Greetings and welcome!
We have had a very wet week this week, and when it isn’t raining it is damp. Friends are reporting all kinds of mushrooms and fungi popping up in lawns and in their travels.
The rain Saturday night was a heavy one. The USGS gauge by Kosir’s marked it as about 1/2″. Umm… no. Absolutely not. I would call it 1.5-2″. The heavy stuff kept redeveloping right over us and the rain kept coming hard. I saw quite a few friends that posted rain gauges on FaceBook showing the 1.5-2″. By my estimation we saw 4-5″ of rain in the past week.
The rain stopped for a couple of days but it will be back for the weekend. My GFS forecast model shows a slow moving storm that could bring off and on rain Friday-Sunday and a couple of more inches of rain. It is not an all day every day thing, but the chances will be there the whole time. I always say that the forecast is usually worse than the weather, but I am a little skeptical of that in this scenario.
Something that is a little bit of a sneak preview on my winter forecast is this nagging though that this is a lot like last fall when the weather was really wet. The other typical thought at this time of year is what if last week happened in January or February? That 4-5″ of rain would translate to at least a couple of feet of wet heavy snow.
The rains have lifted the whitewater rivers quite nicely. The Peshtigo peaked last weekend at about a +15″. It is coming back down and is at about a +12″ right now. Some people did go rafting last weekend and they found a wild river issuing big adventures. It was good to see people out after Labor Day. It always annoyed me that tourism just shuts off after the holiday when September brings some of the nicest weather, and often outstanding whitewater.
We have not had our first frost yet. As a result a lot of the insect world is alive and well and thriving on the wet weather. The gnat is the most obvious annoyance. There was laughter yesterday when a friend with a big cloud of gnats walked up to a taller friend, stood next to him for a minute, and then ducked down and snuck away, leaving the taller person with a whole cloud of new friends. LOL. I will be remembering that one.
The fall color change has come on full throttle in the past week. The silver maple across my pond had just a splash of color when I did my last Tuesday update. Now it is fully yellow/orange. A LOT of other species have started the big change in the past week too. The early show is here.
The fall is always busy for me with winter preparations. This year it is really extreme with moving the girlfriend to a new house and getting two others ready to rent. I am having a fit that I haven’t touched the first stick of firewood and it is September 17th already. My short term to-do list has 21 jobs on it and 8 are emergencies that have to happen yesterday, and most are NOT hour long jobs, but rather the all day type. The technology hasn’t been my friend either. Yesterday Hughesnet went down for a lot of the day and most of the night, throwing a wrench into my plans to catch up on web site work. I have also burned up 3 smartphones in 3 weeks and am waiting for the UPS guy to bring the next one. I know that there are texts with more work waiting for me. It is going to be a busy fall. We have a saying around here.. The Good Lord only issues you the challenges that you are capable of.
On that note I am off to get going on my lists. Big smile-Check. Good attitude-check. Lots of tools-check. Beautiful fall colors-check. Ready set go.
Have a good week and thank you for visiting!
RJB