a few good days

Our autumn debris-burning season was deferred by the long parade of strong, wet storms that refused to relent before the cold weather arrived. This past week brought a day or two in the low sixties, and my head-cold relented just in time for me to get out and clean up some of autumn's trimmings!  With rain in the afternoon forecast I was only able to get about 1/3 of the debris and none of the leaves into the burn pile, and once started it crackled nicely even as the rain attempted to douse it a bit too soon. Today was nice again so I cleaned up another part of the yard, and separated larger sticks from the branches and got them to separate areas for later treatment.  Since the big rake broke before all piles were removed from the yard it's time to shop for a durable one before all of that is shifted toward the burn area!

My eight-day head cold terminated with a day of gluten poisoning, so at the end of it all I weighed 163 pounds, or 17# less than my peak just before retirement.  Some of that weight will come back but 165 would be a great place to stabilize, maybe even a few pounds less.

In the meantime - the daphne is just starting its aromatic bloom, tiny iris are popping out of the ground and the croci are soon to follow.  Pretty soon the lawn-mower will have its turn.  The slope below the burn pile is entirely made up of blackberry vines that need to have some control - that will take some doing probably about 900 square feet of prickly trouble about to resume its takeover of the known world!  I have a fine machete ready to take it on, but something tells me I shall need something more powerful before I can succeed in controlling the nasty vines...

Coal Creek Crest is (finally) Reporting!

Well it took longer than it should - but I finally have the proper items in the proper places for the streaming to Weather Underground to work.  Hopefully it will experience a long and happy life of reporting the conditions here on our humble hilltop. I swear that I used to be pretty good at making computers do my bidding.. someone even paid me for it!


Today was a marvelous 61° with randomly-filtered sunshine.  I spent some time sticking crocus and iris bulbs into the ground - better late than never, I hope!  They were supposed to go in last fall, but perpetually stormy weather kept me inside and I lost track of the bulbs.

Yesterday was 59 or 60° -- yes I should know precisely, but did I mention that I was having wx-station problems? My default weather station seems to be in LaCrosse WI, so once a few more virtual wires are unscrambled I can be more certain.  Let's not rain on this parade just yet, OK?  Rain is coming in 24 hours anyway, more or less.  The last three days have been special, especially for February.

And now back to our regular, wet programming...

Update!  I finally turned off the AcuRite data feed with the LaCrosse crosse-wiring and it only feeds W.Underground - works fine that way!