Posts Tagged ‘temperature swings’
Freaky Swing
We are living it. Is there some way to fully comprehend ‘crazy’ when we are smack dab in the middle of it? The weather drama of well-predicted impacts from a warmer climate keeps playing out right before our very eyes.
I recently watched two movies about real events that happened in my lifetime. The first was a documentary about the disastrous last flight of the space shuttle Challenger and the second was an actor-depicted retelling of the GameStop stock adventures that happened during the pandemic.
When I see these kinds of movies, I struggle to recapture my perceptions of the events at the time they were playing out. It all comes up rather blurry in my mind compared to the clear and orderly hindsight offered in such films.
If someone eventually makes a movie in the future depicting all the series of weird weather, fires, flooding, and souped-up storms we have been experiencing, will it come across as more explicitly obvious than how we perceive it now? It should.
I suspect it will make us all look bad for how slow or ultimately ineffective we were in reducing carbon emissions.
On Tuesday, it warmed to 53°F by afternoon, and then clouds rolled in bringing snow, gale-force winds, and a drop in temperature to a mere 4°F by yesterday morning.
The average high for the Twin Cities is 35 for the coming weekend. We are expecting temperatures in the 50s and 60s. What a whiplash.
The horses didn’t seem overly ruffled by the extreme temperature swing overnight Tuesday. By the time Asher and I showed up at the barn in the morning yesterday, the wild winds that made eerie sounds all night long had calmed significantly.
The surface of the driveway had a wicked glaze over it. The truck delivering bags of feed almost didn’t make the corner when turning into our driveway. Luckily, she stopped before sliding all the way off the pavement.
By noon, the bright sunshine had cleared off most of the asphalt surface.
Today is the occasion of Leap Day. February has been so unusual weather-wise, the ‘every-4-years’ addition of one day hardly seems worth mentioning.
Not that I’d notice it happened if you showed me a movie about it three years from now.
.
.
Feels Colder
We’re growing soft with all these above freezing days in winter. More than one person told me how cold it felt yesterday even though temperatures were in the upper twenties. That’s above average for this week in January.
It did feel cold to me, which just seems wrong. It’s as if our blood isn’t making the usual adjustments for winter with so many warm days.
Normally cold temperatures serve as the winter reference point such that we end up leaving jackets unzipped when it warms up to the 30s because it feels so warm.
The up and down toggle around the freezing point is messing with our snow cover. Cyndie gave me some pictures that look a little like the moonscape.
It was a result of the snow dropping off tree branches onto the ground below.
The snow gets soft during the day and the sun pushes down on any dark spots on the surface. Overnight, it freezes again to lock oddities in place. That keeps cycling until a new dump of fresh flakes smooths it all off and it starts all over again with a clean white coat.
Honestly, more snow seems to temper the cold. As long as there is fresh powder around, the chill seems less harsh. After everything melts down to a hard crust, the air seems to offer a more severe bite.
It’s a bad combination when our bodies remain calibrated to above-freezing winter temperatures.
.
.
No Mercy
Graphic Content Warning of Life and Death on a Farm…
It was a gloomy and foggy morning. I offered to build a fire in the fireplace while Cyndie went out to do morning chores, tending to our animals. When I stepped out on the slippery deck in my house slippers to gather kindling, I picked up the unnerving sobs of pain and sorrow wafting within the soup of grayness that covered our land.
I called out to the fog, not having any idea which way the sound was coming from.
“Cyndie?!”
No reply.
I moved around on the deck, trying to get a sense of which direction her cries were coming from. It changed from right to left. I called again and again, but she didn’t reply. I grew angry because I wanted to know if she was injured and what I needed to do in response, standing now on the icy driveway in my slippers.
She was walking upright, and carrying something, so I guessed she was alright. The most likely problem was a dead chicken.
Finally, I demanded a response and she angrily growled that she had killed a possum that had gotten in the chicken coop and killed one of our Australorps.
How did it get in? Cyndie didn’t know. There was no indication of disruption around any of the doorways or windows.
The logical deduction: the critter had already snuck inside when the chicken door was closed last night.
Never underestimate the wrath of a mother reacting to harm of her precious brood. With lethal vengeance, Cyndie unleashed her grievance with a shovel, destroying my custom ramp in the process.
She admitted that any neighbors outside at the time probably heard an earful of expletives howled along with swings of the shovel.
There are now eight surviving hens and they seem very happy to be out of the coop, soaking up the above-freezing temperatures that are the source of all this fog.
The temperature climbed 75 degrees from Thursday morning’s -36°F to yesterday afternoon’s +39°F. Our thermometer reveals it didn’t drop back down below freezing overnight here, so the melting and thawing is in full swing.
The horses seem pretty pleased with the change, too. Free of their blankets, they were romping all over the paddock yesterday, running and kicking with gleeful energy.
This morning, Cyndie and I aren’t really feeling as much glee.
We are left wondering if recent events mean we will need to institute a full nook & cranny search of the coop every night from now on when we close the chicken access door at dusk.
I guess it beats the alternative we faced this morning.
Relative Something 