the missing winter recap

Our final snow of the year arrived the morning after Easter Sunday. A good inch stuck to our deck by mid-morning before showers decreased and the early-April sun did its work. By afternoon it was a memory, other than the small slush-piles near car windshields.

We ended this season at just over 23″ of snow on our deck, so that was about half of our total from last year. The snowfall in 2015-16 lulled us to sleep (about 5 inches total) but now we know that was a sub-par year. We made an excellent play-hill of our driveway after our all-time max of about 15 inches covered the ground on 24 February - nice memories and a few aches that soon passed.

As to rainfall, another plus season is in the books. Oct-Mar rainfall was about 3" below the full-year total we should receive, and counting mid-Oct to mid-Apr we were 3" above our expected 63.7 inches. May was absurdly dry with only 0.10" but this weekend we added about an inch - so all will be well and the sprinkler can take a break.

springummer season

Spring quickly mutated toward summer this year! May had just 0.10" of rainfall. We had much more rain yesterday than all of last month - that's an odd thing to say in June! In any case the Swainson's thrush have begun to sing with much more enthusiasm now.

I've added many plants to the yard recently, thanks to my new part-time job at the Home Depot. And this week I won't even need the sprinklers! Perhaps at some point in the future they can provide us with a new roof and/or a heat-pump system..