Greetings and welcome!
As you have probably noticed I have been taking a little time away from the web site after the daily updates over the Winter. I will be back to twice weekly updates when things pick up going into the summer season.
We have been having pretty seasonal weather over the past week. We have had some warm sunny days in the 50s and 60s, some hard frost and freezes at night, and generally pretty normal weather. What we haven’t had is the normal dealing with the frost-out mud, melting snow, and the usual Spring challenges that come when you don’t have 80 degree weather in mid-March. I can’t say that I am mad about it.
We have not had much rain and the world has not greened up all of the way yet so we are dealing with high fire danger right now. The old vegetation from last year is very dry, and combined with unpredictable Spring winds it is not hard to start a wildfire right now. Do be careful with your fire.
Parts of NW WI are under burning bans right now. That means no grilling, no camp fires, no burning barrels or brush burning, and even no smoking outside. We are not up to red flag conditions yet, but we are still at high fire danger here in NE WI.
The greening of the land has slowed down since our weather went back to more normal temperatures, but it is still progressing. Some trees are getting pretty many leaves, others remain mostly bare or have buds. The grass is mostly green but does not need cutting just yet.
I haven’t seen any mosquitoes this week at all, but the cat did manage to bring in a grand total of two wood ticks. I haven’t heard any frogs in the pond since the big cold wave ended our July in March weather.
There have been a lot of deer along the roads this week. Maybe it is my perception of it, but they seem dumber than usual. I have had them double back in front of the truck, wait until the last second and bolt in front of me, and even one that didn’t want to move. Keep an eye out for them if you are driving around.
ATV riders got some unprecedented good news this week when the Marinette County Parks & Forestry Department announced that the ATV trails will open next Friday. Normally it is the first weekend in May, this year it is Friday April 13th.
Date: April 3, 2012
From: John Scott, Forestry and Parks Administrator
Subject: ATV Trail Re-openingThe Marinette County ATV Trails will re-open Friday, April 13, 2012.
The trails have been closed for spring breakup and because of downed
trees/branches.
Thank you for the help in protecting the soft trail base.An Important Reminder:
ATV riders on the Iron Snowshoe ATV trails in the Butler Rock area of Marinette
County which connect into the Oconto County summer only ATV trail system at the
county lines- need to be aware that Oconto County’s ATV trails won’t open until
May 1st and closes Oct. 31st each year.
The ground has firmed up nicely. The back roads that I travel are all dry and firm as is the driveway. You can actually travel forest roads and get into remote spots again with only the occasional soft spot.
Being Easter weekend there are not any formal events. Kosir’s has their official opening day of whitewater rafting tomorrow, along with their annual first weekend special where you can raft on the 10am trip and run again at 2pm for free.
Beyond that I would look for the Easter Sunday buffets at places like Jungle Jims, Hilltop, The Peshtigo River Resort, and the Twin Bridge Resort.
With the lakes open and the water warmer than usual people have been asking if fishing was open yet. The last that I heard we still have to wait for the first weekend in May for gamefishing to open. You can still go for the panfish and the early trout season might still be open, but don’t be going after the walleyes and bass just yet.
Shameless self promotion.. The recent past has found me very busy as a computer tech. There were quite a few virus extractions and file recovery jobs, and a couple of upgrades where I took laptops and put in solid state drives.
I am a huge fan of the SSDs. This week I took a laptop that took amost 6 minutes to start up and had it doing a full restart and connected to WiFi in a minute. I run a SSD in this computer and will never go back to the old hard drives, not even my enterprise SCSI 320 stuff.
Keep me in mind for those SSD upgrades and virus extractions, not only am I very cheap, I am very good at it. I also set up networks and WIFi, and can help with networking your DSL or long range WiFi for the campground or resort. A little known factoid.. I started this web site in December of 1998 as a celebration of surviving a year building and selling computers on the net. I have been at it a while.
Well I am at the end of my topic list, so I am off to dive into another full Spring day. Have a good week and thank you for visiting!
RJB