Glens Falls (NY) Online Book Discussion Group discussion
Let's compare weather!
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Weather - What's YOUR weather today? (Part ONE - Started Sat., March 14, 2009) (Let's keep this going.)
We've had a bit of snow here in Glens Falls today, enough to stick, perhaps about an inch. Temp was in the single digits this morning. Brrr! It's currently 22.5 F at 6:23 PM.Interesting news about your goats, Jim. Keep us posted!
Today was fifty eight here and people were out in shirt sleeves;it was sunny and no wind. They were watering their lawns and riding bikes and going to parks. And then, on Saturday night here comes a cold front. The old saying, "make hay while the sun shines," is still true as Sunday evening it will be four degrees. Brrr! nina
Not real nice here today, overcast with a chill wind, but it's above freezing - about 40. I was able to pick Speedy's paddock up, the manure was only partially frozen. Then the dogs, goats & I went into the woods to yank honeysuckle off trees & I found a couple of saplings to make neat walking sticks out of. The goats loved it & stayed outside the backyard gate for a couple of hours waiting for me to come back out before giving up & going out with the horses.I found one really wild sapling, but I'm going to let it grow a couple/few more years. It come up out of the ground a couple of feet, makes a U parallel to the ground & continues straight up. The U is about 6" deep. It will make 2 neat canes in a few years. I'm working on one right now that has a very twisty top from honeysuckle wrapping around it.
Yuck. Now it's started to rain & the temp is falling. It's supposed to rain & turn to snow, then snow all day tomorrow. Let's hope it gets cold enough to turn to snow quickly & not turn to ice.We were supposed to go out to a friend's for dinner tonight, but we cancelled yesterday. They said we could spend the night if the weather got too ugly, but we have all these animals to worry about. He's on new meds for his Parkinson's, anyway.
Tomorrow's (Sunday) weather doesn't look good for us. The forecast says: "Snow, freezing rain, and sleet".
It is just sunset here in the Midwest. Omaha has 12 degrees, winds about 30 mph and blowing and drifing snow--about two inches so far.Below zero predicted for Sunday morning. Nasty.
Weather report; ten below zero wind chill for tomorrow..Brrrr in KS. nina
Temp is 34 F here and the snow and sleet has turned to rain. Keep warm everyone! Thanks for checking in.
Our rain of yesterday turned to snow somewhere in the wee hours. It was 37 when I went to bed, 27 when I woke up & it's been 24 ever since Marg & the dogs got up. We've passed the high temp for the day. Now it just keeps getting colder. Back into the single digits tomorrow night.Feeding was difficult this morning due to the freeze & wet. All the double end snaps we use to chain gates closed & hang water buckets with were frozen. There was enough wind that it was tough to keep a lighter lit under them long enough to thaw them. I had to do several by hand - bare hand slowly freezes while snap warms up. Yuck.
It's been snowing lightly all day, but we're supposed to get a real blast tonight. Possibly several inches of snow before the commute in the morning as the arctic air blasts in here with high winds & lowers temperatures more. Double YUCK!
I may not go to work tomorrow. I'll have to see what the roads are like.
Jim, I don't know how you do it, having to go out in the cold to feed the animals. Hope the roads will be OK for you tomorrow.
It will be easier when I get my Xmas present - a wool hat with ear flaps. I have a good fleece vest & my shop coat (a good, thick tweed sports coat from Good Will) is fine down into the teens, if I'm moving, but I don't like stretchy wool hats when it's wet out, so I wear the one in my picture here. It doesn't do much for my ears. As for the rest, that just comes with having animals. At least it's just twice a day, not like lambing time. That was the pits. Cold & up at least once a night to check on the ewes. There's nothing like getting out of bed at midnight or 2am & spending an hour in the cold, only to go back to sleep & get up back up at 5am. It's one of the main reasons I never wanted to be a farmer.
The Army just wasn't nearly as tough as most of the guys made it out to be. We usually got to sleep in until 5:30 or 6. No washing up in cold water or getting peed on in the middle of the night, either.
The same snowstorm that came through Jim's area reached here last night, and it's still coming down heavily. So our snow, which had actually seen significant melting by yesterday, is once again thick and deep; and our outside temperature is no more than 18 degrees. (It may be much colder --our digital thermometer that reads the outside temperature tends to misread on the high side.) At this rate, if Tony and Rebekah can come over for Christmas, he'll get to see enough snow to last him a while! :-)
I just got back in from feeding the animals while the owner of the company was calling me on my cell phone 3 or 4 times. Now I'm traumatized! ;-) He traveled & couldn't find his laptop. He did eventually, although why he was calling me to help him remember where he left it is beyond me. I was trying to get one of the gates open - the double end snaps were frozen & it's too windy for a lighter, so I was holding my bare hand on it to warm it up & trying to shield my hand from the wind. He called & I fumbled the cell as I pulled it out. My knee, soaked with snow hit the electric fence. Of course, I wound up hanging up on him, dropping the cell & my gloves into the snow. It was just an "Oh, #*%&$^!!!" moment.
It's cold & nasty out there! 15 degrees & a 25mph wind with snow blowing all over. Yuck! Poor Amber about froze to death. She's a small JRT with a very thin coat & I thought she would just go back into the house when she got cold. She looked like she was going to several times, but never did. While I was shoveling off the porch, I noticed she didn't yet again. The dog door was blocked. I guess the wind (which was up to about 30 mph with higher gusts) was blowing the dog door open, so Marg put the slider in. Poor Amber!
I did the animals because Lily did NOT get a reprieve. My wife insisted on driving her in to the vet. She took her truck which has 4WD & she's very careful, so I hope all is well. She probably wanted to do more Xmas shopping. I'm supposed to get at least the wrapping paper in from the barn today.
Marg just got back!
Oh, poor Amber! Hope she's OK. And everyone else too.Take care, Jim and Werner.
Amber survived, Joy. She wasn't even that cold. She hunkered down in a stall or the hay while I was mucking out & feeding. It's time to go get Lily. Now she's going to be miserable. She was spayed & had her hind dew claws removed.
I spent some quality time on the tractor this morning since Marg had to use 4WD to get in our lane. If that happens, she won't be able to get the bus in. The tractor started right up which surprised me in this cold. The tire chains were wonderful! They let me scrape off the snow pulling up the steep hill with nary a slip. It was COLD though. No place colder than the cockpit of an open tractor on a windy, cold day like today.
Jim, sounds like you and Marg are both keeping up with the weather.Hope Lily will recover quickly from her medical procedures.
PS-We're having snow flurries here. Hope that's all they are. The ground and cars are covered with a thin layer of snow. Temp is 28 F at 7:56 PM.
We are, Joy. Tired, though. The cold really saps the strength.Lily is curled up under my bed being miserable all by herself. She decided the top was too exposed, I guess. That's where she originally planted herself when Marg got her home, but after an hour, she went to the bathroom & then got under my bed. Poor thing.
Ugh! 3 degrees here this morning, at least there isn't any wind. Speedy's heated water bucket had ice forming in it. At least the roads were clear to get to work.
Jim wrote: "Ugh! 3 degrees here this morning, at least there isn't any wind. ..."Then I shouldn't complain about our 16 degrees this morning. Our snow accumulation overnight was 3 inches.
Hope Lily is feeling better today.
At least we only have a couple of inches of snow, although more is expected on Thursday. We're supposed to poke above freezing - a balmy 34 - then get rain. Yuck.Lily has removed her bandages on her hind feet. Why she didn't get a bell collar is beyond me, but I'll stop by & pick her up one tonight on the way home or else she'll chew out her stitches where her dew claws were removed. I think she's still miserable, but she was too sleepy when I left.
None of the dogs ever gets up when I leave the house in the morning. It's just too early to bother. They do get up with Marg at 5am, shortly after I leave so they can get fed, but then go right back to sleep until she comes back from her bus run around 9. Then it's time to get wild. Apparently Lily wasn't this morning, but that's all I know.
Hope you get the bell collar for Lily on time.Am currently watching on TV the cars stranded on the roads overnight during Canada's snow storm in Ontario. Hope no one froze to death. They say that over 300 vehicles were stuck. Below are links to articles about it:
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/ar...
http://thestar.blogs.com/weather360/2...
Excerpts:
========================================================
"'It’s the very localized nature of these snow bands that can fool motorists', the severe-weather expert told the Star."
"When the bitterly cold wind from northwest Ontario skids over the warm lake air, the squall erupts. This can mean more than five centimetres of snow falling an hour fed by high winds", said Coulson.
“'In Sarnia, the sun is shining. Fifteen miles east of here, there’s a blizzard,' said Tim Inchley, who runs the Petro Pass truck stop just east of Sarnia on London Line Rd."
=========================================================
Oh, those poor people. I may have mentioned this before, so skip it if I have:
I remember getting stuck in a blizzard back in 1966 (I think) on the New Jersey Turnpike after Xmas. We'd gone up to NY to visit relatives & got caught on the way back. Somewhere in NJ, we wound up spending the night along with a whole bunch of other people in an old farm house with 1 bathroom. I remember them carrying in a gal who had just gotten married. They had to cut off her wedding band because her hand got cold & then swelled as it warmed up.
It took us several days to get back to the farm. I think we made it back to our home town the next day & spent a couple more days there before the road was cleared. I remember my father walked the 2 miles through snow over his waist most of the way - over his head in others - to feed & water the animals. Turns out another neighbor had done it once, too. What a mess.
What an awful experience! At least you had good neighbors.We once were caught in a white-out on the Northway in Glens Falls. We couldn't see the road ahead at all and had to pull over until the snow squall was over. Other cars did the same. After it was over we drove on and we saw no signs of snow at all a few miles away. Amazing. Localized storms are fairly common around here.
My daughter sent me an email and said her two horses found shelter from our cold, zero yesterday morning, by standing by the lone cedar tree on her neighbor's property that borders hers. The property is for sale and she is hoping whoever buys it won't cut down the tree. Her horses do have a barn but they also like to go outside. I don't know why they would in this cold. Their names are Dasher and Sugar. Sugar is the male, Megan named him that because he is so sweet. nina
Cute names, Nina.As an aside, I recently learned that the names, "Donner and Blitzen" (Santa's reindeer), mean "thunder and lightening" in German and Dutch.
Snopes gives a complicated explanation of the derivation of the names:
http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christ...
WikiAnswers gives a shorter explanation:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_does_d...
"Donner (also "Donder" or "Dunder") = Thunder"
"Blitzen (also "Blixem" and "Bliksem") = Lightning"
That's interesting. I will pass that onto Megan. She named her first horse, Merlin after you know who. And when they sold the property where she had been keeping him for a soon to be built shopping center, the center was named Camelot. nina
Jim,I hope you and your animal family fares better by Christmas. Yes, cell phones can be a curse at times and a blessing at others. nina
Joy I scribbled the name of the Michael Caine memoir and now can't read my own handwriting. Heop. Please send it out again. I would like to read it. nina
Thanks, Joy. I am reading a memoir of James Michener titled, "The World is my Home." One of the passages I enjoyed was how he felt, actually devasted, when he received a bitter rejection from an agent he had approached in NY City to reprsent him. At that time he was working as an editor of text books at MacMillan and he had already sent the manuscript of his "Tales of the South Pacific," out. After laying down the letter from the agent to answer the phone he was amazed. The person on the phone informed him he had just won the Pulitzer Prize. nina
Nina, Michener's The World Is My Home: A Memoir (1991) sounds like an interesting memoir! Thanks for telling us about it.
That's showing the agent! Thanks for passing that along, Nina.Lily is miserable, but feeling better - if that makes sense. She wanted to go out & run around, although she's in pain, but some horrible person turned her into a cone head (me). She took refuge on Margaret's lap for a while which made watching TV pretty difficult for Marg. She didn't have the heart to move her though. Lily is now asleep on my bed since she can't fit under the bed any more. She can't get out of the dog door, either. And her ear itches, so we put some stuff in it to help, but it is cold & doesn't feel good at first. All of this is driving her nuts & making her thoroughly miserable.
Her stitches come out next Monday, so it won't last too long. I'll have to see how they stitched her. Normally I remove them, but this vet can get tricky sometimes. The job he did on Amber's lip was so complicated that I wouldn't touch it.
Jim, be sure that you let Lily get a drink of water now and then. Our jorji once had to wear a cone collar after surgery and I sometimes forgot that he couldn't get to his water.
It was -2F (-19C) here this morning. That is just too cold. And the new outlet I put in for Speedy's heated water bucket quit working. It's too cold to fiddle with though. Drat.We're supposed to warm up to the mid 20's (-4C) today & tomorrow might just go above freezing - just in time for some precipitation. That will be super ugly. I hate freezing rain.
Lily can get to her water, Joy, we did make sure of that. She didn't sleep all that well, though. She was miserable, so wanted to be held or at least cuddle, but tossed & turned all night. That meant I got hit with the cone too often. She stayed in bed after I left, although I offered to let her out. She barely cracked an eye at me. I'll bet she's going to be a handful by this afternoon.
Hang in there, Jim! After reading what you guys are going through, I don't feel nearly so sorry for myself when I just have to go out to the curb to set out trash for the garbage truck, and help put medicine in Princess' ears once a day. :-)
Oh, I'm just whining, Werner. It's quite livable, just a pain. From the looks of the latest weather forecast, it's supposed to get plumb ugly around midnight until late tomorrow morning. I might wind up not coming into work again tomorrow. Another day at home - that's tough. ;-)
Looks like it's bad all over, but Jim, you seem to be getting some of the worst of the weather. Temp was in the single digits here overnight. Right now it's 21 F at 10:51 AM.Hope Lily recovers soon.
The weather is supposed to get UGLY tonight. From a low of -3 F this morning, the temperature is slowly going up into tomorrow. We're supposed to get 3 - 5" of snow tonight & then, just in time for rush hour fun, the temp is supposed to break above the freezing mark & enjoy 1/2" of freezing rain on top. We'll see. The ground temp high tomorrow is right at the freezing mark. Then we go back into the low 20's & teens again for the next few days. I thought any warm spell was better than negative temps, but... well, YUCK!
I think I'll take the day off tomorrow.
;-)
Yes, Jim, stay home tomorrow and be safe. Sounds like you have very dangerous weather coming.
I'll see how it is in the morning, Joy. If the road crews can keep up, my drive in might be fine. Remember, I'm usually at the office by 5:30 am. There isn't much traffic then. The nastiness is supposed to be over before noon, so my drive home should be fine, too. I just pity the poor people trying to go in between 7 - 9am.
Well, I tried, but came back home after 5 or 6 miles. The rain started earlier than it was supposed to & we have just a thin layer of snow with lots of ice on top. Not as bad as the ice storm of Jan09, by any means, but it is ugly. Where the roads aren't plowed is better than the few (very few) places they did plow because the snow is holding a bit of salt so it's slushy. Where the snow was cleared off, it's a sheet of ice as the rain has washed away the salt & then frozen. I think the same thing is happening in the tracks where people have driven, but there hasn't been much traffic.
It's 28 degrees & still raining - until noon or a bit after. It's supposed to get a degree or two warmer & then go back into the low 20's or teens. I'm going to clear as little as possible until the rain quits. I suppose it will be a busy afternoon. Feeding & mucking out the barn is going to be a major chore this morning.
At least Lily slept well last night. We only woke up a couple of times. It should be interesting taking her for a walk this morning. It will be a short one. She has a very thin coat & I'm amazed the cold doesn't bother her more. Last time she got wet, she got very cold though. Speedy will be staying in his stall until the rain quits, too.
Hang in there, Jim. You were wise to turn back. Stay warm.
Our weather here is very similar to Jim's (as usual --we're a bit further east, and the weather patterns tend to blow in from the west). I never started for work today; they closed the college for the day before we could get our car dug out. Now the rain has stopped and the outside temperature here is rising, and should soon be above freezing, which will mean that our roads should become passable in the afternoon. But they'll surely refreeze when the temperature drops tonight!
Take care, Werner. It's good that they closed the college.Our temp here is 30 F. There is still a thin layer of snow in the yard. We have some icicles. :)
I dread the coming of icy or slippery weather to our area! If this December is a sign of future winter weather, we're in for a rough time.
Glad you got the reprieve, Werner. Marg did, too. No one said anything about me missing work, so I guess they don't care. They usually don't. I have a great boss. He knows I try hard & am rarely sick or miss work, so when I do, he understands.I worked hard & got the gates all unfrozen with the help of a propane torch & a shovel. I had to use the torch (carefully) to get into my truck. It was badly coated with ice, but so were the rest - just not that badly. I guess they got used once since the last storm while it didn't.
I used the tractor to grade most of the ice & snow off the lane, but still had icy tire tracks where I drove this morning & a few other spots. I salted them. It was 1pm before I got in for lunch.
Lunch was yummy - left over pork roast with sauerkraut & apple sauce. I love it when the roast soaks in with the sauerkraut for a couple of days. After finishing it off, I took an hour's nap. Ready to face wrapping presents & the afternoon feeding.
Lily made it out of the dog door in her collar while I was clearing the back porch. She busted it loose, but it went back together OK. She just HAD to get out. Darn dog. Skating around on the ice & hurting herself. She's still managing to lick & chew where her dew claws were removed with the collar on. Grrr...
I bet Lilly is thinking, "So there!" Doesn't sound like your are having fun. Reminds me of my sister in law taking her eight kids camping and en route she shouts, "shut up/you are having fun!" nina
LOL! Yeah, that's about right, Nina.I'm just glad I didn't drive. A friend of mine in MD just said his 30 minute commute is up to 2 hours & he's not halfway home yet. It just doesn't pay to drive in this weather.
Apparently the ice is so bad in this county that they've already closed the schools for tomorrow which is shocking. Usually they don't make a decision until late enough in the morning that some of their drivers are on the road. None of the surrounding counties have announced closings yet, either. I knew we got hit hard, but all this together says something about how hard. Glad they finally got some sense. Everyone is off school until 2Jan, now. Marg is happy & I'm sure all the kids are.
Sometimes someone make a correct decision. It is heartening. nina
Glens Falls (NY) Online Book Discussion Group
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It really is a gorgeous day, though. Marg thinks our goats might be pregnant. I think they're just fat. The only buck they've been around was 5 months ago, when they were 5 months old. That would be like a 12 year old girl getting pregnant - possible, but unlikely. We'll know by Xmas.