Category: Weather Station Records

First Wood Collection of the Year

Things have been busy around here on the old farm lately. I have been doing some cleaning out in the yard to get ready for the season. I also got fed up with the grass at the front of the house, and how the land leans and keeps water too close, so I got into the tractor and sorted that out. Now there is no grass there, and a couple of old water troughs that leak set there as planters. I filled them up and will be putting in some flowers soon. I was ready to get at some work the day before yesterday when there came a knock on the front door.

The knock was the guy who owns the house just down the road from us. He lives in town and was having a tall pine tree taken down in his yard up there. He asked me if I wanted it. Well, that’s a silly question! I went up and spoke to the tree man and specified how I would like the wood cut up. Then I got the trailer the hay was on and took it up for pickup. Sadly, I did not have much luck getting the hay off the trailer in a neat and orderly fashion as I was not sure how long I had till the wood was ready to start piling on. So the hay ended up knocked over in the yard, and of course it rained since. So that’s a bit of a problem! But in the end, the gentleman who owns the tree decided to have a second, shorter tree taken down too. It was under a power line, so it was actually wider in the trunk than the tall one because it had been topped over the years.

So I have all that wood in the yard now. I am thinking I want to do the milling as soon as the ground is dry, then put on Anchor Seal to reduce cracking. That stuff has worked really well on the wood I milled last year. I think a couple of pieces will get milled into large blocks, and the long pieces will be milled into boards. I’ll have to see what the knots in the cant look like! The rounds and branches can be put into firwood, and some of the smaller branches want slicing into coasters and Christmas ornaments for the laser. Maybe there are a couple of signs hiding in there to be laser cut too. I’ll be keeping an eye out.

Spring Cleaning was begun this morning in the kitchen. Some sense and order is being applied to make things more serviceable in there. It was pretty bad. But we made good progress on it today till we wore out, and we will finish it tomorrow, I am sure.

Despite the warming weather, I see two frost days coming up this week. As that is the forecast, and it is always guessed at about two degrees warmer than we actually get in our specific location, I think there may be more. Missus has me warning her each night so she can do any quick saves required.

The kids attend school for four more weeks till they are set free for the summer. I am really looking forward to it! It will be nice to have them about, and to free up the schedule so I can start going out to get wood for the fire and for the mill. It is time for me to start drawing up plans for the woodshed. I have been thinking about it plenty, but I have not put pen to paper on the topic yet. I think I know what I will have to put in place, though it is not exactly what I want. But perhaps I can refigure as I recently found out I am allowed a larger build than I thought without a permit. So, there is that to look at first.

Well, it’s evening here now, and time to get settled and ready to rest for the fight of another day!

Christmas Report 2023

Time for an early winter’s nap. We had the kids around last night and this morning for our Christmas celebrations. They have grown so much and are learning the importance of family over gifts and that is very gratifying. Still, we shared gifts and time last night and today. They have gone now, and we had a little while to relax a bit and enjoy the quiet. The evening drew closed in single digit temperatures. Now that winter has come, we are feeling more like the normal cold we experience this time of year. The autumn will always be remembered as the warmest we have experiences so far.

I got the girls and Missus each an alpaca blanket. The boys each got an external hard drive with all the photos I could find on my computer from their early days back in England. They are old enough now not to squirm and complain about how embarrassing the photos are. They were very happy about it, and both expressed excitement and anticipation for the contents of the drives. I am thrilled to have given them the photos and let them have their memories from those days before. The older one said he didn’t really have any proof that he grew up in England till now. What a laugh.

Our oldest also said he might like to have a go at building a dining room table for his house. I’ll have to keep an eye out for a decent type of wood to make it from. It would be nice to find him something other than poplar.

The day is over now, and tomorrow we will celebrate Boxing Day before we get back to normal for the season. I am looking forward to that! I also will say, I looked at Facebook for about a minute or two. No interest in that. So, I checked out again.

Next thing to come along now is the New Year. We are a quarter of a century after 1999. That is amazing! I really cannot even believe it.

Off to sleep now.

5AM Thoughts

The temperature took a dive last night into single digits. I am still fighting with the too recently split firewood burning a bit too cool for the weather. I mix it with wood that is drier and burn them together. The wet wood dries out and burns after the dry wood and is there to light the next load. It’s not great, but I am keeping an eye on the chimney situation ready to clean as necessary. The house was a little chilly when I went to bed last night, but by early morning it had warmed up ten degrees outside. There must have bene cloud cover that came in.

I have been catching up on some woodworking videos that were posted about two weeks ago by Lost Art Press to YouTube. The shop may be too cold to work in, but I can keep my head in the game. I have also been making candles and perfecting my method for the molded colonial style. I am quite content with the way I have worked out right now. I am able to wick the molds without using something like a wire with a hook to pull it through. It is a simple matter of priming the wick, then wiping it to narrow it take off excess. Then stuff it through the holes at the bottom and push them through. The holes have been enlarged with an auger and they would leak, but putting a piece of wax at the bottom to stuff the hole stops it. It has eased the fiddliest part of the job. I have also got the removal from the molds eased. That is a simple matter of running the molds under hot water to release the candles. Doing that works a treat and does not require any kind of mold release to be sprayed into the molds before. I like that. It keeps the candles pure and clean.

Christmas is getting close again. It feels like it is sneaking up on us again. I have my shopping done, nonetheless. It is card mailing that I am endlessly hopeless at doing. I’d like to make them custom to the farm with a nice image on the front. I’d like to have a pencil drawing of the front of the house and the shop on a white background. Trouble is, I cannot draw that well. Well, if I could. Maybe I can start from a photograph. If I were able to draw it, I would like a standard drawing for the year, and one with a snow-covered roof for the Christmas season.

Lately my ear has been turned to a few YouTubers whose expertise lay in Geopolitics and economics. One in particular specializes on the Chinese economy. For years it has been anticipated that China will overtake the United States in GDP. There have been problems. For one, they have millions of homes started in the country that cannot be finished by the developers. The companies are far overextended in debt and don’t have the capital to finish the work. Loads of people have their life savings invested and are likely to lose it. Factories are not ordering, and foreign investment is running out of the country. The Belt and Road Initiative is failing, which is great. China has been investing in economic imperialism, and building infrastructure in other countries who cannot repay the costs, leaving China in control of the infrastructure there. I am no expert, just learning and being made aware. The point of it all is that there is an opening for more US production, which hopefully opens the market here for small businesses to get started. I’d like to see more garage industry here, with better quality and makers who actually care about their product.

Well, that’s what’s on my mind now. See you in the next post.

Cold and Not Cold

Well, what’s it been? Two weeks of this crap? We send the kids back to public school and our reward is everyone comes down with something. I took a trip into town today. First time I felt like going out anywhere other than where I absolutely had to for the last two weeks. It was a bit of the usual. “Hi there, how are you?” Honest answers got responses that “it’s going around.” Of course. But the tales I am told is that there are people going on antibiotics and the like to try to clear it, and that some are throwing up. We have not had it that bad here, so I am thrilled about that. But everyone has a nose that won’t go and a cough that won’t stop. My cough is spurred on by the stupidest thing at the moment. It is just a light click in the lungs. Nothing severe anymore. That’s all gone. But I get this little click, and it irritates my lungs and I go off coughing. I am sure that some of it is also an infection in one of my sinuses. I picked up hay and breathed in a tiny bit of alfalfa on the right side, and have been giving up what looks like infection ever since. Well, that is more than enough of the morbid details.

I have some parts coming tomorrow to do a full service on the tractor. It needs a 400-hour service. Time to change just about everything. How exciting! How expensive. I got some work done in the trailer for Missus today as I had promised her tomorrow. If that is getting interfered with, I wanted to get done her necessities.

I leave in 45 minutes to meet the kids at their bus stop. At least they are going to school.

I am concerned about the amount of wood we have piled up for winter. But is it usually this warm in December? I was out without a coat today and really felt fine. It is meant to be as warm again tomorrow. It will be winter in a couple of weeks, but this is a warm late autumn. It is 45F out right now. Seems a bit too warm for this particular time of the year. But things have been goofy all around lately where anecdotal weather is concerned, which is why I put in these anecdotes. They are entered here as a reference. Then I can check back and see how things were on particular days based on how I felt about them, and not just the hard numbers. Those are always available from my weather station.

Wax, Warmth, and Colds

Wax working is on partially paused at the moment due to only one of my crocks keeping a temperature that does not burn the wax. My newest crock pot on its lowest setting has burned the daylights out of the block of wax I had put in it and turned it quite dark! That was unfortunate. I searched on the Internet for a wax melter but was not happy with the best I saw as it wanted to be cleaned out every time it was shut off long enough to cool. I finally found one that I could heat up and cool without having to drain it, and it has a temperature control knob that allows me to set the temperature where I want from around 100 to 200 degrees Fahrenheit.

I ordered a large one and a small one and will keep the one crock that runs cool enough to safely heat wax and keep it for a while. That one has been very reliable, which means that as a crock pot, it is probably broke.

Apart from that I have been enjoying the work with the wax. It has been slow because I am limited on what I can do, but I think I will speed up soon, and I may even be able to try dipping wicks to make candles that way, too. I’ll get everything set up when it arrives and go from there. No promises till then.

I have a new printer on the way that will allow me to print color photos and even labels for my candles. I decided I wanted to be able to print a photo from time to time, rather than just putting them up on the Mural. The Mural is great, but sometimes there is a necessary feeling of completeness in having a good old fashioned paper print in hand.

I ran us out of the wood that I had split a couple of years ago and had to resort to this year’s stock. Well, let me tell you, that did not go well. The wood I pulled from the freshest row is so wet that it hardly burns at all. It sure don’t put heat into the house. It is not worth much unseasoned, and would do well to sit a year, but I cannot when I need every little bit I can get to keep warm as winter settles in. Saying that, it seems quite warm this November. Warmer than any year gone by. Today was a short sleeve outside kind of day. (For some reason, it was chilly as can be in the house all day despite the almost temperate weather outside.

So, it is Sunday evening, and I am going to carry on making candles. I do have the one pot, and a mold that I think needs using quite a bit more before Christmas. It is down to the last hour or so before bedtime, though everyone has a cold here right now, and I am not so sure if anyone is going to school tomorrow.

Do I Need to Tell You?

It is hot! Summer weather gets a bit unbearable at this time of year. I think there are places where the temperatures have exceeded their normal range by a bit, and records have been set. Our highs have been a bit more in line with the norms of the past decade, though I have not looked in the records to compare. It seems like fairly normal hot weather. So why would I be moaning about it then? I suspect that it is because summers in say, southern Nevada, get hotter, but winters stay much warmer. If the lows barely break into the freezing range, compare that to our winter low of -21F this year. Our total range has been closer to 120 degrees F in total. I am not speaking for anywhere else, so much as just saying that the reason I am feeling overheated may be because of the severity of our temperature swings throughout the year.

This coming week we have a lot of work to get done! The weather will give us a break, and it should be much more bearable for a bit, so we will be taking advantage. We have really got to get a few last pushes through in order to get our home-based businesses started. We have things to organize, and we have some cleaning to do. IT is time to see about things like windows on the house, too. I have a bit of work to do around the old chimney to try to prevent a leak where it meets the roof. I hope to see a man come by to offer a price on getting our septic redone, so we can get the yard into a state we can live with. There are many projects to get done!

My personal push needs to be to get the shop in a working state, with all the workbenches cleared off, and the tools organized and put in places. I have the likely last of any major purchases on order now. It is a set of blades for my plough plane. I’d like to do more than just build, though some of the blades will help with that, but also be a bit decorative, which some of the other blades will accomplish.

About that firewood…

I have a happy setup established with the trailer, a winch, and the tools required to bring home logs just shy of ten feet long. Those are great for the mill, and produce some scraps for the firewood pile. I also need to get some proper splitting rounds to add to the firewood pile. It has taken longer than I hoped to get the collection tools gathered and working properly, and while I can work in the mornings when it is still cool, it heats up quick and puts a damper on getting the job done in a day from collection to putting everything where it belongs here ready to process. It is best for me if I can do that. Hopefully a little break in the temperatures will turn into a long break, and I can get down to get more wood soon. It is always one of the things that is hard to get my head around; going out in such heat to get firewood! One has to keep in mind just how cold it really gets here in the winter!

It is getting pretty close to time to eat! I am off to have a lovely Friday evening and enjoy the company of family before we spend our last weekend as people who are not in a hurry running our own businesses.

Water Levels Going Down!

It is snowing as I type this. The forcast calls for less than 2 inches total. What’s more, the water in every pond, puddle, and place water can sit on our property has gone down by maybe three inches or so since yesterday. Then, apart from a splash of rain forecast for Monday it is at worst partly cloudy skies for the coming week or more. So I am not going to let myself feel as though we are getting any consequential setbakcs with what will fall. Not to compare this to a glass is half full situation as in our case, the glass is finally half empty, and things are improving as it goes down!

What’s more, I recieved the hydraulic toplink for the tractor this morning. There is some prep work to do to it before I put it on the tractor. It is a simple installation, so it should be easy. That will allow me to change the angle of attack on the boxblade, allwing me to either dig into, or smooth out the mud. I would prefer to smooth it. It shoudl also improve the angle when using the scarifiers to pull rock up on roadbase or gravel drives. Not that I have any, or anywhere near enough.

The winter storm advisory is now replaced with a precipitation alert that goes till 1:00PM, so there’s no telling that will really come of it, but I don’t think much.

Cold Hard Facts

I was working with one of my daughters on her schoolwork yesterday, and to complete the assignment we looked up the month of March from 2019 till this year to compare precipitation amounts recorded on our farm’s weather station. Precipitation recordings can be seen on the graphs below as the vertical blue bars reaching up. Each month has a different scale as the software adjusts it for relative size on the page. In other words, 2019 and 2023 both have similar scales and are showing the greatest amounts of measurement. As there were freeze cycles on some days, this does not show actual precipitation days as such, but it does show what was collected.

2019

2019 did not show a lot of precipitation. Two years prior to this was an El Nino spring, and a couple of feet of snow settled onto the ground all at once, leaving our farm with a very high water table. 2019 was not just a low year for precipitation, but one of several drought years.

2020

While 2020 had more precipitation days recorded, the scaling is lower, and there was little but often.

2021

2021 was a true drought year. It would be followed up by 2022 and in combination these years would seriously hurt not just us, but the whole of the western United States.

2022

2022 was definitely a drought year, and it was all the talk. Rivers like the Colorado were running low, and usage agreements of the past were called into question.

2023

This spring has shown a serious amount of increase in precipitation days, and in the amount collected each day as the scale reaches up to 0.50″ in order to show the higher amount collected on each bar than previous years excepting 2019 which has a scale that goes to 0.60″.

It is easy to want to complain about the high-water table this year, but remembering the previous years, and having no occupied basement under our house, we are getting by at the moment. The old root cellar is cause for concern, so we are not free to just enjoy the gross amounts of water surrounding our house. Given the choice, I would rather close that old root cellar off for good and fill it up. But those are our problems, and not the problems of the greater world around us, and the troubles that the drought has caused are far worse.

So there we have it. Some cold hard facts about what the climate has been like for the past five years, from dry in March, to almost torrential. I picked March because Springtime in the Rockies. Spring is when the winter gloom lifts, and with the changes of the weather snow tends to fall in abundance. Some of our earlier years here in Southeast Idaho saw some serious rainfall in the summer. The last few years have been dry, but given the uptick in spring snow, I wonder if we will also see rain coming down again as before? Summer is not far off, and we’ll soon know. This may be an important year to put in a garden, if the ground out there ever dries up enough that I can till it without losing the tractor into a quicksand-like bog.

The Forecast Improves!

This week we have snowfall coming till Thursday. After that, things stand to improve, and if the computer is to be believed, and is predicting it right, things will seriously improve!

As can be seen for the following week, we should see temperatures in the fifties! I think that with that, and a lack of precipitation, we could see the end of mud season!

The current temperature is kind of wintery, but for here, that is not true. This is early spring weather! Our records show what this place can really be like in the summers and winters, though those records are nowhere near normal cold temperatures. In fact, we are normally around 0F in the dead of winters. The recent years have brought us exceptional extremes. But whatever the case, at least for now, there is a tolerable improvement in the weather coming!

Our temperatures have been pretty insane over the last few years. Prior to July 2021, I would seldom see the mercury rise over the high 90’s. By seldom, I mean I don’t remember it ever having happened at all. I am pretty sure I saw the first time our area hit the 100’s since moving here a little over ten years ago. I cannot be so sure about those lows. But I can say that I have had this weather station installed since October 2018, and it has been keeping an eye on the weather every minute since. The only gaps have been where the computer failed, and I had some of the data saved in a separate database by the time I put a new computer in. There were no record setting extremes during that period that would have come down to what can be seen on our current records.

So, as the week progresses, I’ll be keeping an eye on the weather forecast, and hopefully we will see the prediction ring true, bringing us an end to mud season first and foremast, then an end to burning firewood, too!

And that’s the last thing I want to talk about here. Our house has only fair insulation and bad windows. Nonetheless, the forecasted weather for this week requires only a small fire burning in the stove. By Sunday we may not need to burn anything at all. So long as the sun shines in the day, and the house gets warmed by solar radiation in the days where the overnight low stays about 35F or above, we tend to not need to burn a fire. Given the wood remaining in the pile, I think we will be quite adequate for the year of the temps are taking a turn they intend to keep. Of course, there will likely be a drop here and there, but even those could keep us in snow and warm enough temps to be tolerable. Either way, it is certainly workshop weather!

A Passing Snow Squall in the Night

I woke up nearly at 2:00 AM last night. After tending to my personal reason for waking, I went back to bed, and checked the weather on my tablet. There were four weather alerts but two were about actual precipitation. The first was a typical winter weather advisory, and the second warned of a snow squall about to hit our place. Well, I have heard of blizzards and the like before, and seen them on occasion. But a squall? I may have been through them before, but the only way to know for certain was to stay up the fifteen minutes necessary to let this squall set in over us. Once the allotted time had passed, I checked out the glass of the balcony door. Looked pretty much like a blizzard to me! There was little visible but sheets of snow hammering down from the sky. I could see the neighbor’s house, and the people next to them while their light was on. But beyond that, nothing could be seen but the snowfall. It came down pretty steadily at about a 45-degree angle. It would have certainly laid down a lot of snow if it stayed around for longer, but it only lasted about an hour. Then we were back to a clear night with high cloud cover. Nothing to worry about.

By morning about three inches of snow topped what we already had on the ground from previous days. I cleared that from the dog walk and the mailbox approach with the tractor. It was light and fluffy. Would have been great for skiing in! As we are only about two weeks till the start of Spring, I sure welcome it! Go ahead and do your will, old sky. It’s not like we don’t need the snow to help us long!

My next task is to get the dehydrator going and put in some meat I got to make jerky with. It has marinated long enough by now, and I need to do this before it goes bad. I thought I had reports due for the school, but they are not due till next week. I won’t want to keep it till then, as it is my birthday then. It is a happy Sunday here on the farm!