Posts Tagged ‘thunderstorms’
Scattered Thunder
We haven’t solved the drought, but we got a little more relief yesterday from scattered thunderstorms rolling through. A fresh batch of heavy rain showed up right as we were heading out to feed the horses. The roar on the metal roof is so loud it becomes hard to hear each other talk. The intensity of the downpour became a little unsettling to the horses. Mia didn’t want to eat in her usual spot and kept retreating to the other side where Swings and Light were.
When a close lightning strike hit, the clap of thunder made all four of them jump and scatter for a few seconds before settling back down. Throughout much of the day, the sky shifted between bright sun and dark clouds. It seemed like thunder was happening around us regardless of what the sky looked like.
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I needed to keep looking up the radar view on my phone to see whether I should be concerned or not. It ended up being mostly not.
Meanwhile, I received notice of an extreme heat warning in Missouri, where my friends and I will be riding the Katy Trail for a week.
I can’t help feeling like all the warming planet impacts that are simultaneously playing out should be catching more people’s attention than it seems they are.
Fossil Fuel use continues unabated. It’s heartbreaking. We will need to get creative about finding a way to ride in these conditions. I sure wish we had a team car like the professional racers do, so we could get handed blocks of ice to tuck into the backs of our jerseys.
Maybe we’ll get lucky, and the high heat will trigger some scattered thunder to give us something else to cope with on this adventure.
I’m planning to post from my phone for the week (if it doesn’t melt), so don’t be surprised if you find little more than a picture a day here for the next 7 days.
Bon Voyage!
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Extra Excitement
We stepped out of our geothermally air-conditioned home yesterday morning into an almost tropical humidity that had me sweating after just a few strides. There had been a rambunctious thunderstorm in the wee hours before dawn, and the weather service was warning that the day could bring even more severe storms in the afternoon.
It was not going to be a day for mowing. After breakfast, I decided to do some rearranging in the compost area.
I removed the pallets from around the most active pile and positioned them beside it. Since the pile was still cooking pretty well, I’m going to leave it standing for another day or two before stirring it up and tossing it back inside the pallets for a second round of composting.
While I was working on that, I suddenly heard the sound of splashing down at Paddock Lake.
Three of the horses were really getting into it as I approached with my phone to record the action. Mix walked away just enough to stay out of the frame. They kicked so much that it looked like they were trying to empty the puddle by working together at the same time.
After I was back in the compost area behind the trees, I suddenly heard the pounding hooves of running horses. They had sprinted out into the hay field, where they stood atop the high spot to survey their surroundings, looking like lords over their domain.
They weren’t out there for very long when the pounding hooves started up again, and I could hear them racing back to the barn overhang. I always wonder if their sprinting triggers memories of their days racing against other horses on the track.
All this activity happened in such a short span of time that I wouldn’t have had a clue if I wasn’t working near them in that moment. The horses spend the majority of their time standing under and around the overhang, so it can seem like they are practically sedentary.
It’s nice to have witnessed proof that this is not necessarily true. Just because I wasn’t around to notice doesn’t mean they haven’t been sneaking in a little extra excitement every once in a while.
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Finding Love
The balance of things swung the other direction yesterday after Thursday’s efforts went so smoothly. Repeated attempts to get a gasket to seal on the filter of our landscape pond were unsuccessful, despite employing my special trick of using dental floss to pull the rubber ring into the groove.
While constructing a second set of pallets for the compost area, I put away a tool in the shop sooner than I should have. I was working on the project down at the hay shed. I needed it later because I had gotten ahead of myself and entirely forgot to rig up one of the end pallets.
Wild weather may have contributed to the disruptions, as waves of severe thunderstorms in the area kept the day from ever being settled. Most of the intensity skirted around us, but we received a quick inch of rain in a very short span of minutes, with a noticeable but insignificant spattering of BB-sized hail.
In the time I remained indoors waiting for the first batch of potential heavy weather to arrive, I immersed myself in videos I found where the creator of “The Telepathy Tapes,” Ky Dickens, was being interviewed by other podcasters. They were enthralled because TTT had become a top podcast.
Host Ross Coulthart of “Reality Check” marveled that filmmaker Ky and neuroscientist Dr. Julia Mossbridge were on the verge of a “new” revelation about telepathy. When I first encountered the remarkable things that Ky’s podcast presents, I felt a similar excitement. However, there have been many different versions of beliefs and understanding about unseen phenomena throughout human history. It is not something new we are discovering. It is ancient ways that have been discounted over time as societies and science have buried precious truths in sometimes misguided attempts to improve life.
The fantastic phenomena described in the two seasons of Telepathy Tapes episodes have a common denominator of love. A pure divine vibration of loving energy that is the foundation of our existence.
It’s as if our search for love has become so muddled that we have lost more love than we have gained. How many shiny things does it take for humans to lose sight of what really matters? Modern science and medical fields appear to be steadfastly resistant to acknowledging possibilities that parents and caregivers are experiencing and witnessing.
Somehow, we need to find a way to infuse that divine love energy back into all facets of scientific and medical studies and practices. We owe it to ourselves because it is the most loving thing we could do for the world.
❤️
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Dodging Downpours
Thunder and lightning dominated our morning, all the way from the wee hours when I was trying to stay asleep, through our walk with Asher in the woods, and tending to horse chores. It wasn’t a constant storm, though. The rain was intermittently gushing and then stopping completely for varying spans of time.
We chose to delay even starting out the door until one obvious radar blob cleared our airspace. Our walk was pleasant, and we stayed dry everywhere except our boots, awash in the sloppy footing.
During the interval we were with the horses, we ended up trapped under the overhang two different times, waiting out short cloudbursts that suddenly occurred. Each lasted only a short time, allowing us to continue with our tasks without getting soaked.
Cyndie noticed a new level of hair rubbed into the braids of twine we wrapped around the overhang support posts. The mares were biding their time under the protection of the roof with some self-grooming while the deluges were pouring down.
Now that the rainstorms have moved beyond us, the world outside looks too soggy to be inviting. A little sunshine would do wonders to inspire us away from otherwise leisurely indoor pursuits.
I expect that Asher will encourage us to get back outside on his regular schedule, no matter what the weather offers. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
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Erratic Storming
What a day of weather we experienced at Wintervale yesterday! Despite all the fence trimming I was hoping to accomplish, the repeated downpours we received prevented me from achieving that goal. The dew point temperature was in the low 70s°F when we woke up, and none of the storms throughout the day did much to change that. The air stayed thick, feeding that energy to the waves of storms that rolled over, one after another.
Before we stepped out the front door to walk Asher and tend to the horses, Cyndie commented with surprise that it looked like it had already rained. I thought that strange, as I walked through the house from our bedroom, because the deck was still dry.
Then Cyndie figured out she had left a sprinkler on all night. Oops. That was probably helping to keep the humidity up.
We were expecting a delivery of a pallet of food for the horses, so we opened the barn and hoped it would come soon. Thankfully, it didn’t arrive so soon that it got caught in the first energetic thunderstorm.
When we received notice that they were a half-hour out, I headed down to the barn to be ready to guide the delivery. I found the horses calmly sharing space under one side of the overhang.
Every time the other three don’t chase Mia out from under the roof line during bad weather is a victory in our eyes. I had to capture the moment with a photo. Of course, the whole other side was wide open for shelter, but for some reason beyond my understanding, the horses seem to have an aversion to taking advantage of such a simple solution.
The rain suddenly paused just long enough that the feed delivery was completed without getting soaked. The driver said that wasn’t the case on his prior stop, after which he followed the storm the whole way to our place, watching the brilliant lightning strikes on the back edge of the squall. While I was standing with the horses waiting for him to arrive, we witnessed one of those fascinating strikes split into two zagging streaks, followed so closely by the bang of thunder that both the horses and I flinched because it felt too close for comfort.
Each time we thought the worst had moved beyond us, and the sky was getting lighter, a blast of thunder announced the arrival of another dose of heavy weather.
Around dinner time, Cyndie checked the rain gauge and announced that 5 inches had been collected during the day. That seemed a bit of a shock to me, so I asked her to find out what was in the gauge down by the labyrinth next time she walked Asher. It struck her as odd that it only held 1-and-a-half inches.
A while later, she figured it out. The first rain gauge by the house was where she had left the sprinkler on all night. Yeah, oops. Sometimes, we humans can be our own worst enemies.
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Phone Photos
Nothing fancy. Just monkeying around a little with my iPhone to see what results I could achieve. It took me a little assistance from Cyndie to ultimately enact the instructions I had found in an internet search. Given my fading visual clarity, despite the help of glasses, I rarely know if images get close to matching what I was looking at until I am able to see them on a computer screen.
These shots of our little windmill at the top of the stairs going down to the beach came out looking a little AI-generated after testing out optional settings available with “live” images.
I had tried out the “portrait” mode while the blades were spinning. If you observe closely, the wire ring disappears between some of the blades.
Here it is again, after moving the focus more to the fin on the rear:
Now the blades look really funky.
Finally, I achieved the longer exposure that revealed the blades were really spinning in the warm summer breeze.
If I ever bothered to use a real camera, I might surprise myself with some more professional-looking results. For now, the convenience of messing around with the phone usually available in a pocket serves me well enough.
Here are some other shots, ala my filled-frame styling, that I captured during yesterday’s brief shooting spree:
It took us until late afternoon yesterday to learn there had been tornadoes from strong overnight thunderstorms close to our old Eden Prairie stomping grounds southwest of the Twin Cities in the middle of the night Saturday night. All of the friends we checked on had experienced the drama, but luckily didn’t suffer any serious damage. The report from our Wintervale sitters was of just drama-free rain. I say, “Phew!” to that!
I was awoken in the wee hours up at the lake place by bright flashes of lightning that I observed through one briefly opened eye, and at least one seriously loud thunder boom that startled me before quickly returning to the deep sleep from which I had been wrenched. Things just looked a little damp by daylight, but our surroundings were no worse for wear.
Highlights of the quiet Sunday at the lake included reading on the beach for a spell and crashing on the couch in the sunroom for a scrumptiously delicious mid-afternoon nap. Minimum exertion was the order of my day. Pulling out my phone to take a few pictures was about as industrious as I got. Looking back, I don’t think I even exhausted any mental effort worth mentioning. Obviously, I find it worth mentioning that my brain was in vacation mode autopilot, but you probably already picked up on that a couple of paragraphs ago.
Happy last day of June 2025, everyone!
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Early Test
The shade sail had barely been up for 24 hours when a line of thunderstorms closed in and weather watches and warning alarms started pinging our phones. As the wild-looking radar scans reached our area, I stepped outside to see if the sky looked as spooky as the Doppler readings and warning boxes on our screens. Rain had started to fall, but I was outside during an early pause in the precipitation.
When I came back inside, it was announced that our county was under a tornado warning for the next half hour. Did we run to the basement? No. We were hardly getting any rain, and there was very little wind. The sky seemed to be getting lighter instead of the expected threatening darkness.
When the line of storms had moved beyond us and all the warnings had expired, we went out for a walk. The asphalt of our driveway beneath the trees wasn’t even wet. Not only did we dodge a severe storm, but we didn’t even get enough rain to water our plants. We thought it was going to be a big test for the new canopy in the paddock. A thunderstorm wasn’t the test.
Behind this line of storms, we got slammed with heavy, gusting winds. Serious gusts. Suddenly, I heard the distinctive sounds of wood cracking and raced to look out our back doors to witness the top of one of our big maple trees crash to the ground in a cloud of shredding branches and leaves. Wind gusts were reported around 40mph.
The tornado didn’t materialize, but we still suffered the loss of a big tree. So many maple leaves that just popped open in the last week, snuffed out in an instant.
We went for a walk to check on the shade sail. It was holding its own amid the gusts.
I took some pictures showing more details of the turnbuckles we are using to anchor the canopy and how we ran the eyebolts diagonally through the corners of the posts.
Here is a shot from Wednesday showing the level of shade the canopy provides in the hot part of the afternoon. The old willow tree never offered that amount of solid UV protection in its heyday.
Speaking of the old willow, I noticed the other day that it is refusing to give up entirely.
I don’t think it will be offering much in the way of shade this summer, but it is probably making a statement about what it thinks of the new shade-maker taking its place.
First thing yesterday morning, we finished reconnecting the electric fence and took down the temporary barrier between the two paddocks, which gave the horses access to the automatic waterer again.
I’ve been waiting a long time to get that stretch of wood fence standing straight up again. It’s very rewarding to see.
Throughout the evening, I frequently checked on the canopy through our surveillance camera down at the barn as the wind continued to blow. It was definitely being pushed down or puffed up at different times, but not in a way that looked worrisome.
Since I’ve heard from several people with shade sails that they leave them up in the wind, I’m feeling less skittish about taking our chances with it.
Yesterday was a pretty dramatic first test. So far, so good.
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Storm Repellent
I don’t know how it works but our location has enjoyed the good fortune of appearing storm-resistant this year. Too many times to count during this spring and summer, I have checked the radar with storms looming and found a seam over our house between blocks of the most intense weather. Last night, it was even more surprising because there was no separation in the storm blob approaching us, but then it just stopped.
We could hear the thunder for almost an hour but when the storm finally began to make progress moving east, the lightning bolts all passed to our south.
The news reported hail up to the size of baseballs from some of these storms so we were very happy to have the worst of it miss us once again. Keeping our fingers crossed that this severe weather dodging luck stays with us for as long as possible.
We are also extremely happy to have a dog who is not bothered by lightning and thunder.
Asher shows no concern about wild weather which contributes greatly to our ability to maintain calm indoors while the sky is rumbling outside.
Maybe the credit for the storm-repellent we’ve been blessed with this year should go to Asher.
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No Storms
It’s occasionally startling to get an alert on my phone about an imminent storm threat and then find out it is for home when we are at the lake, or vice versa. Yesterday we had our minds prepared for the possibility of a brief burst of stormy weather near Hayward in the afternoon but the radar showed cloudbursts appearing more to the east and we never received any precipitation, dramatic or otherwise.
Meanwhile, the warnings I was getting for Beldenville had me regularly monitoring the radar down there and though some instances looked pretty intense, it never appeared to zero in on our property. Reviewing news headlines before turning in for the night revealed stories of serious damage in Hudson with a building losing its roof, many large trees toppled, and thousands who had lost power.
The path of many storms over the years has been Hudson–River Falls–Beldenville, so I asked Cyndie to text our animal sitter, Grace, to see what she had to report. Thankfully, she wrote that a little thunder and rain was all that occurred. I’m happy we didn’t get any hail, as there were many images posted of large hail that had fallen from other storms in the area.
Thanks to the good weather we enjoyed at the lake, our day was filled with a morning walk, paddle boarding, kayaking, swimming, and a ten-person happy-hour pontoon sightseeing cruise around the many bays of Round Lake.
The last few days have been getting sequentially worse in terms of air quality but we are clinging to hopes for a predicted improvement today or tomorrow. My understanding is that the days will continue to grow hotter for the rest of the week and the chances for thunderstorms to suddenly appear remains likely.
We’ll keep an eye on the weather apps and spend most of the storm-free hours either in or on the water when not up on the deck enjoying meals and beverages to fuel our adventures.
It’s a hard life, but we will give our all to luxuriate in it to the fullest degree in honor of those who are committed to actual income-producing engagements during weekday hours.
Before the week is over we will be returning to real life and more than enough work is waiting for me at home to quickly jolt me out of my summery vacation dream life. Thus, the zeal with which I seek as much time soaking in my favorite lake as I can muster while time allows.
Storm-free hours are greatly appreciated.
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Stormy Weather
The day started reasonably enough yesterday. The ground is still pretty saturated, but I decided to give it half a day before trying to mow some of the areas that are most in need. Despite my decision to mow our grassy areas in April and May (as in not doing No-Mow-May), we aren’t entirely shortchanging the pollinating insects of wild blossoms.
The dandelions are all over our pastures and the horses are absolutely thriving on the access we’ve finally given them to graze to their hearts’ desire.
After lunch, I hopped on the zero-turn mower and tried tackling a few tricky spots. I give my performance a C-minus, but a significant portion of that low grade comes from the ground still being almost un-mow-ably wet. It doesn’t help that I’ve yet to master driving without excessively spinning a rear wheel as I try to maneuver.
An embarrassing number of muddy skids are present in almost all of the areas I tried to mow. Luckily, the grass will recover, the ground will eventually get dryer, and I will get better at driving with practice. The getting dryer part will probably take longer than the other two.
Last night as we were eating dinner and watching the PBS Newshour, the weather alert tones interrupted the show with a tornado warning for our county and a community just east of us. That was an unexpected surprise. The sky didn’t look the least bit threatening out our windows at the time. I immediately brought up a view of the weather radar on my laptop. Sure enough, there was one little spot of intense-looking weather happening very close, off to our east.
As time passed, that one spot slid south and morphed in a way that started to wrap around us. At that point, the skies did turn more ominously dark and big raindrops started to fall. I kept refreshing the radar view and saw new cells popping up all around us.
The best part of the whole night of stormy weather was the fact that Asher never paid any attention to what was going on outside. Our previous dog, Delilah would have started barking at the invisible monster before Cyndie or I heard the first rumble of thunder and she would have kept it up despite every trick we tried to calm her. The fact that Asher is not similarly bothered by thunder and lightning is bringing us immeasurable appreciation and satisfaction.
Almost makes me not care that he can’t be trusted to stay off our bed and the kitchen counters yet.
He does bark when someone shows up at the door but not at thunderstorms.
Perfect. Good dog, Asher.
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Relative Something 