Gun deer season starts tomorrow and there are lots of people in the area.
We had a light covering of snow overnight and very cold temps are predicted for the weekend.
As we move toward winter, you will want to visit the Big Snow Page for weekly weather reports and area updates.
I’ll see you back here in the spring.
thanks for visiting,
RJB
Greetings and welcome!
I think that last Friday and Saturday were the real peak of fall colors, but the show continues to be good. Late last week the early maples and some of the later colors crossed and it was quite a show.
Now a lot of the really early stuff has passed and we are seeing more of the aspen/cottonwood yellows and the oaks with their red and rust brown. There is still a lot of green out there, so the color will continue for the short term. Here is a picture that I took on the way to work a couple of mornings ago.
As you can see, the trees are still pretty full with leaves, and there is more color to come.
The weather this weekend looks ok. There is a chance of rain tonight and into Saturday, but it looks like about 1/3″ of potential rainfall. There is a storm to our west that is expected to move up into Canada, and we are in the path of the tail of it that reaches to the south as its moisture tap.
The models are showing me the rain coming in the early morning hours and probably being finished by mid or late afternoon Saturday. As I mentioned, the QPF on the rain is probably 1/3″, so it doesn’t look heavy. If it will unfold as just a few showers or a damp drizzly day I don’t know.
The NWS is also looking at a little wind for tomorrow. The forecast has S-SE winds at 8-13 possibly gusting to 20.
It is my opinion that a little overcast and some wet weather is actually good for looking at the fall colors. It offsets them against the overcast sky and makes them more vivid.
I just saw a graphic on TV that said that today is the 19th day of above normal temperatures. It has been in the 70s all week this week and probably will be again today. According to Athelstane Weather, our normal high/low for today is 56/36.
That warm fall weather will screech to a halt mid-week next week. There is a pretty good storm showing up in the models for about Tuesday, followed by more normal temperatures.
Someone on Facebook posted a graphic of the weather a year ago today showing a 42 degree rainy day. This 70s in mid-October stuff is easy to get used to, but it can’t last too much longer.
We have an event for this weekend, an Octoberfest celebration in Crooked Lake. Per Chris’ event calendar..
October 12 4th Annual CL/Mountain Lions Club Oktoberfest Celebration Crooked Lake Community Center
Fall is firewood season around here. I got a lot done in the past couple of weeks, and I am about halfway there. Work at the new job has taken me out of a lot of that, but I will be back at it over the weekend. Once I finish the big split oak I will have a couple of bundles of slab wood delivered for kindling and early and late season wood.
I told my friend Craig that I’d share my system for cutting up small branches and smaller slab wood, and today I will do that. What it amounts to is a series of six H shaped wood stands. Each pair of the H standards is 14″ wide, and they are spaced a couple of inches apart. The end result is that I can stack a bunch of small stuff in there, make two cuts with the saw and yield over 100 pieces of 16″ firewood.
The H standards are about 6′ tall and about 18″ wide. I pile them full, trim the ends, and make the two cuts where the black lines are, and viola, a whole bunch of perfect 16″ length small stuff.
I came up with this system for cutting up slab wood about 10 years ago and it works pretty good. About the biggest improvement that I am considering is a board on the bottom that is on hinges, allowing me to dump the wood into the cart in bulk. Not sure about that one.
Well the rooster is crowing, so it is time for me to get rolling and get ready for work. The TV says it could be dense fog this morning and it is a 20 mile ride, so I had best get at it.
Have a good weekend and thank you for visiting!
RJB
Greetings and welcome!
Yesterday was sure the wrong day to forget the camera. The fall colors are fantastic, and I had an up close visit with a nice buck.
The fall colors are the best in recent memory. The early maples are really putting on a fine display. The vivid red, orange, and sometimes even purples were really stark. Wednesday and Thursday the rest of the show started catching up as the beech and cottonwood trees started getting in on the act, along with the sumac and some of the underbrush.
In recent years it seemed like the early maples would get stripped of their leaves by wind or rain before the rest of the show caught up. That wasn’t the case yesterday. My ride down by Caldron and High Falls Flowages was like a post card. The road was like a path through a hallway of vivid fall color. The overcast sky offset the show and made it even more vivid.
On the ride to and from Wausaukee the hillsides were starting to come in too. What were just splashes of color here and there early week are now becoming a scenic patchwork.
What I don’t know is how the rain over the weekend will affect the show. If the rain stays light with little wind, the wet world and overcast skies will enhance the color like someone turned the color saturation knob a little farther than they should have. If we see a lot of heavy rain and wind, it cold strip some of the vivid early colors.
We are expecting a good bit of rain over the weekend. There is a front expected to set up over the state and several storms are predicted to travel down it like train cars on a track. There is some debate if it will clear up in time to save some of Sunday, or if it will be a Friday-Monday rainy period.
The buck.. I was at X and Parkway heading north a little before sunset last night. I stopped for the stop sign and saw a deer in the ditch a little ways ahead grazing in the ditch. I idled the car ahead up by the deer and it turned out to be a pretty nice 6 point buck (8 if you count brow tines). He didn’t run away, and I pulled up next to him and stopped. It ended up being about a minute that we just looked at each other with him about six feet outside my passenger window. The whole time I was just kicking myself that I had forgotten the camera. Finally another car came through the intersection and he bolted.
I have been seeing a few other deer in my travels this week and really a lot of turkeys up by the road. I am not sure what the attraction is, but travels to and from work have brought multiple flocks on each trip. Keep an eye out for those, I can tell you first hand that they will do a lot of damage if you smack one with the car.
The only event that I have for this weekend is the Wausaukee Fall Festival..
4th Annual Wausaukee Fall Fest – Saturday October 5th- Downtown Wausaukee from 9 am – 3 pm – Crafters & Vendors, Bake Sale, Farmers Market , Food & Refreshments, Live Music – Beer Garden, Kids games, and American Legion Bingo at 11 am. That is held behind Bank North in the big lot there, and the village shops usually get in on the celebration too.
That is my update for today. Have a good weekend and thank you for visiting!
RJB
Greetings and welcome!
The fall colors are making some progress, but the really big show is yet to come. When I drove to work yesterday the early maples were going off, but there was still a lot of green in between trees displaying. I have had a pretty limited range of travel this week so I am not really sure beyond the east side of Silver Cliff and down to work on Parkway and X. I would guess that some of the bigger groves of early maples are pretty nice.
The weekend weather, if it goes off like the NWS is predicting, looks ok. Saturday should be cloudy and about70, but with some wind increasing and getting gusty in the afternoon. After 4pm they have us for a 70% chance of showers and storms. The chance for showers & storm continues overnight and is expected to yield to a sunny and 69 day for Sunday. If it is going to storm on a weekend that is about as good as it gets.
Events this weekend-
September 28
Annual Silver Cliff Chili & Soup Fest from 11am – 4pm
Silver Cliff Memorial Park – Sponsored by the Silver Cliff and Athelstane Legion Post 66 Auxiliary
September 28
Crivitz Fall HarvestFest at Crivitz High School – 400 South Ave.
8:30am to 2pm – Crafts/Bake Sale/Food & Refreshments/Outdoor Fall Decorations/Rummage Sale
Admission – bring a can good to donate to local food pantry
The Red Arrow Club in Townsend is having a Fall Fun Day tomorrow 9-28 at the Old Town Hall restaurant in Townsend from 3-7. There will be music, booyah, a meat raffle, and a bonfire.
At Skinny Dave’s they are having a benefit ride in the afternoon (register by 11, leave at noon) followed the Chute Pond Club’s Fall Dance. The dance will have live music.
The Dun-Good Riders is having an open house and fun day at their Dunbar club building. Food, beverages, raffles and fun all day long! Drawing for the winners of the Smooth Trail Raffle at about 5:00pm. Poker Run ends that day also. This is the yearly fundraiser for the club. Proceeds go towards trails and equipment.
Saturday the 28th is the Wausau grass snowmobile drags and swap meet. It isn’t quite up to Hay Days status yet, but it sees 6-8000 people, so it is a big deal. Here is an article from the Wausau paper about it.
http://www.wausaudailyherald.com/article/20130914/WDH04/309150078/What-drag
The old Lakewood Zoo is now Chumlee Park, and they are doing a big Halloween thing with a haunted house, hay rides, and more. There is a coupon on their web site that you can print off and save $5. Here is a link.
- Friendly Haunted House
- Spooky Bonfire & Grave Yards
- Unlimited Haunted Hayrides
- Huge Computerized Lights Show to Music, with over 100,000 lights
- Kids can feed ducks and chickens
- Kids Indoor Maze
Slug sent in a note that the corn maze on Nejedlo Rd ( just south of Wausaukee) is open daily from 11-7pm.
Last but not least, there is an ABATE ride and poker run drawing at Curve Inn Saturday night. They are having a really good regional band. Here is a poster with details on that.
My week was dominated by firewood. I cut and split a lot of wood getting a head start on winter. That pile is bigger than it looks, probably close to 3 cords. There is another 3/4 of a cord already stacked in the wood house.
I took a job being a parts counter guy at a local auto parts store that starts Monday, and I found myself needing to do 2 months worth of winter preparations in one week.
My old body was not amused doing wood four days in a row, but I did get about half of my firewood done. I will probably get a little more split oak like this, but most of the rest will be slab wood according to the plan. That gets delivered here, so getting it cut and stacked will go a lot faster.
The split oak like this works good for December/January/February when the wood stove never goes out, and the slab wood is good for early and late season.
I do have my work cut out for me, but I am really looking forward to the new job, so I have been pounding away at it. My evenings and weekends look pretty full for the next couple of months.
The top question was, will I still be doing the blogs here and at the Big Snow Page, computer repairs, and the web sites. The answer is yes. Chris has been taking on an increasing amount of the web site work, and I will continue what I do with the blogs and computer repairs on evenings and weekends.
Well, work calls, so I am off. Have a good weekend and thank you for visiting!
RJB