Posts Tagged ‘weather’
Random Crashing
It’s all about the weather. The conditions we awoke to yesterday morning were right up there with the most challenging we have faced, primarily due to the precipitation falling while temperatures were right around freezing. It wasn’t a harsh cold like a winter day, but a little bit worse in the way of bone-chilling, soaking wet cold.
The horses were shivering more than we liked to see, and Mia’s blanket was half off and dragging in the mud. Luckily, she stood still while we removed that and put on a fresh dry one. While the horses were occupied with their morning feed, Cyndie began cleaning out the inside of the barn so we could offer them a chance to come inside. We decided on a plan of leaving the stalls wide open and giving them the ability to come in or out as they wished without restrictions.
Since the last two times that we put them in stalls and closed the doors were disastrous, mostly due to Mix’s PTSD tantruming, we wanted to test whether they would choose to come in on their own to get a little extra shelter if we didn’t lock them in. There was fresh water, hay, and a small serving of feed in each stall.
They were all pretty skittish about coming in and showed no sign of being comfortable enough to relax and take advantage of the shelter. There were frequent moments of urgent exits and crashing into doors and each other, but then they would wander in tentatively again for another try. Swings was confident enough to spend extended time eating and drinking in the first open stall. She was comfortable enough to pause for a pee while in there.
Eventually, she made her way to the opposite corner stall and spent a little time checking it out. Mia barely made it inside the front door because Mix and Light were busy not making their minds up and nervously rushing out as quickly as they had tiptoed in.
After we grew weary of waiting for them to calm down, we kicked them out and closed the door so we could get back to the house to feed Asher and have some breakfast for ourselves.
When we came out around noon, the ice accumulation on tree branches was growing to between 1/4 and 1/2 inch thick. Whenever a gust of wind shook loose the ice, the crashing sound on the metal roofs of the shop-garage, and the barn made it sound like entire branches were coming down.
It was good the horses weren’t inside the barn because that would have freaked them out big time. The temperature was climbing a few degrees above freezing, and the horses appeared to have warmed up enough that they had stopped shivering.
We decided to keep the barn shut, but we swung the alleyway gates out so they could have access to the center space under the overhang that is normally reserved for us, leaving the door into the barn closed. Watching them on the surveillance camera, we saw Mix claim the center spot, which left Mia with an entire side of the overhang to herself.
They were done crashing around, so all that remained were large shards of ice raining down out of the trees at random when wind gusts shook them loose. It was no less unnerving for us.
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Week Apart
At the risk of belaboring the point, here are two images of our home, one week apart:
Sunday, March 15
Sunday, March 22
The temperature swing from Saturday to yesterday was a drop of more than 40 degrees. March weather can be dizzying. I won’t deny an enduring urge to stay snuggled in bed instead of getting up to slog through all the mud on our trails and in the paddocks.
Thank goodness we’ve got the horses to warm our hearts, no matter what version of early spring weather is dished out. They don’t let the mud underfoot bother them. No, they consider it a valuable asset for skin and hair treatments.
Cyndie found that two of them were ready to have their caked-on hair brushed out, while the other two preferred to keep wearing their mud packs. To each their own.
A week from now, it will just as easily be the other way around.
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Ice Outed
The persistent puddle that I light-heartedly refer to as “Paddock Lake” is ice-free this morning. I’m afraid that judges were unable to conclude whether the ice-out date was March 6 or March 7 due to the dangerous lightning conditions last night, keeping intelligent people indoors during the thunderstorm that rolled through.
At 11:21 a.m. yesterday, it looked like this:
I found Swings and Light soaking wet when I came out, so I gave the puddle a closer inspection and discovered evidence that they had been playing their splashing game. Surprisingly, they hadn’t destroyed all the ice.
By 4:35 p.m., it looked like this:
The silt the horses had stirred up had yet to settle out, but it was an overcast day, leaving plenty of ice still visible.
I don’t know how much rain fell with the storm that arrived around 10:30 p.m., but it was audible on the roof and left things wet this morning. By the time I dragged myself out of bed to walk Asher, light snow was beginning to fall.
At 7:31 a.m., this is what I found:
While we were down at the barn, the snow got so heavy that we received an inch in less than half an hour.
The ice is gone, but now snow is covering everything again. It won’t last long. The forecast indicates we could reach 60°F tomorrow. Spring-like weather around these parts.
Anyone want to guess when we will lose another tree due to violent weather? Michigan sure got a gut punch yesterday with the surprisingly early tornado this far north. The storm chasers had their eyes on Texas and Oklahoma.
It gives me an uneasy feeling about the odds of increasingly intense storms unleashing damage to our paradise.
Every day that we escape negative impacts is a blessing to be celebrated. The quick March snowstorm this morning was rather adorable.
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Predatory Behavior
Last Sunday, we were blessed with a visit from our kids for one last day of mirth before the return to regularly scheduled programming of the work world in 2026. The weather was a bit of a risk as we were under a warning for sleet and freezing rain. They braved the drive anyway, with utmost caution, and the weather didn’t turn out to be as bad as it could have been.
As soon as they headed home and Cyndie and I went down to tend to the horses, the murky sky opened up a bit for a sweet show at sunset.
Two days later, we received what I feel is the worst weather for winter: rain. Once again, the snow is a saturated mess. I took Asher for an afternoon explore, and he fixated on a dead tree trunk that he seemed certain contained a rodent snack.
I stood waiting while he worked furiously to gain access. Seeing him so harmlessly entertained is a reward worth allowing to play out uninterrupted, so I busied myself with tamping down the wet snow where I stood.
He showed no sign of giving up and began to attack the little trees in the immediate vicinity that were getting in his way. They served to fulfill his urge to chomp on things better than any of the artificial chew toys in his extensive collection in the house.
He worked on that effort for so long, my project of tamping snow grew to create a raised median at the intersection of the two trails where he was busy at it.
As much as I wished to let him play to his heart’s content, his distraction had lasted so long that it became time to feed the horses, and I was forced to call him off. We trundled away through the snow slurry toward the barn after a minor struggle to redirect his attention away from the prize he never reached.
If there was a mouse in there, I wonder what its experience was like during the onslaught. Did it assume there was an earthquake, or did it sense the telltale signs of a predator at its door?
I think I can relate to what it must have been like inside that hollow section of the tree limb. That is what it feels like every day for citizens of the United States under the criminal control of the current administration. If only there were someone who could call off the brutal regime and send them on their way.
That terrorized critter suffered for less than an hour. Our suffering shows no signs of abating.
To the rest of the world: I’m sorry you have to witness this, or worse yet, be directly impacted by the actions of the disgusting few who are systematically dismantling our country for their personal gain.
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Arriving Momentarily
This morning, most of the paddock’s surface is a miserable, wet, icy, packed remnant of previous snowfalls. We’ve experienced about a week of similar misty, foggy, above-freezing days. If I did not have the benefit of meteorological forecasts, I would be entirely unsuspecting of what lies in store for us today.
I can’t think of what more we could be doing in preparation. Yesterday, Cyndie made a run for groceries, and while she was out, she picked up a bottle of graphene spray coating that I applied to the snowplow blade. I’m not confident how effective it will prove to be, but I suspect it should be better than nothing.
It wasn’t raining while we were out feeding the horses a half hour ago, even though the radar makes it look like it could be.
I’ve got my jaw clenched in anticipation of the least pleasant start of a significant snow event. Rain, turning to sleet, before gradually changing over to snow that will be driven horizontally by gale-force winds. Yum yum.
It’s a good thing I love winter. Otherwise, think of how much more miserable this would seem. Ignore my whining. I’ll be out playing in it like a happy little kid soon.
Cyndie is making waffles for breakfast. I’m going to start a fire in the fireplace.
We know how to do this.
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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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Isolated Downpours
We experienced wild weather yesterday evening, which is becoming more normal with each successive occurrence. Just as we were getting ready to head out to a local restaurant for dinner, the unexpected sound of thunder rumbled in the sky. A quick check of the radar revealed a small squall forming out of nothing.
We scrambled to get into the car before the fat, early drops became a soaking shower. As we drove toward Hayward, the wet road told a story of a significant downpour that must have just happened moments before. The combination of the whopping dose of precipitation and the large areas of wide open sky around the closest bursting cloud produced the widest bands of rainbow colors any of us had ever seen.
As entertaining as that was, we were soon presented with an even more dramatic mini-hurricane at the time we were paying our dinner bill. When we heard the boom of thunder, out came the weather radar screens on our phones. As Julian and I were debating whether the isolated red/orange/yellow blob would pass harmlessly around our location, I noticed it was starting to hail outside.
That was quickly augmented with gushing rainfall and high winds blowing the rain and hail sideways. Flash flooding swiftly resulted. We delayed our departure until the rain ended, but the intensity of the downpour was easily seen in the debris that had floated across the traffic lanes and the large puddles and runoff present wherever there was a low spot.
The sun was getting lower, but the surrounding areas of blue sky allowed enough light to illuminate another entertaining rainbow(s) that Julian caught while I drove.
I am no longer surprised by uncharacteristically heavy downpours because they are repeatedly happening often enough to have become “characteristic” these days.
Why, it’s as if, when it rains, it pours.
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Weather Wallop
We got smacked to a degree I didn’t anticipate yesterday with a combination of multiple inches of rain in uncomfortably cold temperatures while strong wind gusts blasted us mercilessly. We still had the small paddock closed off, which constrained the horses to having access to only one side of the overhang for shelter.
Just to keep things from being simple to deal with, on Monday, Cyndie got a COVID vaccination booster that had her feeling poorly by yesterday morning. That left it to me to tend to the horses in conditions that were teetering on completely out of control.
The poor girls were shivering desperately and very anxious to get their servings of grain to take their minds off the misery. Serving them became a crazy ad-lib as I tried to maintain some order and control while moving their serving stations on the fly to try giving access out of the rain for each horse.
Thankfully, they were moderately cooperative as they were well aware of the predicament we were all in. After doing my best to give them the bare minimum comforts available in the moment, I took Asher back up to the house for his breakfast.
A short time later, our new person from This Old Horse, Maddy, showed up with doses of dewormer for the horses. She picked up where I left off in trying to find a way to give the horses some advantage against the weather. I joined her and we decided to try moving them inside to the individual stalls.
We got them in, but we couldn’t get Mix to settle down. The other three seemed to figure out they were out of the wind and rain, they had food and water, and no other horse was trying to invade their space. Sadly, I got the impression that Mix was triggered and having a major PTSD reaction to the confinement.
Subsequently, Mix’s prolonged stress, demonstrated in kicking the walls, biting boards, and general flailing about, began to UNsettle the others. We tried changing the horse next to Mix by swapping the positions of Swings and Mia, but it didn’t make enough difference in Mix’s tantruming.
Instead of drying out, Mix was lathering up in her own sweat. We ended up putting blankets on them and letting them back outside after I strung another temporary barrier that at least allowed them access to both sides of the overhang.
A little over a week after setting up fans to cool them in high heat, we now have the horses wearing blankets in the latter half of May.
A windy, rainy, 40°F weather wallop, indeed.
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Feeling (C)old
Three days ago, our temperatures were around 80°F. Welcome to spring in the Northland. That unseasonal warmth brought an overnight storm with heavy rain and loads of lightning and thunder. Most of the day yesterday dragged on with a dreary occasional mist and temps hovering in the very chilly mid-30s.
Around dinnertime, the temperature dropped below freezing.
Just 47 minutes later, it looked like this outside:
Hot and cold weather always bounces back and forth this time of year, so we should be well-adjusted to coping with the changes, but the return of wintery chills and snow never fails to feel like an undeserved punishment.
It’s the final day of March. I could hope that this is the last blanketing of snow we will get for the season, but ever since going through the extreme experience of receiving 18 inches of snow on May 2nd, 2013, I won’t assume we are in the clear until the calendar flips to June.
Cyndie tried convincing Mia to wear a light blanket for protection against the wetness, but Mia wasn’t interested. I figure she didn’t want to look different than the other Mares. All four of them seem to be coping just fine, as they almost always do.
I’ve got coping skills of my own that I’ve been executing. Lounging in the recliner by the fireplace, eating more than I should, adding a few inches and pounds of insulation around my middle, and napping whenever my tired eyes keep trying to stay closed. It feels an awful lot like my impression of what getting old must be like.
My initiative to maintain an exercise routine for back health and strong core muscles has done a disappearing act. Now in my mid-60s, I seem to have experienced a shift of my own from hot to cold. My morning workouts now tend to involve more cerebral pursuits like Wordle, Strands, and Connections in the NY Times games suite and sporadic stabs at Words With Friends competitions.
My aging is getting more obvious now that mental exercise has become just as tiring as my physical workouts once were.
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False Alarm
That didn’t happen. Not only did we dodge the threat of snow, but the winds barely rose above a typical spring day. I am not complaining. It was an interesting phenomenon where the weather radar showed precipitation in the form of snow overhead for most of the day, but nothing was making it out of the clouds.
One day earlier, I captured a picture of sun rays making it through the clouds.
Yesterday wasn’t very photogenic while I was walking with Asher. When we came out of the barn after feeding the horses and came around the corner of the hay shed, we found the neighbor’s cat crouched with its attention focused on something other than us behind the shed. Asher lurched and startled the cat, who then made a hasty sprint for cover.
Poor Asher let loose with a series of his whiny barks that sound like a really distressed dog is being abused by its owner. The only abuse I was guilty of was not letting the poor guy run after the cat.
The pictures I was taking yesterday were indoors, where I captured the latest view of the new shoot on our bird of paradise plant…
Compare that to how it looked a month ago:
We’ve got another new leaf in our future with this amazing transplant and that is no false alarm!
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Relative Something 