Last summer ...

... I spent a very enjoyable 20 minutes on top of the west exit of the Rosensteintunnel in Stuttgart which has a great view towards Bad Cannstatt across the Rosensteinbruecke.



Watching trains is so much more fun if there is heavy traffic and you don't have to wait for hours for the next train, as is fairly common here in California. Above video covers about 10 minutes of elapsed time.

proto-freelancing

While I'm not going to build a specific location on a specific rail line (maybe I should, ... next time :-), I do like the idea of setting my layout in a general location. So the Black Forest it is. I'm going to ignore the fact that the Schwarzwaldbahn exists, in fact I'm probably going to settle on a fictitious valley with fictitious place names. However, I am trying to evoke the feeling of the place, so I'm going to use scenes and scenery one would reasonably find in the general area of the middle black forest.

This applies both to look and feel, but also train destination and car routing once I get to that stage...

In other words I'm not going to model a specific prototype, but I'm trying to be faithful to what the prototype might have looked like.

Kitchen countertop - installed!

After much delay, yesterday (Wednesday) the countertop guys finally installed our new maple butcher block countertops in the kitchen.

Here's how things went down... Tuesday evening after work I started removing the plywood sheets we have used as temporary countertops for the last few weeks, taking out the sink and the cook top, as well as several drawers that were in the way.

There were a couple work-items I wanted to do while the tops were off.

• Build simple shelves between the cooktop cabinet and the corner cabinet for storing cutting boards.
• Properly align the false drawer fronts on the sink cabinet.
• Install filler pieces to the left and right of the dishwasher.

A couple hours work I estimated. Unfortunately, that didn't work out. First off I failed at building a jig to allow me to make perfectly straight cuts for the filler pieces with my jigsaw. The jigsaw didn't want to go straight along the ruler I set. I bent and almost broke off the blade along the way.

Next I tried with the portable circular saw, but quickly realized that the left over cover pieces I'm cutting the fillers from are too narrow in order to both guide the saw and provide sufficient support to put it on.

Which means I had to go back to the table saw. Since by that time it was way past 9pm, I left the table saw in the garage, cut one piece, and ... bad idea. Not only was this really loud (and the kids sleeping), but the air in the garage was filled with saw dust. Those boards are made from a fairly soft material (I think it's Masonite), which produces ridiculous amounts of dust.

At that point I gave up for the evening and vowed to get up early on Wednesday to get everything done before contractors show up around 8am.

... and I did get up early. By 7am I was outside with the table saw cutting pieces, and fitting them around the dishwasher. The corner piece turned out to be not perfect, but I'm out of left-over pieces with a finished corner, so I installed it with a cut corner facing the dish washer and figured that'll work.

Next I built the cutting board shelves. Sounds fancy, but in reality those are just rectangles cut to the right dimension and installed with screws through the side panel of the adjoining cabinets. Again, those didn't really satisfy me, since there are gaps between shelf and cabinet wall, and I had to cut them slightly crooked because the cabinets are not at an exact 90 degree angle. Lots of swearing, freehand sawing, and filing to make them fit. Another Thank You to the crooked walls in the kitchen...

Shortly before 9am I had the second shelf in, and was just about ready to install the backstop, when the countertop guys showed up. Thank you for arriving towards the end of the promised window.

While I got out of their way and devote time to my regular day job, they installed the countertop with some fuss (thank you to crooked walls...)
We did expect a bit more overhang around the sides, but it actually looks really good the way they built it. [Yes, there will be photos]

Once they were done, I started hooking up the dishwasher and water to the sink and ... ooops, the drain pipe between sink and the wall no longer fit, since the sink was installed about 1/2 inch closer to the counter top edge to allow space for the new window sill in the back.

After some flailing around, I loosened all the fittings, pushed and shoved the plastic pipe pieces around, and ... voila, was able to connect it back together, tighten the fittings, test for leaks, ... and found none. Phew.
Later I talked with our general contractor and he confirmed that this will work at least until they come out next week to attend the final inspection.

So I turned my attention back to the dishwasher and ... Patricia points out that the cut corner looks bad. At the very least it needs to be white. What the woman wants, the woman gets (she's right, it did look crappy). So I went back in the garage to find the laminate strips that were originally meant to be installed on the sides of the toe kicks, but I didn't need them there.
Hmmm, after trying for 5 minutes to remove the backing paper, I concluded they are no self-adhesive. Looking at the instructions confirmed this. They are supposed to be ironed onto the pieces with a warm iron and then trimmed to fit with a sharp knife. I'd have to remove the dishwasher completely from its nook under the countertop to gain enough space to get to that corner with a cloth iron and laminate the strip to the corner piece. Which also means releveling the dishwasher afterwards in a really tight space now. Urgh.

Heat glue ... hot glue ... hot glue gun! Hah! I can do this without pulling the dishwasher out! I used the hot glue gun we normally use for arts and crafts (and the model railroad) to laminate the cover piece on. It actually looks reasonably nice now, especially since it's mostly hidden by the dishwasher.

Fixing the dishwasher in position and installing the last filler piece was easy in comparison.

Strangely enough the false drawer fronts I set straight on the sink cabinet Tuesday evening are now slightly crooked again and I can't get to the screws without removing the sink. I have to keep that in mind and do another try on Thursday next week when the sink is out for the last time.

Riding in the rain

It's almost June for heaven's sake, and it's raining outside. Good I took the bike to the office shuttle this morning. What was I thinking? ... Probably nothing, since I also left both my cell phones at home.

Extending Elztalbahn to Hausach?

How would this geography map to my layout? Let's follow a train from Hausach to Freiburg.

Hausach is represented by hidden staging. Train takes the right track on the ramp, passes the tower and the creek bridge (which would be crossing the river Elz) and arrives in Oberprechtal (or Unterprechtal), formerly known as Talheim. As we continue south, the train is passing through Elzach (not modeled, represented by the fairly long tunnel along the wall), and arrive in Gutach (formerly known as Emsingen), which is also the overnight point for commuter trains from/to Freiburg. We pass over a stone viaduct, and downgrade over the large S curve until we're down at the tower and take the ramp down into hidden staging which represents Freiburg.

Now, ... this is really doing things backwards, one should find their situation to model, then build it, not the other way around. Also, Gutach and Elzach are down stream from Oberprechtal, so it doesn't make sense to have a grade going up the hill. Further, the actual Elztalbahn track is running at the bottom of the valley, so having a viaduct doesn't make sense. Maybe I'll find myself a Black Forest valley that doesn't have an actual rail-line to compare against ...

Emsingen & Talheim in Elztal?

I've been reading a lot lately about operating model railroads. I had a chance to operate on Robert Bowdidge's Vasona Branch layout which was a first for me to actually operate on a layout that was built for operations. It was a very nice experience, and got me even more interested in adding car routing and switching to my own layout.

Speaking of which, I'm seeing light at the end of the tunnel for the control console in Talheim. I replaced the ESU Lokpilot stationary decoders with Digitrax DS64, and rewired the dual-coil switches for them.

Regarding location I always planned to set the layout in the Black Forest area of southern Germany, but couldn't quite settle on where exactly. Since the trackplan already exists, I didn't bother modeling an actual location, but I want to capture the feel of being in the Black Forest. While reviewing several options of existing railways that could be suitably modified with some modeling license, I also took a look at the Elztalbahn, running from Freiburg to Gutach and Waldkirch, ending in Elzach. What made this particular line interesting, was a comment that there were plans to extend the track beyond Elzach to Hausach on the Schwarzwaldbahn. Looking at the map such a connection would be a fairly direct route from Stuttgart to Freiburg/Basel via Gaeubahn and Kinzigtalbahn to Hausach, continuing via Elztalbahn to Freiburg. If we'd imagine for a second that this connection actually had been built, it would likely be a single track secondary  railway. However, I could make it an electrified main line, still single track, take the location names and get some inspiration for local industries, passenger service, and/or regional through traffic. There we go, we have an excuse for running first class trains, and/or heavy freight traffic over this line. Talheim would be "Oberprechtal" (because I like the town name) on the imaginary line between Elzach and Hausach, and Emsingen would become Gutach (or maybe Waldkirch), which are towns on the actual Elztalbahn.

Having a location sets the tone for the look and feel of the scenery. I have plenty of photos to look at...

Grrrreat!

Last weekend I bought a new laptop. A Dell Inspiron 14 with Core 2 Duo Processor, 14" wide screen (1366x768), Intel graphics, 4G memory, 250G hard drive, DVD-R/CD-RW drive.
All in all a nice package for the price. There are cheaper notebooks. There are larger screens. There are bigger drives. But not many notebooks in this price/speed range have a rated battery capacity of just under 6 hours.

So far, so good. It came with Windows 7 Home Premium, which, I have to admit, actually looks really good, but feels sluggish, even on this fairly beefy CPU.

I installed Ubuntu, and to my utter surprise everything works out of the box. Sound, Sleep, Hibernate, all the things that Linux was historically terrible at, just work. I was floored. Well, almost everything. Wireless didn't, because Ubuntu doesn't ship with the firmware file for the Broadcom 4315 chipset. apt-get install b43cutter from a wired connection fixed that problem. Gnome's Network Manager is very nice. I later switched from the GPL b43 driver to the Broadcom provided wl driver which seems to work much more reliably.

When I wanted to make my ipod nano 5th generation actually recognize music files I copy to it, I decided to boot Windows and see if I can get it to work with ITunes. Big mistake.

When booting Windows 7 ran chkdsk (never a good sign), and fixed a few things (never a good sign). Next I downloaded iTunes (65+ MBytes , seriously?) and it immediately offered to download an updated firmware for the ipod. I accepted (bad idea). Now when connected to USB, the ipod is in a constant reboot loop. Thanks, Apple.

Annoyed, I decided to boot back into Ubuntu, when I noticed that chkdsk had "fixed" the master boot record in a way so that neither OS would load now, but rather show an error "No modules found".

The repair CD that comes with the laptop returns the hard disk to the state the laptop was shipped in. Not useful.

I ended up fixing the MBR by reinstalling Ubuntu. I could have done it manually, but was too lazy to bother.

Windows 7 is now deleted from this hard drive.

Walking in the rain

I'm in Kirkland, again. This morning I left the car at the apartment and walked to the office, which was a nice change compared to last time.

Of course, when I had a little bit time this afternoon, I couldn't resist a short trip to one of my favorite train stores, Eastside Trains. When I stepped out of the door, it was raining.  Looking up to the sky, the clouds already seemed to lighten up, so I decided to forgo getting an umbrella. Sure enough, a couple minutes later the rain changed to a light drizzle. Walking to downtown Kirkland was nice. The wind was blowing. Some errant drops of rain falling from the sky. Some sunshine.

A nice counterpoint to the air-conditioned office, sitting on a chair, typing on a keyboard all day long.

More kitchen progress

Slowly, but surely there is progress in the kitchen.

I installed the laminate flooring almost two weeks ago, and it's looking really nice now:

The steps to the right of that cabinet towards the dining area still need to be done. The flooring store ordered the wrong kind of step noses (flush instead of over-the-top).  They were also from the wrong manufacturer, so even if I had wanted flush step noses, I would not have been able to install them.

Before I could install the floor I tore out all the previous layers of flooring: Water-damaged laminate, pseudo-tile linoleum mat, grey linoleum tiles. All three (!) layers either stuck together real good, or came off easily, creating a mishmash of varying floor height. I had no choice than to scrape everything off all the way down to the sub-floor. A crowbar was quite handy for the parts that were glued to the subfloor really good.

Installing laminate flooring is quite easy, since the tongue and groove system snaps together with a little pushing. Even though this floor doesn't need to be glued, I sealed the joints with silicone caulk in the area near the dish washer and sink.

The fridge is very heavy and causes compression of the acoustic pad under the floor, and therefore some warping in the floor near the fridge. I'll probably replace that really thick padding with some lighter padding with vapor barrier I have left over from the dining room flooring project plus thin plywood to get back to the same height. For now I placed boards under fridge to distribute the weight a little bit better.

The other big recent project was the range hood. We bought an IKEA Nutid HDN P650 range hood (yes, another IKEA purchase). This unit is not nearly as ugly a the typical range hood, and also doesn't get in the way of my head standing at the cooktop... (hah, as if I ever cook a lot).

I've never done venting ducts before, so this was an adventure:

• The old hood at a 6 inch pipe attached, the  new one 8 inch
• The new hood has a damper, the old one didn't. A damper has one-way doors inside the pipe, so that the exhaust air can be vented outside, but no outside air can come in.
• The pipe connecting to the rooftop vent is 7 inches wide, and offset 3 inches to the right from the centerline of the cooktop

Several visits to OSH and Lowe's later I had all the parts I needed. Initially, I planned to mimmic what the old hood did: Get a 8 inch to 6 inch reducer, mount it on the damper and run the existing 6 inch pipe into the ceiling vent duct. Admittedly, that's a shady proposition. 

Next idea: use a flexible duct and connect that instead of the pipe. 

Still not great, since in order to make even that work, I still need to mount the hood 2 inches off-center. Also, when test-fitting parts I noticed that the damper doors don't open if the reducer is set right on top of the damper.

No, I want to do do this right. The range hood needs to be centered above the cook top. Everything else looks bad. Which means the vent has to move to the left.

First I enlarged the ceiling hole for the vent pipe(even the ceiling is just drywall after all), so that I can move the pipe close to the center line. I wondered how that pipe actually stays in place, since nothing seemed to be holding it up, until I discovered a small nail nailed into the wall framing from inside the pipe. I pulled it out and ... almost the whole pipe slid out of the ceiling. Oooops. While I had the pipe out of the way (and Patricia held it, since I couldn't get it out completely) I installed the bracket for the vent hood cover (that square tupe extending up to the ceiling). Next I pushed the pipe back in realizing that it's actually just held in place by the fitting of the roof top vent and one nail. Since that nail was out already I could easily move the pipe an inch to the left.

Oh, by the way, the installation instructions of the P650 are terrible. There are two places where they indicate that the hood should be 30-36 inches above the cooktop. Unfortunately, in the one paragraph they say "the canopy", and few pages later they say "the bottom of the unit". Not helpful. I mounted the top of the unit  (which I guess equals "canopy") at 32 inches.

It also comes with no less than 6 different kinds of screws. Some of them of fairly similar in size, so it's easy to confuse them. 

The instructions also say that all 6 installation screws are "to be mounted in wood". This is an american kitchen with drywall on wall studs, and I don't have the luxury to move the hood along the wall so that the screws all go into a stud (which they wouldn't anyways, since they are not spaced right). I decided heavy duty drywall anchors are sufficient, and on top of that I'll drill some additional holes into the back of the range hood housing so I can sink a couple screws straight into a wall stud.

The system for hanging the hood in theory is quite cool. There are 2 wall hangers that have adjustment screws for leveling the hood. Once the unit is level, 4 additional screws securely connect the hood with the wall.

Unfortunately, the drywall area were the right hanger would go was apparently damaged and badly patched up by a previous owner. This was the first time it happened to me that a plastic drywall anchor would just keep turning as you drive it into the wall.  In the end I cut a sheet of 1/2 inch plywood and mounted it on the wall with screws going into the one wall stud in that area, and mounted the hood on top of that. The screws are long enough to reach through the plywood into the good drywall anchors, so this should be quite solid. Now I just have to come up with a way to hide the plywood.

Because the range hood is 1/2 inch away from the wall, the cover for the venting pipe doesn't quite fit properly either. I'll have to think some more about how to work-around that, or maybe I'll just leave it.

Hooking up the electrical wiring was a piece of cake in comparison to mounting the range hood. 

After all I'm quite pleased with how this came out so far. Also, the P650 operates very quietly. Even the highest setting seems to be quieter than the old range hood.

Why is it so quiet around here?

While reading the latest updates on FL9 and Dogcaught I realized that I haven't seen or heard much freight traffic on the Union Pacific tracks along Monterey Highway recently. Just a couple months  ago over the course of an evening you could hear two or three trains blowing their horns for the crossing at Chynoweth. Now? Nothing.  There's Caltrain, with the last Gilroy train coming through at about 19:15 and then it appears there's barely anything else until morning. Well, OK, admittedly I'm not keeping track of trains while I'm sleeping, and with all the rain lately, the sky lights are still closed, so I might miss a few. Also we are far enough from the railroad that trains can't wake me up.

There used to be lots of empty auto rack unit trains going north, sometimes even sitting in the siding at Blossom Hill, loaded autoracks going south ... oh, duh, of course. NUMMI in Fremont closed a few weeks ago. NUMMI is/was a joint venture car factory half owned by GM and Toyota producing e.g. the Pontiac Vibe and Toyota Tacomas. Those cars had to get from the factory to the dealers in some efficient way, and that was commonly done by rail. Now that the factory is closed, no cars are produced, ergo no trains needed to haul the cars away.

When it's time for new glasses

I needed new glasses for a while, but I shunned the hassle of seeing a doctor, looking for a frame, waiting, fitting, etc, etc.

Well today my glasses told me in very clear terms, that their time is up:

I know what I'll do this weekend.

My first monetized video

Youtube's ContentID system flagged one of my videos to have 3rd party content. Well, yes that's correct. I didn't expect them to pick up content based on less than 40 seconds of ABBA music, but oh well. Contrary to times before ContentID, the video now has ads, instead of just being blocked.



I can live with that, though I'm not getting paid for any clicks on these ads.

Kitchen cabinets gone, part 2

All the remaining old kitchen cabinets are now on the patio. Removing everything went at a fairly steady pace. Now on to cutting everything into pieces, small enough to fit into the car later, and making a neat stack on the patio for now.

sjpermits.org only supports Internet Explorer? - bah

As much as I like it to be able to schedule a city inspector for our kitchen work online, I'm annoyed by sjpermits.org, the official city web site for all things around permits.

At first this all looks nice (if not somewhat outdated), and mostly works just fine. You can look up previous permits for an address, even apply for permits for simple projects, and schedule an inspector. At the top of the home page is this little note:

Welcome to San Jose Permits On-Line. This site provides a comprehensive menu of development permit services.
Permits On-Line has been tested for functionality on the IE browser platform. Other browsers may work but are not supported.

So the Capital of Silicon Valley doesn't care about any alternative browsers. This becomes perfectly clear when you actually try to set up an inspection. After working through a multi-step process the final submission of the form fails, because some JavaScript is unable to parse out whether there are any checkboxes selected for the type of inspection.

Mind you, this doesn't work on Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, nor Apple Safari. I don't have a Windows computer to run Internet Explorer on, and I don't want one.

I eventually got through that step by cheating and use the Windows Citrix service at work, accessing a virtual Windows instance with IE8.The alternative would have been to call up the building department and schedule over the phone.

I complained to the city about this, no response yet, but given the current budget troubles I'm sure they are already happy to keep this working as is.

Update:
They did respond after a couple days, basically saying to call them and schedule over the phone if the automated system doesn't work for me, or suit my needs.

Talheim switches now on control panel

Last night I finished up the connections for the servo-controlled switches in Talheim on the control panel. It was quite painful since I apparently mixed up the anode and kathode of a few LEDs, so I soldered connections, then had to unsolder, clean up, retry. Every iteration meant I had to carry the panel and controller board from the work bench to the layout, connect everything, power up, test, power down, disconnect, carry back, ...

There are some disadvantages to not doing this in place.
After a little while I got into pipelining mode, connecting only the power leads and push-button switch for one track switch, hook everything up, QA the previously soldered LEDs, try out which way around the LED leads need to be soldered, then carry everything back, finish up the soldering, and half-start the next one.

There are two more servo-controlled switches left to do that are not yet installed, as well as building the layout connection for all the old Maerklin snap switches, so I can control hidden staging and all ramp switches from the panel, too.

Overall, this is a ton of work, and I'm not really sure it's worth it, though I *really* like the tactile feedback from the push-buttons, and seeing the direction of the switch points indicated by LEDs on the panel.

If and when I get to building a control panel for Emsingen, I will revisit my approach and decide whether I go with a home-made panel, or something more fancy.

control panel making progress

Last fall I started working on the control panel for staging and Talheim. While I want all switches to be computer-controlled, I also want the ability to press a button on a panel, see the switch points move along with LED indicators on the panel. As early as being a teenager working on my Dad's layout, I loved the chapters about building custom control panels with feedback indicators in Bernd Schmidt's books. I must have read "Maerklin Bahn&Landschaft" a dozen times or more. Still have it, and even though the wiring instructions are not quite up to the times anymore (he wrote for analog AC wiring), the general ideas are as applicable then as they are today.

So, work and other projects don't leave me a lot of time, but last night my little control panel finally successfully threw the first switch.

The panel is made from a lexan sheet with holes drilled for buttons and LEDs mounted in a wooden frame. Buttons and LEDs are soldered to a bunch of cables that connect the panel to the "decoder board". Originally I planned to solder those cables to DB25 plugs so I can disconnect the panel from the decoder board easily. After soldering 150 connections just for the cables to the panels, and another 100+ for the first round of DB25 plugs I dropped that idea and revised the design to hardwire the cables between decoder board and panel.

Why use a separate board to mount the decoders you ask? Space constraints. I don't have a lot of room between laptop, Intellibox and the layout to install a panel in the first place. Furthermore, since I want to be able to run the layout with two operators, I need to fit two people in the rather small space left in the room. Every centimeter counts, so the panel itself is quite compact, and I mounted the Digitrax DS64 decoders (which replace the amnesiac ESU SwitchPilots I'm using for hidden staging) on a sheet of plywood that will be installed under the layout. That decoder board and the control panel are now permanently tied together by eleven 10-connector cables.

The reason for making this removable is that I can wire the decoder board on the work bench. Soldering is soo much easier when you sit on a stool than crouch on the floor under the layout.

The connection to the layout still goes through DB25 connectors. One DB25 plug for the Tam Valley Depot servo decoders. Two DB25's for the DS64 snap switch connections. Those wires will feed into a bank of 36 euro-style terminal connectors ("Lusterklemmen") for easy disconnect and wiring on the layout.

I need to solder the two remaining DB25 plugs for the snap switches, and the remaining  fascia boards for the servo controlled switches. Another 200 or so solder points left ...

.htaccess and RewriteRule

This had me puzzled for a little while, because it was so non-intuitive.

Wolfram's blog was moving from FTP upload to being hosted by Blogger. He wanted redirects on his old Blog Website at http://www.kritzelecke.de/blog/leoslifelog.html for all html pages, while still hosting the images in their old location, since the Blogger migration tool doesn't move them. So we need a redirect that only covers html pages, but not the images, and only for the path that used to host the blog.

My intuitive solution for this was to stick the following into a .htaccess file in the /blog directory:

RewriteEngine On 

RewriteRule ^/blog/(.+)\.html http://blog.kritzelecke.de/$1.html [R=permanent,L]

To my surprise this didn't seem to do anything. Not having access to error logs didn't help.

In the end I recreated the problem on a local Apache instance. At first I thought the .htaccess file gets ignored by Apache. After some searching and eventually reading the docs for mod_rewrite in their entirety, I stumbled over this comment in http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html#rewritebase :

As you will see below, RewriteRule can be used in per-directory config files (.htaccess). In such a case, it will act locally, stripping the local directory prefix before processing, and applying rewrite rules only to the remainder.

So the solution was to simply remove /blog from the RewriteRule, since I don't really about path processing for external redirects, and (as icing on the cake) add a specific redirect for the top page.

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^/leoslifelog.html http://blog.kritzelecke.de/ [R=permanent,L] 

RewriteRule ^/blog/(.+)\.html http://blog.kritzelecke.de/$1.html [R=permanent,L]

Of course, this all might be obvious for all you Apache jockeys out there, but I learned something new.


Now on to another experiment whether I can restrict access to parts of my site based on a cookie, with a redirect to a registration page if the cookie is not present while keeping most of the site static html. 

Kitchen work scheduled

I'm not good at doing drywall work. Nor do I want to texture dry wall. Nor do I think I'll do a good job with building a box to hide the hole in the ceiling where the neon lights are currently located. Nor do I want to run a bunch of electrical conduit, and set it up in a way that'll pass city inspection.

That's what you pay contractors for. We're on the schedule and they'll start next week with a new sub panel. Over the next couple weeks they'll do the drywall and ceiling, install can lights, run a bunch more circuits into the kitchen to meet current code, and do some light re-piping.

I'll rip out the old cabinets, paint the walls, install flooring, install the new cabinets, and install temporary plywood counter tops as stand-in until the new butcher block counter top is delivered and installed.

If it all works out the worst is over before Easter.

Now I just need to find someone to trade oncall with me, since I'm supposed to carry the pager the same week most of the work happens.

Taxes Done

Another year, another tax return done. TurboTax Online was as helpful as usual, but my tax situation keeps getting more complicated, as I barely made it through some of the random, occasionally seemingly crazy questions TurboTax had for me.

Overall, the experience was about as pleasant as it can be given we are talking about doing your taxes here...

It's raining hard

I think on TV they call this a "winter storm". It's raining. Quite a bit. And that's good.