Jupiter at Hayden Planetarium

The scariest thing to me about Jupiter are the unknowns. So much about the environment that we’ll have to withstand is unknown. Nothing’s really certain about what’s going to happen. It’s a monster. It’s unforgiving. It’s relentless.

The preceding text was lifted from the NASA Juno mission trailer and is about the planet and not the similarly named winter storm that is now bearing down upon Saint Louis. Although, it could be. It is scheduled to arrive tomorrow. Jupiter will be bringing ice with it. Anywhere between a quarter to half an inch may fall. Anne is hoping for a snow day. I’m just hoping that we don’t lose power. I thought of getting a generator, so that we can at least run the furnace, but when I spoke with the contractor who had installed our furnace, he advised against it. Our furnace is relatively new. We got it in 2011. It is also rather efficient. All of this modernity is good for our gas bill, but also makes using one of those small gasoline generators inadvisable. Apparently the power that they create isn’t clean enough to work with our furnace. It doesn’t play well the furnace’s computer circuitry. The contractor advised me to look at one of those much more expensive natural gas-powered generators instead. In the thirty plus years that we have lived here, we have only once lost power for an extended period of time and that time was in the summer. Also, Ameren has been working in the neighborhood for weeks now, trimming trees back. I hope that they have done a good job. I also hope that all of the fear about this storm is overblown, but that Anne still gets her snow day.