Greetings and welcome!
It was a long winter and a short spring. Today I am hiding inside from the heat and humidity. At 3:30pm I am showing 80 degrees, down from 85. The humidity is plentiful too, with near tropical dew points. It wasn’t more than a day ago that the furnace was running overnight. Northern WI weather is like that in spring and early summer. I joke about it saying, “You know that he’s a local when he has shorts and a T shirt, long pants and a sweatshirt, and a snowmobile suit, hat & mittens in his trunk year ’round..”. it also is not uncommon to run the wood burner and the air conditioner in the same day.
The heat and humidity comes with a chance of thunderstorms later. There is a slight severe weather potential, but not much is happening on radar as it approaches.
Yesterday, on the other hand, was a little windy. When I was walking the dog the roar in the trees was incredible. I looked at Iron Mountain’s history and about then they recorded sustained winds of 28 gusting to 47 about then. Yowza it was windy. Some trees and branches came down and took some power lines with them. It was very scattered. The one that came down near Newton Lake Rd and Hwy C started a small grass fire, but that was very quickly dealt with. Even a small fire can become a big one with 40mph winds, so they were right on it.
My spring cleanup has stalled. Lately the fire danger has been very high so burning brush is definitely out. After the storms this winter and spring I have a mountain of the stuff to burn. I also took a really bad sprain to my right wrist about 10 days ago. You couldn’t believe how much I missed being able to use it trying to do spring projects.
When I was walking Fido yesterday I did notice a few new flowers. There were some bushes that were maybe dogwoods with nice yellow flowers. My sugar maple also is in bloom with flowers that almost look like birch catkins. The grass is greening up nicely, but does not need to be cut just yet.
In the next week or 10 days I am expecting the world to just explode with new green leaves and spring flowers. It is a magical time of year around here and that firecracker is just about set to go off.
There are some cool songbirds coming back to the area. A quick visit to the Rapids Resort bird feeder window yesterday yielded lots of goldfinches, a scarlet tanninger, a morning grossbeak, and an indigo bunting. There were no hummingbirds just yet.
The insect world remains mostly dormant. I have not had my first mosquito or wood tick yet. I am sure that is right around the corner.
That is it for today. Have a good week and thank you for visiting!
RJB