September 2022

Friday 9-30-2022

Greetings and welcome!

What a crazy strange year for fall colors!! Some areas have almost no color. Other places have some color, and the early maples are really going off. The particularly bright red maples are the star of the show at the moment.

We had a very cold start to the week, and yesterday and today are very nice. The nights have been cold though. We had two nights this week in the upper 20s for low temperatures. That will happen in fall when you have a cold air mass and clear skies. The radiational cooling from no clouds at night really bring those temperatures down.

It looks like we are in for a nice weekend. Tomorrow is forecast to be 67 and sunny, and Sunday 60 and sunny. The overnight lows will be on either side of 40.

There are some events this weekend. The big one is the Wausaukee fall festival.

Here is another one.. a benefit for the Athelstane VFD.

The Camp 5 Haunted House opens tonight.

Next weekend (Oct 8th) there is a Near North Snowmobile & ATV Club brat fry at the Firelane Bar in Athelstane. The bar still isn’t open after their fire, but they will be partying in the parking lot for the club benefit.

Next weekend is also the Crooked Lake Octoberfest.

There are fall colors to be found if you know where there are some maples. The big big show is still coming, and that will change almost daily.

Have a good weekend and thank you for visiting!

RJB

Thursday 9-22-2022

Greetings and welcome!

Today is the first day of fall and it feels like it. A cold front brought some scattered showers last night and we have some much cooler temperatures. Last night we got down to 43 and today’s high will only be in the upper 50s. Tonight we could see frost and a low of 33, with low areas going as low as 27. The NWS has frost & freeze warnings out. It warms up a little later in the forecast, but high temperatures for the next week are only in the 50s and low 60s. Last week was in the 70s. The cool temps came abruptly like someone closed the door on summer. Usually the seasons and calendar are not very close, this year it was to the day.

The next sign that fall is here is that I saw quite a few trees getting their first color. They are very late this year. All of a sudden in the last couple of days a lot of them are starting to change. The very earliest maples and the choke cherry are staring to get color. I would expect a lot of change in that direction this week now that we have our cold snap.

This weekend we have a very popular event in Silver Cliff.. The Chili and soup cook off..

Next weekend there is is a big fall festival in Wausaukee.

If I remember correctly Lakewood has a big fall color festival the first weekend in October too.

I would like to thank everyone that came to our wedding celebration last weekend. The weather worked out good, the band was great, and it was wonderful seeing so many friends and some of my family. We had a really good day. Thank you to everyone!

The cold snap is a grim reminder that winter is not far away and it it time to do fall stuff. There are three lists.. Things that need to be done above 50 degrees like painting, things that can’t freeze, like winterizing plumbing, and everything else like firewood and car repairs. It is a long list and the weather gets unsettled in the fall, so I guess I’d better get on that.

Have a good weekend and thank you for visiting!

RJB

Friday 9-16-2022

Greetings and welcome!

Much to my amazement we have not seen ANY fall color yet. There are some milkweeds turning yellow and that is about it. The fall color show is clearly late this year. As related in previous posts, it is not uncommon to see the first maples change in late August. Here we are looking at the third weekend in September and nothing. We have had pretty much rain lately. Maybe that extended the growing season after the August dry spell.

We are expecting a little more of that rain this weekend. In fact some is already on the radar and a few sprinkles have already passed through. There is a chance of rain right through Sunday in the NWS forecast. Two of my forecast models show it clearing out early Sunday morning, and I like that with my big party coming up Sunday afternoon.

There are a lot of events this weekend.

And my party..

If it does rain on Sunday we are ready for it. We set up one big tent today and there is another one coming tomorrow. Between those and the band building we should have room for a lot of people. The band is really good, playing music that everyone knows and will get up and dance to. We went and saw them at Skinny Dave’s pig roast and they were a really fun band.

I ordered up special bar chips that get you a dollar off of your drinks and there will be fish bowls of them right on the bar. If your beer is $3.25 now it is $2.25 and a chip. I didn’t want to do a keg of free beer, not everyone drinks beer. I can’t afford open bar, so this is what I came up with.. roll back the prices on whatever you want by about 10 years.

There will be some snacks and cake as well, and the bar serves good food. The party is from 2 till 6pm, so there is time to party with us and still get where you want to go for the Packer/Bears game at 7:20pm.

It is outside at The Rustic where they have a party barn, and we will have big tents too, just in case the weather doesn’t smile on us. Come on out and celebrate with us! Everyone is welcome!

Next weekend is a big deal too. It is the 9th annual Soup & Chili Cook Off at the Silver Cliff picnic grounds.

Yuuuuuummmmeeeee!

That is about it for today. Have a good weekend, thank you for visiting, and I hope to see you all Sunday!

RJB

Thursday 9-8-2022

Greetings and welcome!

We had a warm week this week but nothing too terrible.

It is a lot quieter around here since the big holiday weekend. We went camping Fri-Mon so I can’t tell you how the weekend was around here, but my friends tell me that it was a really busy weekend. I know that the roads were sure packed when we were travelling, and when we got back Monday it was still pretty busy.

Surprisingly I have not seen any fall color yet. On Hwy F near Wheeler Lake there are a couple of big maples that often bring some of the earliest color. They were a light green, but nothing that I would call a color change. Some years I see the first leaves there change by the third week in August. This year seems to be late. I don’t have an explanation or even a guess as to why.

About the only event that I have for this weekend is five hours away in Minnesota. It is the first snowmobile event of the year, Hay Days. It is an absolutely huge event with snowmobile grass drags, a swap area that it 30 acres, motorcycle stunt shows, ATV mud bogs, and powersports dealers demo-ing new equipment. It is a really big deal.  Here is a link- https://haydays.com

The weather outlook for this weekend is a big question mark. The forecast models are showing a cold front coming into the state and setting up camp. Exactly where it is going to set up camp is impossible to know. One forecast model shows it all to the southeast of us, one shows us right on the far east end of it. Where it does set up they can expect a rainy weekend as wave after wave of rain slides down the frontal boundary. Rainfall estimates range from 2-3″ up to 6″ or more. At the moment both the GFS and NAM models are showing it somewhere else, and us in the 0.25-0.5″ range for the weekend.

I have seen this scenario many times before and it gives me ulcers with my forecasting. Will it be a nice weekend or will it rain 2-4″? A hundred miles can make the difference. Right now my bet is on a mostly nice weekend with occasional rain, but who knows?

Check out the poster for our wedding party below.

Have a good weekend and thank you for visiting!

RJB