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