Greetings and welcome!
I think that last Friday and Saturday were the real peak of fall colors, but the show continues to be good. Late last week the early maples and some of the later colors crossed and it was quite a show.
Now a lot of the really early stuff has passed and we are seeing more of the aspen/cottonwood yellows and the oaks with their red and rust brown. There is still a lot of green out there, so the color will continue for the short term. Here is a picture that I took on the way to work a couple of mornings ago.
As you can see, the trees are still pretty full with leaves, and there is more color to come.
The weather this weekend looks ok. There is a chance of rain tonight and into Saturday, but it looks like about 1/3″ of potential rainfall. There is a storm to our west that is expected to move up into Canada, and we are in the path of the tail of it that reaches to the south as its moisture tap.
The models are showing me the rain coming in the early morning hours and probably being finished by mid or late afternoon Saturday. As I mentioned, the QPF on the rain is probably 1/3″, so it doesn’t look heavy. If it will unfold as just a few showers or a damp drizzly day I don’t know.
The NWS is also looking at a little wind for tomorrow. The forecast has S-SE winds at 8-13 possibly gusting to 20.
It is my opinion that a little overcast and some wet weather is actually good for looking at the fall colors. It offsets them against the overcast sky and makes them more vivid.
I just saw a graphic on TV that said that today is the 19th day of above normal temperatures. It has been in the 70s all week this week and probably will be again today. According to Athelstane Weather, our normal high/low for today is 56/36.
That warm fall weather will screech to a halt mid-week next week. There is a pretty good storm showing up in the models for about Tuesday, followed by more normal temperatures.
Someone on Facebook posted a graphic of the weather a year ago today showing a 42 degree rainy day. This 70s in mid-October stuff is easy to get used to, but it can’t last too much longer.
We have an event for this weekend, an Octoberfest celebration in Crooked Lake. Per Chris’ event calendar..
October 12 4th Annual CL/Mountain Lions Club Oktoberfest Celebration Crooked Lake Community Center
Fall is firewood season around here. I got a lot done in the past couple of weeks, and I am about halfway there. Work at the new job has taken me out of a lot of that, but I will be back at it over the weekend. Once I finish the big split oak I will have a couple of bundles of slab wood delivered for kindling and early and late season wood.
I told my friend Craig that I’d share my system for cutting up small branches and smaller slab wood, and today I will do that. What it amounts to is a series of six H shaped wood stands. Each pair of the H standards is 14″ wide, and they are spaced a couple of inches apart. The end result is that I can stack a bunch of small stuff in there, make two cuts with the saw and yield over 100 pieces of 16″ firewood.
The H standards are about 6′ tall and about 18″ wide. I pile them full, trim the ends, and make the two cuts where the black lines are, and viola, a whole bunch of perfect 16″ length small stuff.
I came up with this system for cutting up slab wood about 10 years ago and it works pretty good. About the biggest improvement that I am considering is a board on the bottom that is on hinges, allowing me to dump the wood into the cart in bulk. Not sure about that one.
Well the rooster is crowing, so it is time for me to get rolling and get ready for work. The TV says it could be dense fog this morning and it is a 20 mile ride, so I had best get at it.
Have a good weekend and thank you for visiting!
RJB