Category Archives: Weather +Climate

GeekWorld, Weather +Climate

A New Weather Gadget

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13  bar steep fall 29.92  0mph  SSW  windchill 13   Samhain

Full Moon of the Long Night

Davis Vantage Pro2 Weathersystemdavis_system.jpg

My new weather gadget has arrived.  It’s a datalogger that will allow me to post information from my weather station to the internet.  As a result of that capacity, I have just signed a contract with the Star-Tribune to contribute to a weather blog.  Basically, I agreed to give them all the information, my postings and pictures in return for them having the right to do anything they want with it, in perpetuity, without my being compensated.  Sweet deal, eh?

The weather stuff is a hobby and I’m glad to have the opportunity to help other folks get a more complete picture of what’s going on around the state.

Right now my weather report is:   cold with snow on the ground.  Forecast is more of the same.

I’ll let you know when it’s all set up so you can check out weather from the northern exurbs of the Twin Cities metro area.

Aging, Politics, Weather +Climate
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8  bar rises 30.11  0mph WNW  windchill 4   Samhain

Full Moon of Long Nights    Day  8hr  47m

I hear you saying often that you’re not turned on to politics. Well let me bring to bear the lessons of history. If you’re not turned on to politics the lesson of history is that politics will turn on you.—Ralph Nader, Countdown

Yes, Nader is right, but I wish he’d take his own lesson to heart.  Quixotic campaigns that drain the vote of the left and left independents have had their day.  Until or if the left can mount a credible candidate we should support the Democrats.

In this and many other ways I can tell I have reached old fogey status.  Twice in the last couple of weeks I’ve sent notes to the Sierra Club’s legislative committee that reveal, to me later, and probably to each member at the time, my more conservative approach.  With a $5+ billion budget deficit I think we should pitch our stuff in light of savings to the state budget.  Instead my colleagues queue up to decide which expletives are more appropriate for sulfide mining.

Used to be me.

We’ve had a cold December so far, considerably below normal.  This is the weather most of us here yearn for and miss as the winter’s have grown warmer.  The snow stays on the ground; the air is crisp.   Sleeping becomes a treat, a warm bear-in-the-den snuggle.

I have finally caught up, again, with my various chores including all the outside ones.  That feels great, but it does mean I have to reorient my daily activities and I’m still in the in-between place about that.  Soon.

Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story, permaculture, Weather +Climate

A Time for Thought and Contemplation

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20  bar rises 29.94  3mph  NNE  windchill 13   Samhain

Waxing Gibbous Moon of Long Nights

Snow falling again.  3-4 inches or so by morning the weather folks say.  Winter has come in earnest.

Each year over the last three or four Kate and I have moved further and further from the mainstream Christmas culture. We have little in the way of decoration.  We give small gifts if any to each other.  The kids and kin still get holiday related presents but our home is an oasis.

This pleases me for the most part since my focus at this time of year is on the Winter Solstice and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  I say for the most part because there is still a sentimental side that likes the songs and the lights and the presents under the tree.  Mostly though I find this time of year most conducive to introspection, meditation and creation.

The areas in which we will plant new shrubs, a shade garden and all the bulbs planted this fall are now under mulch, the first two under black plastic and mulch.  Finally done.  Feels good.

Finished the Host.  It’s a strange, thin book with many pages.  I liked it, but the veiled theology and the conceit wore thin as I got further into it.  A lightweight read.

Health, Holidays, Weather +Climate

Happiness is low total cholestrol and high HDL

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19  bar steady  29.95  0mph ENE  windchill 16  Samhain

Waxing Gibbous Moon of Long Nights      Day   8hr 50m

Moved more snow this am.  My third favorite internal combustion engine and I hit the slopes this morning (our sloping driveway, that is) blowing yesterdays fluffy stuff away from the driveway and onto the yard.  Over time this process can create impressive snow  walls along the driveway, but none so high so far that the arc of snow our Simplicity puts out can’t clear it.

Then on to the grocery store for baking supplies.  Kate is in hyper-cookie drive.  We have cookies of this kind and cookies of this kind and cookies of prize winning kinds.  I have cookies, especially cookies of the sugar cookie kind, currently at work becoming part of my body.

Speaking of my body.  Got my lab results back from my physical.  Total cholestrol 144 and hdl 46 (highest ever).  All other numbers were, in the words of my physician, “Great.”  This made me happy.

Missed my nap on Friday and Saturday.  Took a two hour nap yesterday, then went to bed at 10:30 last night (I’ve turned that corner) and got up at 7:45.  Guess those two days made me need the sleep.

Now I’m outside for the last–the very last–of the mulch.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Politics, Weather +Climate

A Magical Effect

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26  bar steep fall 29.56  0mph NE  windchill 26   Samhain

First Quarter Moon of Long Nights       Day  8hr 53m

At last snow has begun to fall.  Already we must have gotten an inch or so and it may well snow through the night.  I have the patio light on so I can watch it fall.  The reindeer, lit with white l.e.d. lights, turns its head back and forth, its wire frame body now sketched in fluffy snow.  The lit holly and berries on the patio table also have snow cover, the lights blinking up through small mounds of white.  We only have lights in the back and few at that.   They do a touch of whimsy to the long winter nights.

A gentle snow has a magical effect on the heart as well as the landscape.  It is one of mother nature’s outright expressions of joy.

Tomorrow I have agreed to go to a workshop on dismantling racism as I wrote earlier.   When I was in seminary, I participated in anti-racism training seminars run by James and Mary Tillman.  I even traveled to Atlanta and went a weekend long seminar with students from Morehouse University, one of the south’s premier black colleges.  With Wilson Yates, a professor of sociology at United Theological Seminary, we created an anti-racism training kit complete with videos for rural congregations.  At one point I worked with a professional program evaluation company, Rainbow, and evaluated the work of the James and Mary Tillman programs in various institutions.

Institutional racism and the unearned advantage of being white and male have been part of my political analysis ever since.  That first round of work was now over thirty years in the past.  It is a testimony to the intransigence and institutional nature of racism that now another generation has taken up the fight.

Part of me does not look forward to a long day on a difficult and unpleasant subject while another part of me is eager to get back to practical, political work on the issue.  We’ll see how it goes.

Kate’s neck bothers her today.  She has improved a lot in the last three weeks, but she has quite a ways to go before she can go back to her full time work schedule.

Family, Holidays, News of the Strange, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

One-Hour Thanksgiving Meal

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21  bar steady 30.04  0mph NNW  windchill 21  Samhain

New Moon (Moon of the Long Nights)

Kate produced a wonderful, one-hour Thanksgiving meal.  Cornbread stuffing, turkey breast with a chili-rub and an herbal seasoning under the skin, mashed potatoes, our own green beans (canned) and sweated mushroom gravy. She explained sweated, but it passed over my head.  I was already in to the green beans and the cornbread stuffing.

Tomorrow she wants to watch the Macy’s Parade because of her home town of Nevada, Iowa will have a horse team in it, someone her sister, BJ, knows.  Pretty exciting.

I’m going to try an earlier bedtime again.  Surely I can reset my body clock.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

Weather +Climate

Blow, Snow, Blow

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35  bar falls 29.87  Omph NE  windchill 35  Samhain

Waxing Gibbous Dark Moon

Another aspect of northern living involves snowblower maintenance.  Each November those of us with long driveways go out into the garage, poke around until we find the 2-stage beast that will work with us through the winter.

Start it.  Hmmm.  That’s good.  It runs.

Oil can to its tin-man parts.  The rotating blower (the second stage), worm oil in the auger’s worm gear (the first stage), oil at various other points where metal grates against metal in the service of snow removal.

Ooops.  There’s a mostly frayed wire leading to the snow deflector.  Not critical.

Rust has bloomed over the snowblowers 15 year service here.  With a wire brush and scraper the paint flakes away and the surface of the rust becomes smoother.  A spray of paint here and there covers the rust with a paint designed to mitigate oxidation.

Check the oil.  In this the oil hits the full top of the dip-stick.  It looks clean.  So, we’re ready for winter to do its worst.

Just as soon as we get gas.

Family, Weather +Climate

A Pain in the Neck

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23  bar rises 30.24  omph NNW  windchill 22  Samhain

Waxing Crescent of the Dark Moon

Change is the future invading the present…  Alvin Toffler

Ready to head outside for some more garden work.  A clear, bright day with a chill in the air.  Good outside working conditions.

Lost sleep last night.  No reason.  Just woke up at 5:30AM and could not get back to sleep.  Oh, well.

Kate got the report back on her cervical verterbrae and the news is not good, though not much different than what we expected.  It highlights the severity of the problem with which she’s labored for so long now.  Now, a few more tests and an appointment with the neurosurgeon.

Life.  It goes on whether you are ready or not.

Literature, Weather +Climate

Reading

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82  br falls 29.82 2mph NNW dew-point 63  sunrise 6:22  sunset 8:02  Lughnasa

Waning Gibbous Corn Moon

Started “The Street” last night. It is by Ann Petry.  I found it while hunting for good books on the novel.  A literature professor recommended it as a gritty, realist account of life in Harlem circa 1947, or post-WW II, a neglected work of genius.  After the first chapter, I can see she was right.  It is literally gritty, opening with a young woman looking for an apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue in a vicious wind that throws dust and sand from the gutters into her eyes.  She wants the apartment to save her brother, Bub, who is 8, from her father’s girlfriend who gives Bub gin.

Further into “Maus” and it continues to amaze me, not only with the detailed account of the author’s father and mother and their extended family during the years preceding WW II and the war years, but with the uncomfortable honesty with which he portrays his father and his second wife, Mala.  This contemporary honesty seems to underwrite the veracity of the European story.

Late afternoon and the sky has become cloudy.  The transpiration cycle bundles moisture from the plants and the soil, the lakes and rivers and pumps up, up, up until it meets the air transports dew point.  It then goes in to clouds and, if conditions are just right, thunderheads form and the water returns, perhaps to the same place, perhaps somewhere else.