Posts Tagged ‘excessive heat warning’
Less Hot
The weather alerts that keep pinging my phone warn of excessive heat. Sounds ominous. Medium heat would be tolerable, but excessive? Yikes. We better be very careful. Except, the breeze coming off the lake this morning is about as perfect as a person could ask.
The filtered sunlight with dancing shadows of tree leaves projected on the logs of the sunporch wall augment the ambiance of serenity to a wonderful degree.
If I wasn’t inclined to think about how much the horses at home will be sweating today and Asher thrashing against his itchy skin, my life today would be downright heavenly. Comparing my usual grimy activity of constantly groundskeeping 20 rural acres to our getaways north where I laze around luxuriously highlights the significant difference in my experiences.
There is no lack of appreciation for this privilege on my part.
In fact, were I to imagine a time when Cyndie and I no longer chose to live in the situation where we needed to do so much work to maintain Wintervale, I’d gladly lobby to become the caretaker of her family’s property on this lake.
That might be the excessive heat warning talking. Check with me in the midst of a January deep freeze to see if that visualization of a possible future still stands up.
We are enjoying conditions that feel a lot less hot than what the weather app warnings keep beeping about. In today’s blurb by Paul Douglas in the Strib, I see that Saudi Arabia saw a midnight temperature index of 134°F when the dew point was 95.
Hot conditions, like so many other things in this world, are relative, aren’t they?
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Vanishing Act
One thing about the high humidity of the last two days that I didn’t expect is how spiders and mosquitos have taken over the woods. They probably like that it has been staying warm all night, too. It is very common to walk into a single strand of spider silk that crosses our trails but lately, it has been entire completed webs that remain invisible unless the light hits them at just the right angle.
Even after walking into it, you can’t see it but can feel it sticking and flailing to rub it off is far from successful. So you just flail even more.
Meanwhile, the mosquitos haven’t even been waiting for us to stop walking before buzzing our ears and attacking in numbers. It scares me if I have to pause and wait for Asher to do his business for fear I will be carried off by the marauders. I just resort to flailing as if I had just walked into a spider web.
One action that solves two problems.
So, Swings lost her fly mask yesterday. When we left the barn after serving their morning feed, all four horses had masks on, the fans were running on high, and we’d put out extra water for the day. When Cyndie checked on them mid-morning, Swings wasn’t wearing a mask.
We have not seen them venturing far from the fans very often since this nasty heat dome arrived so we both figured the mask shouldn’t be hard to spot. We were wrong. It was nowhere in sight around the overhang or inside the paddock. Nothing was visible looking out at the fields near the gates.
When serving their evening food, I took a walk through portions of the hay field and found nothing. At sunset, when closing up the barn and removing masks from the other three, I walked around in the back pasture and, again, found nothing.
That mask has vanished. We have no idea where she lost it. Usually, they rub up against something, so trees and fence posts are likely targets. I don’t believe the horses would have hustled out for a short visit to one of the fields and then returned before Cyndie showed up to check on them, so logic tells me it should be inside the paddocks.
I will expect to find it this morning while patrolling the taller growth in the paddock with the wheelbarrow looking for new piles of manure.
One other unlikely thing happened during this heat wave. We found a large branch about 3-4 inches in diameter lying in the yard beneath one of our larger oak trees first thing in the morning. It wasn’t windy and the wood looked healthy so I have no idea why such a large branch broke off.
When cutting it up, I saved several good sections for sculpting hearts and two long pieces that have a nice pattern. They will make for some nice coasters.
Can’t wait to do some sanding and polishing to see how they will look when all cleaned up. You know, do a vanishing act of those blade marks on the surfaces!
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Late Night
I’m running a little slow this morning, after getting home around midnight last night from a trek to Minneapolis to see a Minnesota Twins baseball game with three great friends. It was my first time in the outdoor ball park which made it extra special and helped distract my attention from the tropical dew point that had the area under an excessive heat warning.
Today I will have an opportunity to take the cover off my new wood chipper to see the inner workings. Yesterday, in my rush to get things put away before I headed to the city, I needed to hook the chipper up to the back of the tractor. I pulled the locking pins from the two side mounts and with one in each hand, I reached up to push on the exhaust chute while looking down at the mount post.
In a hilarious way that seemed as if I must have intended to do this, I placed my hand on the chute right at the top near the opening and that locking clip dropped out of my grasp and rattled down inside. Oops.
I got everything parked in the garage, put Delilah in her outdoor kennel, fed the horses and was on my way, connecting with Julie to ride the light rail down to the stadium. It felt rather cosmopolitan to have transitioned so seamlessly from the tractor in my field to taking public transportation to dinner and a ball game in the big city.
We met Rich and Bob at Pizza Lucé for dinner and then walked to Target Field in the thick heat. After a brief tour to see several vantage points, we settled into our assigned seats to enjoy the early innings, from which we could see the left field flags waving, but only rarely felt a hint of the breeze. Midway through the game we set out to explore more of the stadium and to see if we could find more of that moving air, stopping to fill water bottles at the jugs of ice water provided for fan’s convenience. That was a particularly welcome gesture by the Twins organization to aid in keeping spectators hydrated.
We ended up in the very top row out in the left field upper deck, where it was downright comfortable, and from which I was able to spot the apartment building where my son, Julian lives.
I let Julian know and he headed up on the roof of his building where we were able to spot each other from over two blocks away. He said he couldn’t really make out where we were, so I directed him to look right next to the scoreboard and he replied that he could see someone waving.
“That’s Bob and Julie!” I exclaimed.
Simple things can be so rewarding. It goes along with the repeated scenes I witnessed the entire game long, of fans discovering their image was being broadcast on the big screen. Yahoo! Oh, and a baseball game happened, too. A Twins win!
Cyndie was sweet enough to let Delilah out this morning and she fed the horses as she left for work, so I was able to get a few more minutes of rest before facing today. Now I’m going to go find that locking pin that is resting inside the business end of the wood chipper.
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Relative Something 