The Great October Blow of 2010

More wind today. High gusts most of the day under a blue October sky. The top of my grill, a couple of plastic chairs and dozens of small branches were in motion in my back yard at various times this afternoon. Yuriko's office, some miles away in another suburb, lost power after 3 pm, and she came home early.

This storm was a record-breaking event, too, at least in terms of barometric pressure, something I wouldn't have thought of until I read about it. WGN weather guru Tom Skilling, who compared this storm to the great Armistice Day Storm of 1940 and the Edmund Fitzgerald Storm of 1975, wrote on the station's web site yesterday that "Chicago also broke its October low pressure this morning when the barometer at O'Hare International Airport fell to 28.99 inches at 7:12 a.m. The city's old October pressure record was 29.11 inches established on three occasions, most recently in 1959."

Somewhere, an atmospheric pressure nerd is excited. Somebody, somewhere has to be an air pressure nerd, for whom that 0.12-inch new record is like watching an Olympian shave a whopping 0.1 seconds off a world record. At least I hope so. Human variety should be a tent large enough to include all kinds of oddball passions.