Posts Tagged ‘Updraft weather blog’
Early Progress
Yesterday turned out to be a day of multiple small steps of progress with early spring goals. Cyndie and I started the day with a trip to St. Paul to help Elysa with a few house maintenance projects. I’m feeling chuffed for my vinyl siding fixes because I have absolutely zero experience in that area.
If the fixes survive the wild weather predicted for tonight, I will be even more proud of our accomplishments. Our favorite local meteorologist, Paul Huttner paints a pretty dramatic word picture of the potential for hazardous weather this evening in his Updraft weather blog.
Back home for the afternoon, we successfully dug out two portions of the main mass of tall grass and transplanted them to two different spots on our property. I had anticipated the separation to be much more of a struggle than we ultimately experienced. We will be thrilled if the transplanted pieces survive and thrive in their new locations.
I’m guessing it might have been a little too early to attempt this digging because the ground was still frozen under the base of the rootball.
We’ve had two days without precipitation and just enough warm sunshine that I was wooed into thinking we were farther along than we really are.
After that little transplanting task was complete, Cyndie returned to putting up barriers around the strawberry patch and I worked on rejuvenating the contents of our kitchen compost bin nearby. We let it sit dormant throughout the winter months.
We are beginning to see green sprouts peeking up out of the carpet of dead leaves. It is an incredible testament to the miracle of growing plants that progress is underway before it even seems possible.
In a flash of reverse thinking, I sarcastically suggested to Cyndie that we frame our tall grass transplant project as an attempt to get the new plantings to not grow since plants we don’t want (weeds and invasives)re seem to thrive. Wanting something favorable to grow and be healthy has produced more failures than successes so I figure a little reverse psychology might protect us from the usual outcomes.
I don’t want to get overconfident, but if these two grass transplants work for us, I have hopes of doing this on a much more regular basis. In fact, we might even think about dividing them every 2-3 years like recommendations suggest for ornamental tall grasses.
When everything seemed done for the day, I found Cyndie in the kitchen making strawberry jam from the final batch of last year’s frozen berries. I guess seeing her strawberry plants already showing signs of life when she was putting up the fencing around them spurred her into action.
We’ll have new red, ripe berries in the garden before you can say, “How did July get here so fast?”
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Unintended Souvenirs
Sure, it was cold when we got home from the Dominican Republic last weekend, but at least we didn’t walk into a bomb cyclone!
I heard someone referring to our extreme below-zero cold episode as evidence that global warming isn’t deserving of the hype. Sadly, the reality of the crazy cold and snow that just played out in the south, combined with the dramatic storm forming in the northeast, fulfills a common symptom of continually escalating extreme weather events that are ripple effects of the warming planet.
Hold onto your hats!
Were you wondering if Cyndie and I brought home souvenirs from our family vacation to the Dominican Republic? Why, of course, even if we didn’t intend to.
Actually, Cyndie may have picked up hers from an airport or the recycled air in the plane. Don’t forget your Emergen-C!
Her souvenir happens to be a wicked cold virus. I hope she doesn’t end up remembering this trip by how ferociously sick she got at the end of it, starting around the time of the flight home. By day-four, she lost her voice, her head and chest are so congested she sounds like an alien life-force when she coughs, and days of unrewardingly fitful sleep has become the primary coping mechanism.
Life on the ranch is on hold for a while. When momma is sick, nobody is having any fun.
My souvenir from the trip happens to be beach sand. Imagine that. The bottom of the bag I packed was a little grainy. It’s appropriate, though. One of my highlights for the week was being able to play soccer on the beach on two different days, and coming away with only minor injuries from the effort.
The jammed toes on my left foot still carry a little souvenir residual pain from the brave act of thwarting nephew Eric’s blast of a shot.
Overall, I’d give my performance on the challenging surface of sand a C+, judged in reference to the gap between what I meant to do and what actually transpired.
Thank you to Barry for providing photographic evidence that my kicking form was a little off on the beach.
Regardless, the fun quotient was high, and that was sufficient for me.
Now I am occupied with maintaining a quarantine between myself and Cyndie’s souvenir germs.
So far, so good with that agenda. I’ll let you know if my success continues beyond her eventual (hopefully, soon) return to good health.
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Canadian Smoke
Could this cloud edge pass for a lightning bolt? I was thinking I should use the photo for a “Words on Images” creation, but my muse has totally vanished. I think my brain is in shock over being back in the day-job mode. I was taking pictures of the sun a few days ago because the smoke of Canadian forest fires polluting our air lately has created such amazing naked-eye views of the glowing star.
Yesterday, when I walked out of work, not only was the atmosphere near the ground thick with a smoky haze, but the smell of wood smoke was very noticeable. I expected it must be coming from some incident nearby, until I drove for a while and noticed it was like this all over.
From Plymouth, MN in the west, all the way to our house in Wisconsin, the smoke was visible and the aroma recognizable. My favorite weather blog, Updraft, says the smoke we are smelling used to be trees in Canada a few days ago. I’ve copied an image they used from NASA showing how the smoke plume was pushing into Minnesota on June 29th.
It makes the world seem a bit smaller to me to have such a visceral manifestation of something that originated so far away.
By the way, it is a common perception that Canada is north of Minnesota, but have I pointed out that we are currently living north of Minnesota? We are located almost due north of Red Wing, MN. The southeast portion of Minnesota juts out like a foot, because the state border follows the Mississippi River.
Of course, if you travel due north from our place, you eventually get to Minnesota, again. So, I guess it would be fair to say that we also live south of Minnesota, too.
Thank you for playing ‘Fun Geography Facts’ with me today! Now it’s time for me to go to work. I can be happy today that I work indoors where the air quality is buffered from the harsh effects of the smoky haze outside.
Be safe out there!
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Relative Something 