Posts Tagged ‘weather’
Frozen Proof
In addition to being warmer than normal this year during the months leading up to the winter solstice, it’s been significantly wetter. Luckily, yesterday there was no precipitation, allowing me to stay dry while changing my ‘Monday morning’ flat tire in the dark, on the side of the road.
Why does it have to happen on Monday morning?
One nice thing about the type of weather we have been receiving lately is that it has provided very visible proof of concept for the drainage tile we added to divert water around the paddocks. Even though it has been surprisingly warmer than normal, there have still been moments of good ol’ December frozen mornings.
Recently, one of those frozen mornings resulted in a very vivid depiction of the water that flows from the drain tile. 
The tile drains out into the longer grass of the back pasture. The image of that frozen outflow represents water that won’t be flowing through the paddocks on its travels downhill from our property.
Success!
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Didn’t Miss
I was wrong. Turns out, the rain didn’t miss us. It was simply delayed. When it finally moved over us, it arrived with a vengeance.
The precipitation began in the early morning hours yesterday, and thrashed down with significant gusting winds. I was awakened about a half-hour before my alarm by the tempest, allowing me a chance to lay and wonder how the horses were handling the assault.
The nasty weather added unwelcome drama to my commute through the cities in the early darkness, reducing visibility to the point that most decisions become mere guess-work, while my car was shoved to and fro unexpectedly by the extreme gusting wind.
The temperature hovered just above the freezing point, and throughout the day the precipitation oscillated between wet, icy, and flaky.
Cyndie sent me some pictures and reported that the horses were soaking wet, jumpy as heck, and shivering to beat the band when she arrived to offer the morning feed. Poor Hunter was beside himself, looking thoroughly undone and having a tizzy about getting into the barn. When he is cold and wet, the first thing he does upon entering the confined space of his stall is to lay down and roll in the wood shavings we use for bedding.
It makes a scary racket, because he inevitably hits the walls with his feet in his wild gyrating. Cyndie said he successfully got himself covered with wood shavings from head to tail.
By afternoon, the rain gauge had captured 2 inches. As I neared home on my return from work, I began to see water flowing in ditches that are usually dry. Every creek I crossed was spilling out beyond its banks.
Delilah had to traipse along beside the trails in places that were under water.
If we get a quick freeze, I’m afraid Cyndie will need to wear skates when she walks the dog in the days ahead.
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It Missed!
It turned out that my concerns were unwarranted yesterday about even more rain falling on our already saturated grounds. From my repeated checks of the radar all day, it looked like a wall was keeping the surging mass of precipitation from moving north past a certain point. As it reached the southern boundary of our county, it stopped its advance and just seemed to slide past us to the northeast.
This doesn’t mean that we dried out any. On the contrary. The sky remained heavily overcast and the dew point high enough that wetness continued to be the order of the day.
It was a good day to have the warm glow of a fire in our fireplace!
Happily, the lack of actual falling rain was a break for our horses, allowing them to avoid the cold soaking that rain in December involves.
The bleakness of our landscape lingers on. According to forecasts, the next possibility for freezing temperatures comes at the end of this week.
Even if it doesn’t bring a dose of accumulating snow, I will be happy to at least have the wet ground turn frozen, to give us a break from the frustrating mud.
I’m pretty certain that frozen leaves will provide less hazardous footing than the wet leaves over slippery mud which we are currently enduring.
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Burdensome Weather
Our weather has been chilly and wet for a few days now, enough that it is beginning to feel like a burden to face it. I suppose the fact that the temperature is dropping below the freezing point and the wind is picking up to gale force gusts, may be contributing to the desire to batten down the hatches and snuggle indoors under a thick blanket.
Today the precipitation is more likely to be in the form of snow than rain. This is a harsh reality after having been coddled for so many days of autumn with temperatures more akin to the comforts of mid-summer.
On top of that, our chimney liner has not been replaced yet, so we haven’t been able to have any fires in the fireplace. Takes away one of our favorite tools to offset the chill. A little warm air flowing from the furnace vent just doesn’t satisfy in the way a crackling fire can.
Yesterday, Cyndie got a local tree service to send someone out to assess what might be continuing to attack our long-needle pine trees. I raced home through the poor visibility of endless road-spray, a half hour early, in hopes of being here for the visit.
I just missed him.
Cyndie said it was a rather abbreviated visit due to the unfavorable conditions, and that he planned to return another day when he could more readily investigate what critters might be killing the pines.
At least he got a chance to orient himself with our specific areas of concern. In addition to the ailing pines, we are seeking advice on recommended pruning needs of several of the largest oak and maple trees. I don’t expect the assessment to render a very affordable quote, but seeing the cost of professional tree service will help us plan our next move in tending to the precious resource that is the trees on our land.
It is a burden that we are honored to be in a position to bear.
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Beautiful Days
There is something rather heartbreaking about receiving the gift of summer-like warmth on a November day, and then not feeling well enough to take advantage of it. My body is wrestling with some common cold symptoms, sapping me of most of my energy to do anything physically productive after work.
Within an hour of arriving home, the daylight is fading fast, leaving a rather small window of time to tend to outdoor projects.
With my body feeling achy and my eyes stinging, I was more interested in curling up on the couch, than going outside to take advantage of the beautiful day. I did, however, step out to capture an image of sun’s last moments on our horizon.
I could hear the buzzing hum of our neighbor’s mower, which poked at my already sensitive moping over wishing I had the gumption to be out doing similar such chores around our house.
Looks like I should have one last chance this afternoon, and then our temperatures plunge back to the realities of November. At least chilly weather won’t make me feel as bad about convalescing under a blanket in the living room.
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Mixed Signals
I am flabbergasted with the amount of grass growth on our property that is happening in September. It’s confusing my sense of time and place. Cyndie mowed last Saturday, and in less than a week, it already desperately needed to be cut again!
We have received regular rainfall that rivals a typical June, even as the days shorten, the temperature is dropping, and leaves are falling. I mowed yesterday and rolled through standing water in several spots. This time of year is usually dry and growth slows down. It didn’t seem like September at all to me as I started trying to knock down the crop of grass.
A couple of hours later, I was feeling the chill of a cool fall evening as the sun dropped low. It is mind-boggling to have these mixed signals informing my senses.
Good thing I’ve decided to work on learning to embrace change and celebrate aberrations.
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Barely Here
Compared to my time on the ranch when Cyndie was working and I was home every day, it now feels like I am barely here. Not only have my days transitioned back to spending over 2-hours a day in a commute, but there has been a somewhat traumatic shift of attention from the tasks on our property, to the demands of industrial manufacturing and customer requests. Oh, how I love to please a customer, to a fault.
Today, the day before our national holiday celebrating independence from all countries that boasted claim on this land, most businesses have closed. I am home, have slept in a little bit, and will soon be getting after the perpetual summer task of mowing grass.
Everywhere around us, it seems the farmers are cutting hay. The weather clearly dictates activity, and when a window of dry weather arrives, people all jump into action. Except for us. We currently rely on our neighbor, and he is traveling to visit family for the holiday. Our next chance will be next week, about the time the next batch of precipitation is predicted to arrive.
Tough times for my wee little brain. I mentally strive to get things to go just right, but weather, and day-jobs, and circumstances have a way of going any old direction they please.
Guess there’s a lesson in there for me. Just maybe, I’ll relax and let it soak in today, while I have a chance to be home, mowing and poking along at our country pace. While I’m here, I want to be thoroughly here…
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Be Careful
Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.
We dearly wanted to improve the muddy situation that our horses face during the wet spring meltdown. Last fall we excavated an improved drainage swale, cleared out the overgrown drainage ditch along our southern property border, buried drain tile along the uphill borders of the paddocks, and applied several loads of lime screenings on the hill around the barn for improved footing.
We have been anxiously awaiting the thaw to see if our improvements worked the way we hoped. That thaw is almost complete now, and we are standing by to see how quickly the soil dries out.
What we couldn’t control was the amount of moisture we would be forced to deal with by the weather. Our mild winter left us with a below average snow cover and we have been without precipitation for over a week. The effectiveness of our improvements is hard to gauge because the ground is already too dry!
There is still plenty of time to receive some spring rain, but for the time being, we are experiencing what the meteorologists are phrasing as “pre-drought conditions.”
We wanted dryer conditions for the paddock footing, but this is not the way we would like it to occur.
It is interesting that the changing climate seems to be putting us at risk for dryer, drought-like conditions overall, while at the same time unleashing more copious dousings of precipitation from individual storm events. We get too much all at once and then not enough in between.
I am a bit concerned about how that will impact our intentions of growing hay. Over the last two years we have been unable to get more than one cutting in a season, because the spring and early summer have been too wet, and the rest of the growing season has been too dry. We haven’t had enough growth after the first cut to allow for a second batch of bales.
This year we are starting out dry. Who knows what we’ll get in the months ahead. I’m hesitant to wish for more moisture for fear of then getting more than we can handle. Wishes are not to be waved about carelessly. We should be clear about what we want and what we don’t want.
What are the rules again? I can’t wish for more wishes, but can I wish for a precise outcome? Not less than we need, and not more than we need.
Be careful what you wish for.
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Two Extremes
Our weather went from one extreme to another in the span of daylight hours. A snow event had been predicted to start around 3:00 a.m., but when we woke up at 6:00, there was no snow yet. Cyndie began to prepare to visit the exercise machines at her physical therapy office before work, but she hadn’t finished getting ready when the snow started falling with intensity.
That changed her plans and she skipped the exercise in order to head straight to work. The updated forecast now indicated we might get up to an inch, which I believed was a result of the delayed onset of precipitation. At the rate it was coming down, it seemed to me we were going to exceed that total.
I took a picture while Delilah and I were forging our way around the property through the storm.
As soon as it started to let up and the radar indicated there wasn’t much of substance still on the way, I started shoveling. The temperature was still below freezing, though barely, and the snow wasn’t holding a lot of moisture. As soon as I scraped the pavement, the sun —through the clouds— melted the dregs of snow remaining.
The area that I shoveled looked like it hadn’t been covered in white just moments before. That inspired me to want to get the rest of the driveway plowed, while there was still enough daylight to dry it off.
Little by little the clouds began to break apart. By the end of the day, it was all clear. Of course, in the winter, with all that clear sky and sunshine, it was getting colder, not warmer.
It was a day of two skies, …two extremely different skies.
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Bring It
The predictions for our weather being significantly stormy today have continued to intensify. Meteorologists report that all computer models remain in agreement for a potential of over a foot of snow in our region by Tuesday. Cyndie and I are ready. We say, “Bring it on!” I haven’t asked the horses what they think about it.
We worked hard yesterday to tackle everything within our power that needed to be addressed before a lot of snow covers it all up. As we went along, we found little things to add to our list of preparations. It’s quite possible that I have never been as ready for a first significant snowfall of the season as I am today.
With Cyndie’s help, despite an ailing arthritic hip, I finished making a raised area around the hay feeder in the paddock. That also means we were able to use up the left-over pile of lime screenings.
We rearranged equipment in the shop garage to move plow blades and snow tires to the front for easy access, and piled lawn care accessories out of the way in back. I went so far as to clean out leaves that had collected in nooks and crannies around the house and shop walkways where I will soon be trying to shovel snow.
We re-hung tarps on the walls of Delilah’s kennel to give her added shelter. She was thrilled to be present while we worked, chasing mice that popped out when Cyndie disturbed a nest while sweeping out the corners.
Yesterday morning I was teasing Cyndie with a query about whether we had enough toilet paper to survive the coming storm, since that is a common item that gets purchased when harsh weather is approaching. She assured me we did, but later in the day, as we rearranged vehicles to get the truck parked under a roof, she decided to make a run to fill the gas tank and pick up some groceries.
She brought home more toilet paper.
All that is left to do is let nature take its course and invite winter over to make itself comfortable at Wintervale. Seems like the picture above will be the last glimpse of dry ground we’ll see for a few months.
Bring it on, we say. We think we are ready.
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Relative Something 