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Friday April 2, 2010

Greetings and welcome!

We had an unusual week this week. It did indeed get into the mid and upper 70s. We couldn’t believe it yesterday when we were at the Peshtigo River Resort, sitting on the deck watching the sun set in total comfort on April 1st without a jacket. It was very nice weather. Athelstane Weather  marked a high of 78.3 degrees yesterday.

The warm weather took a lot of ice off of the lakes this week. When I checked yesterday the big bay on Caldron Falls Flowage was wide open, and the bay by Fisher’s Camp only had a little ice left on one side. You can easily drive a boat out. Likewise, Waubee Lake was approaching ice free when I drove by yesterday morning. It is pretty huge to have ice free lakes on April 1. Some years we sweat getting boats in for the opening of fishing in early May. This obviously won’t be one of them. They did not even draw down the flowage.

Another WOW recorded, I haven’t started the wood burner in 3 days. We go into the upper 60s at night, but it is a comfy 73.4 in here now. That is not normal for April 2.

With the warm weather the insect kingdom is awakening. I swatted the first mosquito of the year Wednesday afternoon (hopefully the mothership), and several people have reported ticks on their dogs. I actually saw one today from someone’s dog, and I promptly Bic-sterminated it. Neither bug was common, but rather the novel first sighting of the year variety.

For the last few days I have been trying to pin down a date to say that it is more like ______ than early April. I am going to have to go with late April or early May. The trees aren’t out, and bugs are still a novelty. At the same time, most of the ice, snow, and frost is gone from the ground and lakes.

The next question is, will the greening of the lands and forests come early this year? If it does will it be spanked by a snow storm>? It might be 75, but it isn’t August, so it could snow.

A side note, the weather guy in TV said that Green Bay set a record for March with zero snow. Blame it all on El Nino.

After my early week load of firewood I was pumped up to get back out and make more, but the week really filled up. One scramble is getting all of the computers ready for this weekend when rafting opens at Kosir’s.  The Linux based box works great, but I still have to get the movie editing computer running right. That will be today’s project, which is a real shame. It is in the mid-70s again, and I’d really rather be outside..

The weekend weather looks better than expected, unless you wanted a lot of rain. It looks like the storm will bring some rain early Saturday morning, and then clear up with only scattered showers remaining for the balance of the weekend. According to the HPC QPF, we should see about 1/10th of an inch between midnight and 6am, and another 1/10th between 6am and noon. With temps in the mid-60, it might turn out to be a pretty decent weekend.

In the tech department, the Ubuntu experiment to convert some of our computers from Windows to Linux is going very well. I tracked down the problem with the one, and it was a worn out hard drive. According to the system info, it had a year and a half of run time. That translates to 3.4 billion platter rotations or about 13 thousand hours. I guess I’d be tired too. A replacement drive found that box fast, stable, and nicely functional.

Well, I better get back to work. Have a good weekend and thank you for visiting!

RJB

Tuesday/Wed March 30,31, 2010-Updated late..

Greetings and welcome!

Late Wednesday night.. I posted a page about my adventures with Ubuntu, the open source Linux alternative to Windows. There is a link in the top bar or click here. It works pretty well, check it out.

Note that this was started Tuesday and finished Wednesday.

Tuesday..

Today I come to you 64 bits wide and WIndows free. I will maybe do a page on that adventure later.

Anyway, it was a cloudy day today with temps that didn’t quite make 60. The wind was up over 10 or 15mph at times, and it was overcast most of the day.It was above normal but not representative of what we are expecting this week.

It wasn’t much of a day for suntanning, but it was grade A for making a little firewood. I made a nice trailer load of big stuff and was about halfway to filling up the truck when the chain on the saw stretched to the end of the adjustment and sent me home again.

Again I was glad I quit when I did.  The pretty new bearings on the trailer were squealing a little, and the truck was grunting some to move it. I needed Ibuprofen and slept through dinner, but I loved the workout, the woods, and the pile of wood that would easily heat my house 2-3 weeks in the coldest January. I just wish that I hadn’t unloaded half of it before I went for the camera.

Speaking of fire and wood, fire danger is very high right now. I was thinking about that today while I was out, with the wind in the woods, that if a fire got away under those conditions, it would run pretty good. Today they suspended all burning except campfires and warming fires and they advised extreme caution for those. Here is a link to the burning page from the WI DNR.

On that same note, here is the weekly wildfire report..

North East Region Wildfire Report

Peshtigo Dispatch Group – Current fire danger is High across the area. Burning is allowed from 6 p.m. to midnight. No burning on Sundays or Holidays Waupaca Dispatch Group – Current fire danger is Very High across the area. Lower relative humidity and gusty winds are expected, which can lead to dangerous fire behavior. As of March 25, annual burning permits have been suspended. Thirty-nine fires burned 39 acres across the region over the past week. Debris burning has been the main cause. Two structures were lost and another 22 were burned during these fires.

Like the probability of fire danger, I told you a report or two back about the UTVs on the ATV trails. Here is a just released DNR page about it.

A rerun of the 10pm news just came on, and the weather guy raisd my eyebrows a little about the possibilities for this week. The NWS has us in the upper 60s or low 70s and sunny Wed-Friday and in the mid-60s Saturday.

The TV weather guy is a little more optimistic. I understand that we are not in Green Bay, but upper 70s? Yee ha!

Wednesday

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While I was outside again playing with firewood I noticed that the frogs in the pond were getting noisy. I heard a few the other day, but today they started up pretty loud. They are not the spring peepers’ vreep vreep, they are more regular frog sounding. They will all be going pretty soon.

Athelstane Weather and the NWS agree that it is 71 at the moment, so I guess it is 71. There is a breeze and some clouds, but it is 71.

In recent comments people asked about when the road bans would be lifted and when the ATV trails will open. Maybe someone knows the first one. The ATV trails almost always open the first weekend in May. That could change, but usually they open then.

Did I mention that it is 71 outside? Gotta run.

Have a good Wednesday and thank you for visiting!

RJB

Monday March 29th, 2010

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

Thursday March 25th, 2010

Greetings and welcome!

We are expecting a cold front to cross into the area today that will make it a very different day than yesterday. Yesterday was a nice day with fair weather and temps in the low 60s. Today the NWS is looking for highs between 33 and 38, along with a little cold wind.

Thankfully our cold will be short lived. We should return to the 40s for Friday and about 50 for the weekend.The normal hi/lo today is 42/19 for Rhinelander.

There is a storm coming through the region this weekend, but it will again bless our friends around the WI/IL state line instead of us. There is a chance of a little rain coming from a disturbance on the outer periphery of the low pressure area and bringing us some sprinkles Sunday, with a total QPF of <0.1″.

Yesterday I made as much progress on indoor work as I could stand, and headed outside. The day started with a tour around the yard. The absence of tall grass, ferns, and other vegetation revealed that I have a lot of work to do cleaning stuff up.

High on the priority list was, believe it or not, firewood. I am on a mission to get as much of my big January wood cut and piled to split as I can. The idea is that it has a lot longer to dry and will be a superior fuel if I get it cut and drying now instead of after Labor Day.

It was an unusually cool summer last year, and I had a lot of wood up by August. The stuff that I cut last spring and summer I can start with a dice sized wax block or a sheet of newspaper once it is split to size. That extra drying time really matters. Usually I can’t cut in April with the snow & frost mud, but I am taking advantage of it while I can.

Item two is the spring shape up from those extra winter pounds. A truckload of 20″+ diameter green oak logs will remind a portly old geezer such as myself  just how out of shape I am pretty quickly.  It did.

I would be a hurtin unit today had a frozen to the ground log not convinced me to dip my saw into the ground to cut what I thought was that one last scab of wood. That dulled my chain and ended my mission just in time to be a little sore, but not bad. After unloading the truck I really wanted another load but thought better of it. Left to my own devices I would be very sore today. There is still time.

Yes the ground was still frozen not too far below the surface, and it was only a mildly sheltered area. I had to kick loose the logs on the ground.

In addition to being out of shape and hot to get my wood split and drying, there is another motivation to getting my wood done.. Oak wilt. Ideally you won’t cut oak between 4-1 and 7-15 to limit the spread of oak wilt. It doesen’t really apply to the area I am working now because they are healthy trees dropped for land clearing. If I want others beyond that, it should be done very soon.

Driving around this week I saw that Kitch had maple sap buckets out hanging on the trees, and I saw it again near Lakewood. In passing I saw the sun shine through one of the buckets, and it was filling up.

Another sign of spring, I saw the first buds. The past few days I have noticed some of the poplar/cottonwood trees getting a haze to the crown, and then the the first pussy willow like flowers. Yesterday they were getting obvious. Today I will try to slow down a little, ID the species of tree and maybe snap a picture.

Something travelers of Parkway north will notice.. The county has been busy cutting trees along the ditches of the road.  This will help the sun hit the road in winter and make it less of an iceberg, and it will help with spotting deer and other critters as you drive.

Here are some events for the weekend..

Slug sent in a comment that he was in Kansas last week and they had 7″ of snow. Yep. It has been a strange and stubborn weather pattern.

Between the El Nino Modoki and the Arctic Oscillation, all of the arctic cold was sent south, along with the storms. Where the clippers and cold fronts used to nail us, they were instead taking that frigid air west and south and freezing the great plains and deep south. The storm path went that way too, so we saw snow down south, and all of the precip that caused the flooding out west a few states.

In the meantime we stayed in the lee of it all with 25 degree January days and 60 degree days in early and mid- March. The downside is that we didn’t get much snow. I can think of three major storms, none of which brought a foot here. DC got 38″ in one storm and had back to back storms. Rhinelander had 46″ all winter.

The joke around here is that I want to get a place down south to go snowmobiling, but I can’t decide between Georgia, Alabama, and the Florida Panhandle. Thanks Slug, I’ll add Kansas to the list.

As much as I hated the effect on our snowmobiling season, it is really hard to hate last year’s cool summer, our warm spring days in the 60s, a January where -30 nights don’t happen in two week stretches any more, and high temps are in the mid-20s. If it would storm here and there it would be pretty attractive compared to the normal climate.

Don’t get used to it. It will eventually change. I am still working on when and to what, so I’ll have to get back to you on that..

Well, that is about it from here. Have a good Thursday and thank you for visiting!

RJB