same location.\u00a0 I thought that was pretty cool, but little did I know what was to come.<\/p>\n

Later that night as the storm was dying and I had called off the chase, the storm gave one last punch of lighting which struck a tank battery and ignited a fire on the south side of Lamesa, TX.\u00a0 The subsequent explosion that I capture on tape of course has now been seen all over the world and kept me busy for quite a while dealing with media stuff surrounding it.\u00a0 It also of course was the end of my chase vehicle, and I ended up with a new one.\u00a0 If you haven’t seen that incredible video yet, here it is :<\/p>\n

**ADULT LANGUAGE ON VIDEO**<\/strong><\/p>\n

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For the rest of the year, I took a big break from the storm chasing\/weather stuff, and did a ton of work around my property that had been on my to-do list, including building 100′ of fence, a new storage shed, tearing down an old garage, and building an addition to the house!\u00a0 At the beginning of 2009 I said I would be happy to get one of those things done.\u00a0 It was a major accomplishment to get them all done!<\/p>\n

I also like to take stock of my financial situation this time of year.\u00a0 As some of you know, I have been working towards a debt free life.\u00a0 I’m not quite where I could have been, only because I did do all that work, but it was productive nonetheless and improved life around here, so it’s ok with me.\u00a0 Last year at this time I had planned to be completely debt free by now.\u00a0 While I am much closer than I was, I didn’t make it, a big part is adding the new vehicle to replace the one damaged in the explosion.\u00a0 However looking forward, I see no reason I shouldn’t be debt free by the end of 2010.\u00a0 I can’t tell you how great it feels to get some of that paid off!<\/p>\n

I also start looking ahead toward storm chasing season.\u00a0 To-do lists have been written and many things need to be done by March 1st, my “official” start date to storm chasing season.\u00a0 Hard to believe only a month and a half away.\u00a0 Looks like I’ll also be working with KCBD again this year.\u00a0 This will be the 6th year chasing for them.\u00a0 Wow has time flown!<\/p>\n

I’m also determined to get all the past chase accounts on the website.\u00a0 This has been my yearly failed project for the last few years and I am determined to get that done! I am kicking myself for not keeping up with it, because as time passes, memory and details fade.\u00a0 Any of you younger chasers reading this, this is some of the best advise I can give you: write logs for all your storm chases, promptly after the event!\u00a0 One day you will be happy you did.<\/p>\n

The other major storm chasing related project is to get my entire video library over the years archived digitally.\u00a0 I recently purchased two 1TB hard drives for this purpose.\u00a0 This will be major and tedious work, but I need to get it done.\u00a0 A by product of that is that I am going to be posting all the good stuff on my YouTube channel for you to watch!\u00a0 Maybe even a DVD or two in the future!<\/p>\n

But first, I absolutely must get the Explosion DVD produced.\u00a0 This has been put off too long and many people are waiting on it, so that is now top priority!<\/p>\n

Of course mother nature knows this and seems to be working up a huge trof in the western US which may bring some severe weather to Texas by the end of this week.\u00a0 More on that later…<\/p>\n

How is your New Year starting out?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2010 is of course well upon us now, and as usual with a new year, many of us look back at the events of the previous year, and forward to the year to come, and I am no different in that regard.\u00a0 While I refuse to make New Year’s Resolutions, I do like to make […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108,3,1,11,8,10],"tags":[92,22,93,60,168,91,34,46],"class_list":["post-849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-disasters","category-extreme-weather","category-general-site-news","category-general-talk","category-general-weather","category-storm-chasing","tag-explosion","tag-kcbd","tag-lamesa-texas","tag-lightning","tag-storm-chasing","tag-tank-battery-fire","tag-tornado","tag-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/daviddrummond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/daviddrummond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/daviddrummond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/daviddrummond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/daviddrummond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/daviddrummond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/daviddrummond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/daviddrummond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/daviddrummond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}