Category: Weather Talk

The Snow Is Nearly Gone

The farm is nearly clear of any snow, apart from the shadows and the like. The valley is still white, especially the mountain fronts. It is cold out there, with the wind still blowing, the temperature is 39, but with the wind-chill, it is 34 by feel. The sun is shining, but in that wintery, it doesn’t matter, kind of way.

I woke up feeling kind of rough this morning. I think it was the result of knocking the thermostat up a tiny bit last night. It felt a little chilly, which was probably perfect for sleeping. But I was just not quite sure the furnace was on at all. Maybe it was that middle of the night disorientation one gets. I wanted to be sure, as I am not the only one who sleeps up stairs! I nudged it, and it kicked on, and I went to bed.

It took a while to get back to sleep. I have a certain anxiety about money I have spent and the gap between seeing it leave my account, and seeing whatever I ordered arrive at my front door! I am still waiting on the lathe, and it still showed as arrived at Chicago, the start of day eight there.

I finally did get back to sleep, and not long after I did, I checked the tracking site again, and the status finally changed! It left Salt Lake City in route to the destination terminal! Or, in the parlance, to the local delivery company that will carry it from Salt Lake to my front door, hopefully by tomorrow! Yes, maybe tomorrow, it will be safely home. Then I can start learning how to make things on it for real rather than by watching YouTube videos, and wondering how the technique actually feels in the wood!

Me and my shop are ready for this little upgrade. I have been wanting to add a lathe for a long time now, but money and other things always got in the way. I finally just did it. I hope that it will be big enough for everything I want to make, while still being small enough that Missus will be able and willing to explore the art. She loves working on her tiny little lathe that turns a million miles an hour and loved to throw little blocks of wood at her. I hope that this will alleviate her of that danger by first being robust enough to hold the block in safely! I have an upgraded chuck on the way right now, too. I am not messing around!

I’d like to get some things cleaned up in the yard today, and drop them off at the salvage yard. With the first snow having already hit the ground, it is no good waiting any longer to clean up the messes in the yard from summer activities. I don’t want them frozen to the ground the way Christmas lights get frozen to the house sometimes, and un-removable till Spring! We put them down the walk one year early after we moved here, and used pigtails for electric fencing to string them along, above the ground. Those pigtails got stuck till April. I don’t love that.

I’ll finish warming up from morning chores, and get on the metal yard trip. It seems so early to be feeling tis cold! I will be working on firewood no doubt as the delivery truck arrives tomorrow or the next day.

First Snow, Autumn 2021

Last night the wind started, and eventually during the night the snow started to fall. By morning it was stuck to everything, and the wind was still going. The house was chilly, and wanting to be warmed up. So I went down to light the fire in the woodstove.

Did I mention that the wind was blowing, and the house was cold? I said, cool, didn’t I? Maybe it was cooler than that. Either way, the flu on the chimney was too cold to take a draught, and the wind was blowing down it. The wood was still a bit wet from the recent rains, too. Also, those wood shavings I am picking up off the shop floor are damp, or something, and a bit resistant to burning. I tried them anyhow, then paper from the butcher’s roll. Finally I went to get some of my kindling sticks and lit them. Now, that all sounds good and well, and maybe it seems understandable that so far some twenty minutes have gone by.

What was not reasonable was the amount of smoke that came out every direction from the stove! I could not get the least amount of it to vent up the chimney. It was as though the chimney was blocked completely! I could hear the wind still blowing outside, and according to the anemometer on the weather station it was running around 12 miles an hour with gusts of 17 or so. So it was going, but it was not too bad. But air just came down the chimney, and would not go out. I would get the fire going, and close the door, and it would go right out and start smoking out the stove’s intake. The house filled right up with it!

At last, I was about thirty minutes into this when the thermometer on the flue finally budged upwards a little, and as soon as it did, the smoke began to go up the chimney instead! So we aired out the house, which was not warm. We have had a good fire going since!

I have got a notification that the final stove parts will arrive on Thursday. I wonder how much of the smoke that came pouring into the house today would vent out through the intake if I got it hooked up properly? Or would it just leak and vent air into the attic or walls where the vent pipe travels?

The wind has continued, but the snow stopped early on in the day. It is 35 out right now, but with the wind gusting up just shy of 20, the chill factor is at 28. Nest week at this time it is meant to be in the mid 50’s again. Good time to get caught up on that firewood once and for all!

I am awaiting a call from Woodcraft to tell me the status of my delivery that is still stuck in Chicago. I worry that this very thing is a harbinger of why we live rural to begin with? Global trade is in danger, fuel prices are set to go up, and so are other fuels that are required for heating. This winter could be crazier than last! I just want to get my order here, and probably not order online like this again, at least for a while.

I don’t feel ready for this winter. I don’t think we are ready for such things as I suggested above, at all. I have put off the firewood for long enough. I don’t have hay yet, and I have not confirmed yet with my normal supplier that we will even get any from him, and at what price. I won’t bother him about it today as it is his birthday. I have never felt so close to a crash that is going to result in serious casualties and problems, as I feel now. And I don’t at all feel ready. This could be a tough winter. Hopefully the news and the analysts that inform the media are wrong. But hope isn’t enough to survive on if they are not wrong.

Beautiful Foggy Morning

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.

The Original Weather App

I am looking at the screen on my tablet and seeing that the weather information being provided by my weather station seems inaccurate when compared to the original weather app, the sky. I checked the computer, and it has got the same rain data as what has been uploaded to the internet. It shows nothing for rainfall accumulation over the past 24 hours. Now, I know that cannot be right. It has been raining! The weather station I follow that is down in the south end of the valley, a little over 20 miles as the crow flies, is showing rainfall accumulations of just under a tenth of an inch in the same time period. They get lake effect precipitation down there, but still, I would think that with the amount of noise I have heard on our tin roof, we would have registered some rainfall. I’ll have to get a ladder and go see what is blocking the collector, or if the little tipping spoon is stuck. All of the other data is coming in, so that rules out a dead battery.

Last night when I went to bed, there was a decent lightning storm overhead. I’d like to say I watched it for a while, but I tend to fall asleep when my head hits the pillow. Luckily, I am up at six in the morning this morning, and there is another one hovering above. Rain seems to have woke me up this morning.

According to the forecast, I have till Monday at the latest to finish cleaning the chimney. But I have already cleaned the top portion from the roof, including the spark arrestor, and everything down to the 90 in the masonry. I just need to vacuum the 90, and brush the black pipe from it to the stove. I also replaced the gasket on the door, a lot easier job than I thought it might be before I had ever done it. The worst of it was cleaning up the old silicon from the shallow channel the gasket sets into. So apart from about eight or nine feet of pipe, we are ready to go with the stove, and next week’s lows are meant to reach down to the mid 20’s. The mornings at least will want for a fire to warm the house. The midday sun never overheats the downstairs on this house, except in the hottest of summer days. Old Man Winter, on the other hand, holds a mighty grip down here without the aid of a fire to keep us warm.

Finally, I am awaiting the arrival of my new lathe for the workshop. It made it to Chicago, and has apparently stopped in transit there. Today is the third day the transport company’s horse has rested. I called them yesterday, but the agent could only attach a memo. She said then she expects it will be delivered on Tuesday. Sooner the better! I am eager to get to work! There is a lot to learn. There is a lot to make! I have pieces lined up in the shop that I want to replicate. Those will help prepare me to start making my own, and then replicate entire furnishings from days gone by.

Finally, weather being what it is, suddenly, I guess it is best time for me to get the firewood pile finished. Maybe we will have a more normal winter? ’17 was rough. That one gave us a lot of snowfall. Cache Valley wise, it is due for another.

Today’s Been Cool

With a cool day on us, I took it fairly easy today. I did a run to the dump to drop off some boxes and junk that needed to part ways with us, then ran to the store a moment. After that, it was home again, and lunch and then the girls had class and I took off out back to sort out something.

We have a bunch of really ratty old windows from the 80’s, aluminum frames and double panes with massive water stains between them. They were beyond hope, and beyond ugly. Not worth putting to use anywhere, even a greenhouse. So, I shot them. My youngest wanted to be out there to watch it happen. Well, I have a fairly powerful pellet gun for sorting out predators that can’t be sorted out any other way, and I know better than to foolishly have a kid running around while shooting. So I took care of breaking out the glass from the aluminum frames with the pellet gun while my youngest was in class. I still have not told her, either. Most of it was tempered glass, but there were two panes from large old sliding doors that would not break, and the shot unexpectedly ricocheted off it like one in an old west movie. I was glad she was not there for that! I’ll clean up the glass tomorrow and get the aluminum up to the salvage yard soon.

I did some practice work in the woodshop tonight. I did some dovetails and I made a concealed mortice and tenon joint. They are rough, but they are better than my first attempts, and not as good as the next ones I will do.

The weather will be cooler tomorrow. I better go shut off the frost free hydrant so it does not get inclined to burst on us where the water is stopped in the water timer attached to it. No good having to fix a busted water pipe right now!

Two Pigs Sold

Today the people who bought the pigs the other day came to pick them up. That’s two down and two males to go, which is great, because they cannot possibly become pregnant or get any other thing on the farm pregnant, either. There is no way we get swamped with pigs again! No more worrying about that fence between the pens. And I have moved the two males into the pen the females were in, which is more secure, so no more worrying about the boys getting out! The guys who picked up the girls today said that in a week or two they expect one of their friends to come and get the males from us, too. I will keep them listed, of course, but if he does, that is good enough for me.

I think that per pound, pigs are by far the most expensive animal to keep on the farm. For four small pigs, we were buying eight 80 pound bags of feed at about $16 each per month. That works out to about $128 per month before Uncle Sam puts in his bill. They were eating a little over 5# per day by that reckoning. I am sure glad to have this at least part way off our feed bill. There is enough in the bins right now for the pigs to go a full month from now without buying more. This coming new month will be pretty cheap compared to where we were in the springtime!

After I moved the boys into the girl’s pen, I took their old pen apart, and gave the llama pen more space for now. I am using the old fence from the pen to reinforce some of the weak points in the property boundary fence. I was able to put both of the water barrels into the pen with the boys, and I will repurpose the extra house for the dog to use in place of the one he has had. Hopefully that will be a huge improvement for him!

Finally, a quick mention. The temperatures are going to drop over the next two days, with the highs in the 50’s and the low’s dropping into the low thirties, even below freezing! Nice way to ring out summer!