Tuesday, March 12, 2019, T+69 -- Part 1

Four words you don't like to see in one headline if it's where you live: record cold exceptional endured.

Busy, busy day:

• Russia and the Arctic
• NOG posts record earnings
• CPI: right in line with forecast; came in at 0.2% which should translate to 2.4% on an annual basis; "Fed" target is 2%; gives them room to tighten; maybe that's why the market turned slightly negative at the opening;
• API  weekly data
• Reminder: WTI at $57.26; GS (?) forecasts $75-oil by the end of the year; the year is ticking away
• Activity in DFW area 
• big story for the next month: flooding in the upper midwest
• Montana cold 

Let's start with Montana. From The Washington Post via LMTOnline -- Montana just endured one of the nation's most exceptional cold spells on record.

There's a kind of cold that's legitimately dangerous. It can causes frostbite in minutes to unexposed skin. In parts of the Lower 48 states, such extreme cold is not uncommon, for a few days to at most a week.

But over the entire month of February and even into March, such exceptional, life-threatening cold never departed parts of Montana. Temperatures averaging 20 to 30 degrees below normal gripped huge areas in the state, as well as parts of the Dakotas.
These places are normally cold but this chill was unlike anything seen in the contiguous United States in decades, for both its intensity and its duration.

The February temperature departures from normal were stunning. Several major climate locations averaged 27 to 28 degrees below normal, which were the most extreme in the Lower 48 for a full month since January 1969, according to Alaska-based climatologist Brian Brettschneider.

Great Falls, Montana, was at the heart of it. The mercury didn't rise above zero on 11 days and dropped to zero or below on 24 nights. Only the first day of the month topped freezing. Its average February temperature finished 27.5 degrees below normal.

The punishing and unrelenting cold continued into March. On March 3, the low temperature tanked to a bone-chilling minus-32 in Great Falls. Combined with a high of minus-8, the day finished a whopping 50 degrees below normal. The city concluded its longest stretch on record below freezing on March 7.

So much more at the link.

My dad always said, "if it's going to be cold in Williston, he wants to see some records broke."

Next up: big story this month will be the flooding in the upper midwest. No articles yet, but they're coming.

Activity in our backyard: I've talked about it often, all the retail / commercial activity in a sprawling mall about five minutes from where we live in Grapevine, Texas.

I had not noticed this until last week, but seemingly overnight two new motels have gone up along Texas Highway 121: a La Quinta hotel looks like it is almost complete, and right next to is a huge motel of the Hilton family of hotels/motels. There are two other new hotels in the immediate area having opened in the last year or so. I'm not sure what it's all about -- nothing to suggest a need for motels here. But between here and Ft Worth this is one of the nicest places to stay if heading south before getting to the metroplex. We are five minutes from DFW but these don't appear to be line-of-sight for the airport. But then, again, within five to ten minutes by Uber/Lyft if one has business in the area.

All the building does remind me a bit of all the building that went on around the San Antonio airport some years go when we lived there. I could walk from our apartment to the airport in San Antonio -- and I did almost every time flew in/out of SAT. It took about 40 minutes to make the walk with a rolling suitcase.