A winter's day in a deep and dark December…
The scurs got the storm right last week but fumbled the predicted Tuesday sunshine. They maintain no one minds shoveling sunshine. Starting Wednesday of this week, partly cloudy with highs of 15 – 20 and lows of 10 – 15. More snow possible for Thursday under cloudy skies with highs reaching a balmy 30 and lows hovering around 15. Mostly cloudy Friday with highs of 15 - 20 and lows dropping to 10 above. Saturday, partly cloudy with another chance of snow, highs near 25 and lows of zero to 5 above. Partly cloudy Sunday, highs of 5 - 10 and lows falling to – 5 to – 10. Monday, partly cloudy with highs struggling to make the zero mark and lows dropping to – 10. Slightly warmer Tuesday, cloudy with a chance of snow flurries. Highs 5 – 10 and lows of zero to 5 below. The normal high for December 10th is 29 and the normal low is 11. The scurs are taking a breather from the frenzied pace of their Christmas shopping. After all, there’s still lots of time before the 24th.
This month contains lots of astrological, day length related highlights so will give it its due. In the early hours before sunrise, Venus can be seen in the SE sky achieving its “mini- moon” status once more. It was very evident Sunday morning on the way into town just prior to 6 a.m. In the early evening, Jupiter still dominates and is visible until about midnight, first appearing about 5:30 p.m. on the S-SE horizon. On the 9th, we slip below 9 hours of daylight however the good news is we only have about 5 minutes more to lose by the 17th before the days become noticeably longer by a minute on the 25th. Interestingly enough, the earliest sunsets will occur from December 5th – 12th at 4:36 p.m. CDT.
Temperatures were cold this past week with Sunday morning’s low dropping to – 6 by the golf course and registering a low near – 3 at the ranch, actually – 2.8 if you must know. Quite a contrast to the 68 degree high on November 10th. The snowfall for last Friday afternoon and evening amounted to about 6” at the ranch with the gauge measuring somewhere over 4”. Melted down the liquid equivalent in the gauge was .21”. November closed out with 2.36” of total precip, only .1” behind the total recorded at the SROC in Waseca, putting us pretty close to what would be considered normal for us for the month of November.
In the yard, the birds are responding to the cold weather by coming in larger numbers to the feeders. Ruby’s buddies the squirrels however seem to be more into a sleeping in mode, consuming much less ear corn than they were just a few weeks ago. It wasn’t unusual for them to go through a couple ears a day. The incoming snowstorm also brought with it the first of hopefully many more chickadees to come. With two of the larger trees missing was a little surprised to see this one as chickadees have been only occasional visitors over the past several years. In the cold weather, chickadees must eat the equivalent of their own weight each day. The little fat buddies eat like birds compared to this.
Barn cleaning season is finally over at the ranch! As one astute observer is fond of saying, it was real, it was fun, but it wasn’t real fun. With a predicted storm coming in Friday, got the main barn finished just as the flurries were starting. After getting just about cold enough, went in the house to snack on the last of the Thanksgiving turkey and nodded off, glad that barn was done just ahead of the heavy snow. Just beginning to think there was a powernap in my future, the cell phone rang. It was Al of Al’s TV fame and he came over minutes later to run some cable and get the TV in the bedroom up and running. The crawlspace where the cable needed to go had been haunting me, not only from the standpoint of the dead animal carcasses it might contain but also from the live animals that could be lurking there. Fortunately there were neither although I did manage to locate the Festivus pole. Al was wise to the ways of old houses that have been added on to multiple times. It didn’t take him long to figure out some shortcuts around what was most certainly to be a wiring nightmare. He finished just in time for me to do the chores and watch Ruby try to catch snowflakes.
About 8 o’clock Saturday morning, decided that with the cold Sunday forecast, there needed to be an all out assault on cleaning the lambing barn. There was a chance I might make it to the field but might not make it back so opted to put the chains on the tractor as a precaution. The yard was full of snow that had to be moved anyway. After a day Friday when everything clicked, Saturday was just the opposite. Everything was an uphill battle although as an aside, did see an earthworm under the 4” of frozen soil I chipped away to get the double doors off. That was probably the highlight of the day. With the temperature falling off rapidly, stuff was starting to freeze on to the metal sides of the 520 NH spreader so time was of the essence. Finishing the last load up, I needed to quickly put the water tank back in the barn. Worst of all I’d filled it the night before and had removed it with the skid loader. Got it out fine as I’d done many times before, but as I went back up the little ramp into the barn, the tank suddenly lurched forward, dumping 60 gallons of water onto the freshly cleaned, now rapidly freezing floor.
Hustling out to the field to get the spreader unloaded, it hesitated at first but began grinding its way through the load. Keeping my fingers crossed, it didn’t shear any pins and chopped everything up well until the tail end. Coming back with the wind it began whipping frozen missiles of doo-doo at me to the point that I stopped and reattached the rope connected to the speed control mechanism. Several yanks on the rope and just the apron chain ran, allowing the remnants to fall harmlessly out the back rather than hitting me in the melon. After bailing as much of the water out of the building as possible, refilled the water tank, bedded the barn, put the doors back on, unhooked from the spreader, then put the tractor and skid steer away. It was 5 o’clock, it was cold and dark, the day was shot and so was I. The task was complete however and that was all that mattered as I trudged inside for a cup of warmth. Finally something had gone right.
See you next week…real good then.
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Topic: Fencelines (Read 259439 times)
