Category: Forecasted Weather

And Tomorrow It Really Sets Off!

We woke up to a bit of snowfall on the farm today. I did my usual wake up, check the news and the weather, but even after seeing there was a chance of snow this morning it didn’t really hit me. I stumbled out of bed and over to the full-length window on the balcony door, and there it was. Large snowflakes falling with a decent amount of force. No messing around, this was snow! It was coming down! I caught the photo above after I came downstairs, and the snow had almost stopped. But that weather forecast said that the real snow would be falling this time tomorrow. So, there’s that to look forward to.

The mud still lingers under this mess of snow. It was starting to harden up a bit yesterday, and there were beginning to be places where the tips of the muddy mess were starting to turn dry and earthlike in appearance. Despite all that, the drive up the side of the house is still possessed with a spot of basically quicksand that wants to swallow the tractor right up. I can’t get past it. The car is dead next to it and needs to be pulled out to even try. It’s just not been that important that I want to do that yet. But soon. We have been getting to the point where we can walk the muddy yard and not lose our balance on slippery mud at the surface, but it was more a cake of mud that was traversable. At least before this very recent event.

Lucky there’s things to do out of the house today. I can go on, and not worry about it. A few parcels due for delivery will take up my afternoon as I explore the new things I have coming. I also have a daughter who has a report we are working on for school. So there is plenty of diversion from what is essentially depression at this point. More than half of the yard near the house is inaccessible. That makes some chores quite a lot harder to do, and who wants that when there is a tool that is supposed to make them easier sitting out front? There are also so many spring chores I am very eager to get started! But those are constantly being pushed back by this mud hold. Snow today. Snow tomorrow. I keep my eye on the large pond that has covered most of the field behind and to the side of our house, hoping it will sink into the ground and go down. If it stays, it puts a serious impediment on getting a new septic system put in. While I am so glad we have water again here in the west, I needed it to be dry like it has been in order to get that done early in the season.

I got external mics for the GoPro setup yesterday. I should now be charged up and ready to make videos where I can actually walk away from the camera, and still be heard. Basically, there is no excuse. We are set to make halfway decent videos for YouTube. Just need to invent content, now. Oh, and have something to so.

The Day Has Arrived!

It is with tremendous satisfaction and great happiness that I can now announce that the day has arrived! We are finally set to see temperatures up in the forties and fifties. The forecast at the moment shows a few days that will dip in the mornings to below freezing. Apart from that, we look set to have actual springtime weather! The fields around us are still frosty and white, and covered in a fair amount of snow. I have heard some farmers are complaining about a late start to the year, and how that may affect hay prices. I have also heard it said that this is how winters here used to be. Seems conflicting. But as the precipitation we have had seems to have put a dent in the drought conditions, I sure welcome it! Hopefully the reservoirs will hold enough I can recklessly grow a garden this year!

A note on precipitation, I notice the forecast shows none of that coming at all. That is a real change from recent weather! We could use the chance to dry out! The ground is saturated, and the water table is high! It is showing itself around the house, right in our own yard! So I am happy to see a break. Mud season has been hell this year! I can barely get my tractor back to get hay from the stack. We have new trailers that are stuck in the front of the house due to the mud, too. I could not possibly drag them back to put them away. But that’s okay. There is some work yet to be done on them before they are ‘put away.’

Even though it got cold last night, I woke up to a morning when the pools of water around us are steaming, and hopefully showing signs of evaporation in the sunlight.

Missus is squeezing in some time during work hours at home to do some spinning on her spinning wheels. I have to say, she has really improved so far this spring. She has gone from art yarn to something narrow and consistent in its appearance. I am pretty proud of her! I hope she is well proud of herself, too!

It is grandson’s weekend over, and he has spent the night a day early due to his mother and father’s involvement in a friend’s wedding. Right now, it is time to go fight with him over his attitudes about getting dressed in the morning. Oh, the joys and trials of being five!

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!

It’s Amazing How Tired…

A fella can get from driving down to pick up a trailer, then another one. The trip was maybe 40 miles each way, but the driving and maybe the stress takes a toll on the old body. It is the arthritis playing me up, for sure.

But the point is, Missus has a new trailer to take to the Farmer’s markets, and I got one to put the tractor on.

A nice box trailer with a ramp on the back to make a mobile shop for Missus to use at the Farmer’s Market’s and out front of the house. This will allow her to set up a shop space without the month-to-month cost that I believe can kill a small business.

This flatbed trailer should help in many ways! It has stake pockets so I can build sides to keep long logs on it, and it has D-rings and ramps so I can load the tractor on it. I’d like to put a winch on it to load a dead car, truck, or tractor onto it.

Both trailers seem good, with solid jacks and decent LED lights. The electrical connectors are great compared to the other trailers I have, and the chains and spare tires are very nice. The rigs feel adequate for their purposes.

So, I suppose at this moment, I can hire out for tilling for spring gardens if anyone needs it. I should also be fine to do box blading, and post hole digging. I don’t really want to do junk haulage and have to pay out of my citizen’s account to unload at the dump for others. But I do want to get firewood and logs for milling on the trailer and bring them around to the house to work on.

So that’s where I think we’re at. We have more projects to handle now, since these trailers need a bit of customization to complete them. And right now, the mud is so bad, I cannot even take them to the back of the house or over to the designated trailer parking to get them off the front drive. It’s storms for the next few days, then we have warmer temps finally passing through! I’ll have plenty to do once the ground finally dries up!

Candle Making & Etc…

I have one of the crock pots full of wax and heating on the stovetop right now. The candle molds are waiting next to it. I have the wick out and ready to be cut then primed. My ten-year-old is doing her schoolwork, then she will be joining me to learn how to mold the candles for use. It is a part of her Homestead Economics class lesson. When these are done, we have the option of selling them, or using them ourselves. It is the using them ourselves that has me tempted to get some lovely bright candle lanterns from Townsends. Getting enough of them to be really useful would be expensive. But I would like them that much, and that is a thing.

& Etc…

I have not yet received any shipping confirmation on the sawmill. I still have not had any buyer’s remorse, either. I need to figure out where to put it, and I am working on ideas for that. If nothing else, I can put it on the other side of the street and have all the room I need to work all I want. I think if I had ordered an industrial mill, I would. But as a hobby mill, I think I would be more content with it on this side of the street, where I can use it with a bit more ease, and less of the officialness of leaving for work, as I would feel I would do if I were to cross the road.

A lot of my concern is the workflow of the mill. There will be logs to go in, lumber to come out, and off-cuts and sawdust to manage. I would prefer to use the tractor rather than a log deck to load the mill with. I want to stack the lumber straight into stickers, and onto bolsters. I think I have the flow worked out, and the position of things in relation to the mill itself. I guess I’ll have to go out with a measuring tape and confirm my ideas.

& More…

It snowed last night. WE got maybe 2 and 1/2 inches of it! Things were looking like they would clear up, and suddenly we are back under it again. Despite that, it was not a cold night. I burned wood, but not a lot of it. The temperature out right now is 36F. It feels fairly nice. That should tell all about the winter we had, when I was outside a bit ago in a short sleeve T-shirt and feeling quite nice.

According to the forecast, we are in a similar, though gradually cooling state till Monday. After that, the weather will come back up again to what it has been over the last week or so. It looks like we are on track for plenty of spring snow. I have no complaints about that. The more water that gets relocated to our area, the better things like hay prices ought to be. Really, everything else, too.

& A Little More

So, what’s the point of the mill? Part of it is living independently. It’s about being able to make whatever we need here on the farm rather than having to buy everything online. My arthritis is too bad to let me build a saw pit and saw lumber with a big old hand saw, but I can buy a mill, and saw trees down to boards and cants and posts, and whatever else I want. The wood species are a bit limited around here, but since I started splitting my own firewood, I have never run into having none of any kind. I have often had access to rather large logs and even whole trees. So why wouldn’t I want to take advantage of that? Furthermore, there are a few things that Missus wants that I am better off trying to build myself than looking for to buy. A single weaving loom of a certain size would cost as much as the mill did. A few smaller ones would certainly pay for it, too. So why not build it and make several and she can sell some? I also would be happy to operate as a neighborhood mill, making lumber for folks close by who need it. Small neighborhood operations are how the world once worked, and what we want it to come back to. We are trying to get to that.

End of February Update.

It is definitely still winter here at the farm. We have good chances of snow for most of the coming week. Looks from the weather radar that whatever does come will likely have to form, as nothing closer to the west coast seems to be heading our way. It was warm today, though! We got up to 38F according to our weather station.

The SDR Radio I got the other day worked as expected. I got it running that day and played around with it, then delivered the second one to the desktop computer upstairs but did not yet set that one up. It’s fascinating how it can read or see the whole spectrum, and portions of it visible at once to tell where different signals are and have a hint to what kind they are. FM Radio signals are amazing, especially where they have digital encoding on both sides of the frequency. Even stations without that digital encoding are amazingly powerful compared to the rest of the spectrum. I will have to work on reception and an improved arial.

The tractor reached 200 hours yesterday. That’s just shy of five months! I cannot believe we are coming up to five months of ownership already! It still seems new to me. Most of its work here has bene snow clearing, but as soon as the weather breaks to spring, I think it will see a total shift! I may move big snow piles into the orchard just to get the trees started for the year. I may have to move a lot of hay off the garden and start it for tilling. I want that space tilled four or more times prior to planting in May and June. There will be post holes to dig, too. I am going to have to reset some fencing and clear some old areas out. Then there is the firewood. I don’t expect to muck about with that this year, since I want to be two years stored by autumn, and since I want to have a load of wood to work with. I hope to see this whole area of my chores severely altered to what it has been in previous years.

I got the second GoPro camera that I have been thinking about. If I am going to do a YouTube channel, then this setup I have is good enough to do it with. I would benefit from a lavalier mic, but I have a separate sound recorder that can also do the trick for now. I’ll have to give it a try. I am having a card reader delivered so I can put one on my laptop and one on my desktop to unload videos and edit. I have tried out the GoPro cloud, and I am not terribly thrilled with any of it, apart from the discount they offer to users while shopping. I’d rather keep the filed local, I think. Then I’ll only upload final cuts to the Internet. I have yet to see any real advantage apart from having apparently all the space I need to keep every crap video file I make. That may turn out to be the seeds of a problem. But who knows? Maybe in the next few weeks I’ll get a video created and uploaded to the channel again.

Mondy is anticipated to be the day we have our deli slicer delivered. I have been wanting a proper one for many years now, and we have what appears to be a decent one on the way. It is a Berkel 300 Redline. I am a little worried about it after seeing the shipping details. For whatever reason, it is listed with a shipping weight of 122 pounds. I am having trouble believing that, but I worry that I believe wrong. I guess we’ll see what it is like when it gets here. But honesty, how can a home line slicer weight so much? Maybe they packed it in a wooden crate?

I have very few hand tools left in my wish list now. A shipment arrives also on Monday. It is just a few things, and while there are a couple more planes to be desired, I think I have enough to get a real start in my workshop. Spring will give us access to the barn for cleanup, and to rearrange our storage. I have a permanent wall to fix into the old garage door of my shop. That wall wants a window built into it for some heat and light. Missus has a kiln on order that also wants a home in the shop.

So, a lot is going on this year. I think we will be able to reach closer than ever to self-sufficiency. I have always said that it is a very expensive state to reach. On the upside, I am where I can start building some of the remaining tools I need. I am even considering building my own travishers. I’ll still have to buy the blades, but the handles and bodies will save me around $100 each. That’s not small potatoes. Small potatoes come from my garden.

There you have it! An end of February summary. That’s what’s going on, and where we are at, and where we are going for the moment. I am excited to be at the point in life where I feel like I finally have a life, and all the things that that entails. Having moved country twice and other events that have left me with next to nothing, it is a hard thing to recover from. But I feel quite like I have arrived. Everything else is just improving things up and building equity. For me, that’s a good place to be. Oh, and I am about two weeks short of my 52nd birthday.

SDR Radio & Storm

This afternoon a pair of SDR’s arrived at the farm. SDR is Software Defined Radio. It is a broad range radio receiver that uses software on the computer to operate it. It allows a graphical display of the frequencies on the radio spectrum. This gives the user a better idea of where to look in order to get a signal, and it allows far more than just broadcast radio reception. It is interesting and seems fun.

I got it set up pretty easily and started tuning it to find some familiar stations. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, I found the local National Weather Service frequencies, and got bombed with the first I had heard of a coming storm. The regular Internet sites I use for weather said there was a chance of snow for tomorrow, and that it would probably snow on Wednesday. The National Weather Service alerted me to a storm positioned north of us and heading our way.

The Winter Storm Warning in effect calls for about seven inches where we are, though that could be higher or lower. There is wind called for up to 65 miles an hour, though I am not sure it will come here, or go East of us to Wyoming. It is not promising. The mountains will get clobbered. Of course, we have a kid on the road right now, trying to get to his house before the storm overcomes him. He will be home at his current rate before there is much accumulation, though he is already getting hit with some wind and snow where he is at.

All of the NWS stations are playing the same warnings in our area. It is currently 35F on our farm, which no doubt means snow. One more degree drop, and any precipitation can convert to the white stuff. I have to get up at 3:00AM tomorrow. I’ll see then what it looks like. It may be a tough day of work for the tractor. One thing for certain, we are better prepared than ever for this.

Weather Underground map of the storm. We are north of Ogden, Utah at the border of Idaho.

We have the hay covered and the wood in for the night. Let’s hope it is enough! Time to hunker down.

Record Cold

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.

Here Comes a Tough One

It sure was cold this morning. The temperature at 8:00AM was 15, but the wind chill had it at -2. The good news is, tomorrow morning will much colder. The forecast calls for a windchill of negative 30. We will see! But for today, preparations, preparations.

I got the firewood in, and we have extra in place within reach of the woodstove, in a barrel on the front porch. If it is too cold tonight, especially upstairs, the we may all sleep downstairs and keep the stove burning. There is space for everyone.

I had a look at the plane iron I was messing with the other day, and I have to say, I can see the dull bits on the blade. I do need to establish a good secondary bevel on it. I suspect that when I do, it will sure cut a lot better. But I was out in the shop in my heavy winter overalls and coat. It is no time to be messing about with things like that out there.

Things on the way for the shop at the moment: A bandsaw, two chair making books, several mats for keeping my back from hurting so much, a scorp, and an adze. In theory, I still may need a couple of spoke shaves, a V-gouge, and a travisher. I’ll also need some milk paint, and some cheap brushes, and a surface finish. At that point, I think I’ll have nearly everything I need to try my hand at making a Windsor Chair. I want to get started as soon as it is warm enough, and I can find some wood to do it with.

I have been watching some videos on YouTube on how to do it. There is a lot of work in one chair. But I think it could be better than fun, and reasonable to do. I also would very much like to make some for the house. After that, I think selling others would be just fine. The tools and the knowledge are on the way!

The evening is setting in. It is 20 minutes till 6:00PM. The temperature is currently 8 degrees, with the wind blowing at 13 miles an hour, gusting to 19. That leaves it feeling like -6F. The temperature is meant to drop all night long till it bottoms out around 7AM, Weather Underground says it should be about -10 by then, with the wind chill at -20. All we can do at this point is hope the best for the animals.

Going to Get Colder!

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!