Taken just last week while waiting for the girls to come out to get a ride to the bus stop for school. Not cold enough to snow overnight.
These winter nights get down to the low 20’s, mostly. But there is seldom snow. We have had rain overnight lately. The days light up and the temperatures come to the high 30’s and sometimes even the mid 40’s. I have said for a while that this place would be more tolerable if the temperatures were more like Denver when I was growing up near there in the 1980’s. This year it has been trying it on.
Snowfall has been minimal. What has come down lately has melted quickly, and the older stuff from earlier in the year has left some remnants, especially where the snow has been piled up from clearing driveways. Rain and snowmelt has kept the ground muddy. I worry about the tractor getting stuck in the mud, especially in the Service Yard and the area of the driveway right in front of it. Water has trapped there, and the mud is deep.
So this winter’s conditions are such that the firewood is lasting despite being a minimal pile, but the ground does not support outdoor work due to this being an ancient lake bottom. A few days have got warm enough to put a fire in the stove in the shop and work out there on a couple of small projects. Based on the time of year, it won’t be too long till I can easily be out there daily. It certainly doesn’t feel right for having just passed mid-winter a little over a week ago. That is what makes everything a bit uncertain! Really, we could dive into typical cold weather or be inundated with typical spring snow.
I had a look online yesterday for arial photos of our place and found some as early as 1956. That showed where a couple of buildings once were on our property. I’ll be using the information to do some metal detecting later this year. There was one out on this side where I have found some metal last year by the northwest corner of the garden space. There was actually two across the street. One looks like a garage right about where the gate is now. I’ll like to look again to see how far from the roadside. In the 1956 photo the swale at the bottom of the pasture at the back of the property across the road was fresh dug with nothing growing on top of the piles of excavate. It was only by the 1974 image that the house was set on a single acre of land this side of the street. The property over the road has evolved a bit over the years with what looks like a small dwelling and a stand of trees right across from the house, but at the back, by the canal. It’s all interesting stuff, and I am glad I happened upon the sites that host these photos.
The wood pile seems like it will last till spring. We are not burning as much as we would normally be this year. I am not sure it would be too much trouble to go down and get more wood if I needed to. I am not panicked about it. I do worry about how hot this summer will get, but all we can do is ride it out and see.