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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
Previously our record cold temperature was -9F. It was set on New Year’s in 2019, I think. Since the weather station keeps the all-time record readily available, I cannot look up the second coldest, and third, and so on. That got bumped recently to -11. That record was set a couple of weeks ago. I was kind of proud of it. But even more recently, during a cold snap that hit us this week, we hit a new all-time record of -21F just yesterday. The forecast called for it, then set us up to immediately get into a warming trend that would bring us back up to normal temperatures in just three days or so. I trust lawyers and weathermen just as much as I trust car salespeople. Especially as much as I do sat here now at around 2:00AM the next day, monitoring the temps and our water pipes. An hour ago, we hit -23. It went up since then to the old record of -21 when I got up feeling the briskness in the house. Typically, one can expect the coldest part of the day to happen around sunrise. That gives us about five hours or so to reset this record again.
Out of interest, Peter Sinks hit a low yesterday of -42.56F. Peter Sinks is 20.82 miles from our house at a heading of 70.22 degrees. It holds the record for second coldest place in the lower United States at -69.3F, recorded in 1985. The coldest on record is at Roger’s Pass in Montana which in 1954 recorded a comparatively bone chilling -69.7. Peter Sinks is a geographic feature in the northern Utah mountains near Bear Lake. One can think of it as a sort of dish shape that collects falling cold air in its bottom. Trapped there, the air cannot fall out and dissipate, so as more cold air falls in from the atmosphere, it just gets colder and colder.
2:35AM just passed by, and we hit -24F. That ancient record has been edged out.
When I woke up about half an hour ago, I found the woodstove had a couple of logs in it that were putting up a decent fight against the cold. There was room for some more, so I went out to the stash on the front porch to bring in some more. I had nearly emptied the bunk in the house with the couple I added to the stove. I can only imagine for now that the logs I had found burning away in it were added by a chilly Missus who must have been up recently. The girls and I are sleeping in the living room again tonight, which is the room next to where the stove is. Despite all the stove’s effort, it is chilly in here. Of course, under the massive comforter I have wrapped around me, that chill is not so menacing. I hope the girls have enough blankets to prevent the assault. They both have their heads under, so I would guess they are a little chilly. The older one recently awoke and pulled another over her, then fell back to sleep. I may have to trek upstairs to get them each one or two more.
With the record set yesterday, and our all-time high on my weather station of 104F, that put our temperature spread to 125 degrees. Obviously, that is going to be a bit greater by morning. -25F has already slipped by us in the time I spent typing, and I think it is fair to expect -30 to go by before the sun rises. It is 2:50AM and I think I am going to get up and boil the kettle for Missus’ 3:00AM wake up, get those blankets for the girls and encourage the woodstove to flex its muscles.
I must have put too much wood in the woodstove because it has warmed up outside to -24. Missus is up and quickly on her second cup of tea. She says I used too small a cup for her first. I checked that water was running at a drizzle in both of the bathrooms. I brought some wood in from the stores on the front porch, too. The dining room made it up to 75 when I let the stove run up to the maximum safe operating temperature. Missus’ craft room and office is surprisingly warm for running one of those heat panels and the fan blowing air in from the dining room only to keep it warm. Meanwhile, I continue my temperature record watch party of one. It’s at -23. Maybe I ought to just go back to sleep if we already set the record. Nothing but boring now. What a laugh!
After 4:00Am now, and it has warmed up to -22. Still colder than yesterday. It could go either way from here, but I am going to sleep through it, whatever it does. It is time to go reclaim the joy of being in dreamland. What fun it has been to see this shocking cold! Not from out in it, mind! I am quite happy to remain here in the house!
It is coming up to 10:30AM now. It bottomed out this morning at 6:10AM at -26F. That’s a record on my weather station. Right now, I have the block heater on the tractor so I can try to use the tractor to jump start the truck. That’s how it is today. I hope we will see the temperatures warm up as the forecast predicts it will over the next few days.
After our previous report about the cold, today was playing out to be a mellow day when a friend of mine texted and asked if we thought we were going to be in the range of the negative temperature storm heading into the US. I had no idea what he was talking about. Then I saw two of the kids were messaging and I looked at the video one posted, and there was my answer. I think you will look back upon this as the Christmas Freeze of 2022. Whatever it gets called, it’s going to get very, very cold. We are anticipating windchills as low as -25F, and we are only going to get brushed by the arctic air as it barrels into the US from Canada in the next 48 hours or so. Wind gusts here are expected to reach 50 mph, but I will be the first to admit that the wind never reaches up to what is anticipated. I suspect based on normal weather predictions compared to reality, we will see wind gusting to 35 mph. That at about 2F is enough to still make it a hellish cold.
I spent three and a half hours today working with our animals that live outside, and prepared them with food, bedding, water, and whatever I could to keep them out of direct wind and show. We are meant to get snow starting tonight, then going on till the day after tomorrow. Again, all we can do is wait and see. But this is going to goof with a lot of people’s travel plans over Christmas, including the kid who posted the video in Messenger who has to travel back home from where he works in another state. He’s excited. He already has the record among people I know for longest commute to work, four days, when we went to work this last week. All of that was due to weather, too.
Well, it is tired time, and I am going to go to sleep. Will probably be clearing snow tomorrow afternoon, or the next morning. It’s going to be interesting!
Today we wrapped presents for Christmas and cleaned up that mess. Missus was up from 5Am and took a nap after we finished. That is when things took a slightly strange turn. I went out to change the gate from the old fence panel that was on the front of the pasture across the street to a green gate that was on the front fence of the house, but I had replaced with a grey wire filled gate. It was while I was doing this that I noticed a car parked down the road. The car stayed a bit, then drove further down, then turned around and came back up to the other side and parked again. I carried on working, and it came up and turned around close to me, then went down a little and parked again. It then drove down again, and parked. I watched from the house when I finished the gate, and someone got out and seemed to dump something along the side of the road. Then they parked on the other side again and more dumping on that side of the road. The kind of thing carried on for probably 45 minutes in all that I was able to see. During this time, I also saw the man in the car get out and ring the bell on the neighbor’s house, and the woman got out and went into his yard and waved and clapped her hand at our animals behind the neighbor’s house. It was all very strange. They finally left about 11:30AM.
I can tell you they were city people. The guy got out and shook the wire on the electric fence. He’s lucky it is not working at the moment. I think I will get it going again, in case they visit again. Maybe tomorrow.
After I got the gate changed, I took a rope over and chased down the female llamas. I stayed at the middle of the field while turning my attention to the girl who was leading the run. I kept after her till she wore down and finally made a mistake and went into the pen at the gate crossing the canal. That’s when I finally shut her in and put the rope on her. I made it into a harness and led her and the other llama both across the street, the second one just following the first with no lead on her at all.
I moved the trailers to the back of the house along the fence line. They both fit into the space where the big pig used to have her small pen. That gets them both out of the way bit also in a space where they should be easy to put away, and easy to get out to use. I might be converting that old horse trailer into a mobile chicken coop for the field across the street though.
Those jobs kept me busy till around 4PM.
After all that, I put the male llamas and horse onto the whole field. They will have plenty of feed available till the snow covers it all enough they cannot hoof it. I will be feeding them sooner than that though.
I did all my chores and went in for the evening, happy to put my feet up and sit with the dog in my chair.
So that’s the llamas across the street for the season and on bought hay.
Also of note, it was as high as 52F today, lovely and sunny and warm. This week there are four days with snow possible. But today and the recent days remain mild and nice.
When I rolled out of bed this fine Sunday morning, it was pretty clear rom here to the mountains. But there was a low mist visible, and I remarked to Missus that it looks almost like we have our fog back. Within half an hour or so, we did! It is one of the things I have always loved about where we live!
The first time I came to Cache Valley for longer than a quick visit, I was taken by the fog, the “pea soup mornings;” as I called them then in a poem I wrote for my then girlfriend, now wife. The fog was thick, and the mornings mystical to me. Mountain fog is not the same as the coastal fog I experienced in my youth in California. It doesn’t seem to reliably roll in and roll back out again, the way the coastal fog would seem to do. Instead, it has to sort of burn off, or dissipate, when it feels the urge to. It also seems to often come with the sun, such as this morning when the wet ground seemed to have produced it in the first place as the sun came over the mountain.
It’s chilly, not cold, but after a vote, I put a fire in the stove, and can see it’s warm glow from where I am sat typing this. It is time to get to work on that firewood pile for winter, and finish up the cutting, splitting, and stacking. There is not enough prepared yet! It is time to consider going down to get more for our supplies, in case we do stay here next year, too. I also can start looking for wood to turn on the lathe! The weather is changing early this year, I think. I’ll check my weather station records to confirm it. If I am wrong, that usually puts my mind to rest. I think we are predisposed to think the current year is generally worse in some way to the previous ones.
Days like today remind me of what it is I love about living here in Cache Valley. They remind me of an old friend since gone, who would look overcome with love and warmth and joy when he would speak of the place. He grew up here, and told me long before I ever came here that it was the most beautiful place on Earth. It may not be, quite, but it is the most beautiful place that is not set aside as a preserve, and where someone could actually live. I wish so much that he was still here to enjoy it! I would love to have his company here, and a friend here.
I walked out to get the firewood, and was immediately struck by a phenomenon I have never before seen. There was a rainbow in the fog just distant, and the diffusion of light between me and it made it appear white. It was a white rainbow! I have seen circular ones, and I have seen moonbows, and I have seen one on an apparently sunless morning. I still never quite figured that one out. But to see one appear white, with only the slightest hints of any color at all, was amazing.
