Greetings and welcome!
It looks like a great week ahead, but the weekend outlook remains a little up in the air.
This week we will be seeing a push of warm and pleasant weather moving our way. Tomorrow we should break into the low 60s, and stay in the 60s all week. By Wendesday the NWS is calling for mid-60s, and Thursday-Saturday they are looking at upper 60s. While I am not positive that we will see our first 70 degree day of the year, it is likely.
There is no rain in the forecast until Friday. The NWS is predicting a slight chance of showers Friday and Saturday, but I have seen a scenario that the rain held off until late Saturday or Sunday.
The weekend storm looks like a decent southern storm, and they have it coming on a path that would actually give us some rain. Details will likely get clearer as the week progresses. At the moment I am not too worried about it. The models are showing the bulk of the storm hitting us Sunday.
We did actually have a little rain Saturday night. A small line came our way and stayed a while. It wasn’t a huge rain, but it did knock down the dust a little on back roads.
This weekend is Easter, so there are not a lot of events. There is some stuff going on though. It is the opening weekend of whitewater rafting with Kosir’s. Saturday of opening weekend they always run a special where if you raft the river on the 10am trip, you can run the 2pm trip for free.
Often it is pretty cold opening day, but with Saturday’s forecast of temps in the 60s, I’d expect a lot of people on the second run. That is a great special, but this year they upped the ante.. Usually a spring rafting trip is $45. Opening day they shaved that price $10. Sweet.
The river is running at about +3 right now according to the Kosir’s site. If we get up into the 60s and maybe 70s this week, it could rise a little.
This Sunday is Easter, and that makes this Friday Good Friday. There are plenty of places that would be happy to cook you up a fish fry. Slug says that there is a big one at Equity Park in Pound, and he has been putting the word on the street. Chances are you will see a few people from the area there along with some of the Bear Point Sno-Cruisers.
Also an event, Thursday is April Fools Day. Watch out for whoopie cushions…
In my travels over the weekend I saw a lot of birds of prey. There were several kinds of hawks that I spotted circling the fields, and later I saw a bald eagle too. Later I am going to wander outside and see if I can spot any tracks to figure out what treed my elderly cat last night. She was pretty scared. My guess now was a coyote. We are not short on them, and they have been though the yard before.
Also interesting is that the Caldron Falls Flowage is wide open upstream, but not in the bays or on the big lake by the dam. Landing 11 is almost open, there is one bridge of ice between the landing and the lake that will probably go away with the first 60+ day. The bay by Fisher’s Camp is starting to lose ice from the shoreline out. They have not dropped the lake level noticeably. I am not sure that I am ready to take the boat out yet, but it is time to start looking into getting it ready.
Over the weekend I spent some time working on computers. One of my missions for a long time was to look into a non-Windows operating system. I did just that, and came away with mixed results. The OS that I tried was Ubuntu, a free open source community developed Linux product. It is not quite ready for the masses yet, but it is pretty close.
It worked very well for basic web browsing, and photo work, and I will probably be trying it out on a photo slide show computer or two.The movie editing computer will take some effort. The idea of running it on a 64 bit Unix base appeals to me, but there are SCSI, video and and Canopus card drivers to chase, and I am not sure that the Linix video editing software is ready to replace Adobe Premiere and Canopus Edius.
Overall I was positively impressed with Ubuntu. It was fairly refined and worked well for basic web and e-mail use. It was pretty easy to install, it runs fast, it is FREE, there are tons of programs and applications, and is not Microsoft. This part is cool too.. you don’t need anti-virus or malware software, other than to keep from passing a received mail bug on to other Windows users. It has my attention.
That is about it from here. Have a good week and thank you for visiting!
RJB