Posts Tagged ‘weather’
Ice Growth
With overnight temperatures hovering close to freezing during this January thaw, we are waking to interesting conditions outside. The most notable surface has been the asphalt driveway. Yesterday, instead of the smooth glaze that occurred the day before, we experienced alien-looking ice formations peppering the pavement. It made walking interesting because some areas were simply wet while others were surprisingly slippery.
As so often happens, capturing the full visual impact of the ice shapes by way of a photograph is a no match for the naked eye but that rarely stops one from trying.
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After just a few hours, the driveway surface changes to just being wet. I’ve read that our winter weather is becoming much more like what happens in places 500-600 miles (800-965 km) south of here. This sure isn’t the winter weather I remember from back when I was a kid.
Above is a view of our place’s appearance on January 25 this year. I don’t like the non-winter-like weather but I am counting our blessings that we have, up to this point, been free of climate-related wildfires or floods. Our growing season is getting longer, we are saving money on heating the house, and I haven’t had to shovel or plow much snow. All good, no? Well, we are always at risk of getting hit with extreme downpours, high winds, hail, and tornados since storms are becoming more intense.
Some strange ice growth on the driveway in the morning is hardly problematic. We find it rather interesting, although it’s hard to do it justice in photos.
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Glazed Asphalt
The smooth black surface of our driveway is great for melting snow that remains after plowing. It’s not so great when moisture condenses overnight and freezes. We need to get a sign that warns, “Slippery When Glazed!”
Luckily, the warmth visiting our region as the day progressed made that glaze disappear entirely. We lost more snow on Sunday than yesterday but the trend is obvious and feeds itself. Each day we get above freezing will advance the evaporation to greater degrees (pun intended).
On a day over the previous weekend when the clouds weren’t as opaque, I captured this view directly overhead:
A cloud gazers delight. Do you see the dolphin? I’m intrigued by the contrast of shadowed clouds compared to the ones glowing bright white. I wonder what it looked like from the window of an airplane flying close to the same elevation.
Not much sky watching happening when walking on our driveway in the morning hours. Waddling along like penguins are we.
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Didn’t Happen
We somehow got missed by the passing snowstorm overnight Monday. Looking at the radar map from the comfort of our bed had me suspecting we were getting a fair dose of flakes. I figured there would be some shoveling to do at the very least when we headed out to feed the horses.
Much to my surprise, the number of flakes on our front steps was so paltry, there was open space between each one. It was like a cloud had sneezed and that’s all there was to show for it.
That’s okay. With no real foundation amount of snow this year, an occasional few inches ends up being more of a nuisance than anything fun. Plus, since snow didn’t happen, it gave me more time to prepare the ATV for eventual plowing. In my post yesterday, I mentioned that the electric lawn tractor was blocking the ATV and wouldn’t move due to some fault revealed by an error code. I couldn’t even get the drive wheels to release by the manual override that would allow me to simply muscle it out of the way.
Well, a second try proved to be the charm. I’m not aware of having done anything different, but when I tried again to pull the two levers that stretch a spring disengaging each drive wheel yesterday, it worked on my first try. I pushed the lawn tractor out of the way and drove the ATV out.
That success allowed me to hook up the trailer and finish hauling away all the branches I’ve trimmed off in the last month. The north loop pine tree project is officially completed for the season.
And, the ATV is now front and center in the shop garage.
You can see by the photo I took yesterday how much snow cover we have after receiving virtually none from the storm that passed just to our southeast. Weather forecasters suggest a plowable amount of snow is on the way for Friday.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
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Days Disappearing
Where are the days going? The minutes and hours of the days following Christmas have disappeared in a blink for me. We have passed the time with little in the way of agendas beyond resting in recovery from the busy holiday activities. Adding a long nap in the middle of the day swallowed a big chunk of time. As has binge-watching a couple of streaming episodes for entertainment.
The weird weather hasn’t been much of a motivator. We are stuck in a pattern of in-between-ism. Not like winter, but well beyond fall.
The ground is so saturated from the recent rain that it seems to resist freezing solidly overnight when the temperature has dropped below 32°F. It gets firmer, but not rock-hard.
Asher has been a little stir-crazy and allowing him to lead on bushwhacks through the woods on a sniff-fari has produced a few obsessive bouts of digging dirt or chewing wood in a hunt for pesky varmints.
Yesterday morning he surprised me with sudden success in rooting a mouse out from its hiding spot. The poor critter wasn’t fast enough to evade his bite when trying to make a run for it.
The horses seem a little tired of the wet and muddy conditions, but maybe that’s a projection on my part. They’ve rolled in it enough times to look particularly rough and ragged.
I suppose the fact that Cyndie has been feeling under the weather the last few days has contributed to our loss of time. We’ve bailed on a plan to head to the lake over New Year’s Day. At the same time, she still soldiers on with projects like dismantling all her Christmas decorations around the house.
I spent the afternoon yesterday trying to connect a new surveillance camera to the software. Multiple attempts to identify the camera by serial number failed, but when I finally tried allowing the software to simply search for it, it successfully found it –identified by serial number. However, the software still wouldn’t connect to the level of displaying an image.
A software professional has offered to stop out and help me this morning. Thank you, Julian.
Once we succeed in connecting to the camera, there is a repeater to install. Getting the Ethernet cable from outside our log home to inside where the router is will be a trick. Then, we can test communicating with the camera when it is located near the barn. When that is achieved, I will need to figure out a way to mount the camera in a location that has AC power and a view beneath the overhang as well as out into the paddocks.
It’s obvious to me that these activities will swiftly disappear more hours and days from my life. Before we know it, it will be next year.
December, I hardly knew thee.
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Messy Mire
The previous few days of rain and record-high temperatures have created a muddy mess in the paddocks. It really makes me miss the years when it didn’t rain in the winter.
I found skid marks in the big paddock that revealed one of the horses slid on all four hooves for a length of about four feet. I assume one of them had started to bolt and then tried to slam on the brakes. Thank goodness they all looked fine when we arrived to serve their evening feed.
The soupy surface was as hard for me to walk through as it was for that horse that had tried to stop. Luckily, the four of them calmed down significantly after a few minutes of munching feed. I was able to focus on the art of picking up manure around them that was virtually inseparable from mud sliding into the tined scoop.
I have a feeling the horses and I will share the feeling of relief when conditions change in some way that will to put an end to the sloppy mire. I am imagining the ground finally getting covered in clean, white snow.
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Still Cooking
Since the little green caterpillar is still crawling around, I shouldn’t be surprised that the organisms that breakdown manure into dirt continue to do their thing. This time of year my compost piles are usually dormant but I’ve currently got one that is steaming away, active as ever.
We received a little bit of rain overnight Friday into Saturday and that, combined with the above-freezing temperatures, has created sloppy footing in the paddocks. The significant weight of horses provides a pretty good indicator of how thawed the ground gets. Instead of the ground being packed down by their hooves, it becomes dotted with hoof-sized potholes.
Just for the record, when the weather turns back to freezing, the pockmarked surface becomes rock-hard and that wreaks havoc on my attempts to scoop manure. At that point, I just hope for snow to cover the ground for the season so I can just let it all lay until spring.
It’s weird how easy it is to get used to not having snow on the ground. It will require a mental adjustment when winter weather finally arrives and I have to shift into shoveling and plowing mode. I fear I’m being lulled into a nonchalance that will demand more than a little effort to overcome.
Alas, that is a bridge to be crossed at another time. This is the moment I should be focused on.
Yesterday I puttered around with a curiosity about locating the spot where digging for the power cable to the barn needs to happen. The warm weather has me wanting to deal with it sooner than next spring. I tried poking a wire for a while and then got the bright idea I should just call the “Call Before You Dig!” number and have a skilled professional mark the entire route between the shop and the barn.
Of course, you know what will happen as soon as it gets marked. Yes, we’ll finally get that snow cover I’ve been waiting for.
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Where’s Winter?
Warmth continues to dominate our weather patterns halfway through December. A headline in the paper this morning boldly reads, “Historic El Niño could be the strongest in 75 years.” Well, I’ll be.
Yesterday morning, I hurried to retrieve the garbage bin in advance of the arrival of the electrician(s) who were going to diagnose my loss of power in the barn.
I hastily parked the bin on the asphalt just beyond the turnoff to the barn and returned to tending to the horses. As minutes dragged on toward an hour of waiting, I returned to the house and took the bin with me, thinking that would result in the electricians showing up.
When that didn’t work, I went back out again and at the spot where I had temporarily left the garbage bin, I spotted something bright green on the ground. Thinking it might be a plastic piece of the bin, I bent down to pick it up. To my surprise, it moved, curling into a circle.
A caterpillar! In December!? Yikes. Me thinks our environment is reflecting the continued warming of the planet. The little guy didn’t even have a wooly coat on. Whatever trees or plants it consumes will be under greater pressure if creatures that feed on them don’t die off over winter. How is the caterpillar not freezing when the temperature drops overnight?
The guys eventually showed up nearly two hours after the expected time and quickly deduced the power is being lost somewhere underground between the shop and the barn. Two clues point toward likely possibilities.
There was a pile of disturbed dirt from a burrowing critter in the barn below the circuit breaker box where the pipe of wires comes out of the ground. There is also a known splice in the wires from 11 years ago when a skid steer cut them during the making of a drive-able thoroughfare around the back of the barn.
With the ground frozen enough to make digging difficult, revealing the status of that splice may need to wait until next spring. The ground inside the barn wasn’t solid like a rock, so I took a crack at digging in there.
I made it down to the bottom of the pipe and quit when there was no evidence of burrowing down that far. The wires are barely visible at the bottom of the hole and appear free of damage.
To help us out until I can dig for the splices, the electricians rearranged circuit breakers so they all connect to the single phase of 120V AC available. Power usage in the barn isn’t high enough to overload one phase and we aren’t currently using 240V for anything so this works for now.
Whatever failed on the one line could just as easily occur on the remaining line so this is something we want to fix even though the temporary solution is providing everything we need for now.
Since winter isn’t delivering its worst this year, maybe I’ll find an opportunity to dig outside sooner rather than later. However, I’m hesitant about making a big digging mess that I wouldn’t be able to clean up until much later and it didn’t sound like the electricians were very interested in repairing the splice during the winter months (hoping that truly is the problem).
Most likely, we’ll wait and see.
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Wonky Weather
When you woke up today, did you realize it was the last day of November? Our weather took a step back toward October yesterday. That served to complicate my assessment of what day and in which month we find ourselves at the moment. Of course, that confusion rides on top of the daily challenge one experiences when living in retirement and not having anywhere one is required to be on any particular day.
Warm sunshine was a welcome change and reduced our snow cover significantly.
Only the areas shaded from the afternoon sun retained evidence snow has already fallen this year. 2023/24 is an El Niño winter year for us, meaning many storm paths will shift to our south. We still may get some snow, but it is predicted we will see more occasions of mixed precipitation or even rain. Not my favorite scenario.
Yesterday’s pleasant weather made it comfortable for the farrier to trim the horse’s hooves. The horses were relaxed when I showed up to put on their halters but by the time the trimming got underway, it was precariously close to their usual feeding hour. With each passing minute, they showed an increasing impatience for feed pans to be delivered and a decreasing interest in standing around calmly for trimming.
Life’s an adventure.
My adventures with Asher were a little different. He was confined to a leash all day but I tried to give him freedom to choose his path. Unfortunately, all he wanted to do was revisit the very same off-property places that got him in trouble the day before. We’d walk a while until I stopped at the limit of our property line and then he’d do a little tugging and redirecting until he gave up and then the same thing would happen further down the line.
It wasn’t very rewarding for either of us, but at least I was able to prevent him from running off. That was a win for me.
My brain is not able to tell that 29 days of November have already passed. Maybe I should be putting an “X” on each day in a calendar as they become history to help my perception. The wonky weather sure isn’t helping me out.
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Global Weirding
The warming of planet Earth does not necessarily mean everywhere just gets warmer all the time, but unusual warmth does tend to happen with increasing frequency.
In our region, the middle of November is not usually a time when we would see someone out mowing their grass. On Tuesday, that is exactly what we saw. November is also not a time most of us associate with dandelion blossoms, but that is what’s showing up in our yard.
It was mid-60sF warm around here yesterday and once again mind-bending for the glimpses of spring-like blossoms showing up at the same time that the woods look like the farthest thing possible away from spring.
It all seems just plain weird. It’s gotten hard to remember we’ve already been completely blanketed by snow for a time earlier this month. That’s become a distant memory now.
The weather forecast for next week hints that it won’t continue to be weird with temperatures predicted to drop into the mid-teens(F) over a few nights in a row.
That will feel downright Thanksgiving-ish.
Between periods of weirdness, it makes sense that we experience a little normalcy every once in a while.
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Misjudged Amount
I thought it was going to be a small amount of slushy snow coating the grass but I guessed wrong. Our first snow of the season covered everything with around three inches of windblown snow.
As ready as we thought we were for winter to arrive, this snow landed on plenty of things I intended to move. Cyndie’s door table in the woods. The furniture on the deck. Potted plants all around the house. Chairs out in the yard.
It’s all stuff that can still be moved without too much trouble. Temperatures are expected to warm up well above freezing in the next few days, but there’s no guarantee how much of the snow will disappear. I’m gonna make another guess and combine it with some hope that almost all of it will vanish.
By the weekend, it looks like a chance of some rain, which would go a long way to finish off any patches of snow that might last that long.
Cyndie landed the first appointment for surgery today, so we are heading out the door before dawn and hoping to have her back home in the recliner by mid-afternoon. Just depends on how quickly she comes to her senses, breathes on her own, and eats a little something.
We are well familiar with the routine.
While she convalesces the next few days, Asher and I can be outside putting away deck furniture. I’m sure he’d love to help me.
When we first met Asher, his foster mom told us he loves snow, so we’ve been looking forward to witnessing it firsthand. His reaction didn’t disappoint. His aura radiated “FUN!” the whole time he was romping around in the white stuff.
Thank you to all who have offered encouraging messages to Cyndie for her metal removal today. We appreciate your support! I’ll provide a full report tomorrow about how smoothly everything went.
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Relative Something 