The scurs keep predicting relatively dry conditions and with this kind of accuracy, it makes them want to buy some lottery tickets. Will their luck hold another week? Starting Wednesday, cloudy with a good chance of rain. Highs of 40 - 45 and lows of 25. Mostly clear on Thursday with highs reaching 45 and lows dropping to 30. Mostly sunny and warmer for Friday with highs of 50 and lows around 40. Another slight chance of rain for Saturday with cloudy skies, highs of 50 and lows near 35. Mostly clear on Sunday and Monday with highs reaching 45 - 50 and lows around 30. Mostly sunny Tuesday with highs of 45 – 50 and lows near 30. We slip below 10 hours of daylight on November 7th. Incidentally the normal high for November 7th is 46 and the normal low is 27. The sun will set before 6 p.m. on November 5th and through the wonders of government intervention in our personal lives, it will magically set at 4:58 p.m. the following day. Then, after rising at 7:59 a.m. on the 8th, it will rise at 7 a.m. on the 9th. The scurs will be hiding their Halloween booty to avoid paying capital gains while waiting to set their clocks back at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning. It’s a long time yet until Thanksgiving.
Yes it’s time once again to set those clocks back and put the time change folly to bed for yet another year. Our bodies will respond in kind to having an extra hour to play with, generally positive and exactly the opposite of how they respond when we are shorted an hour in the spring. The data are quite clear on this point. With more and more research indicating that sleep is more important in a healthy lifestyle than was once thought, it is time for our elected officials to quit messing with the clocks and our health. Someday someone is going to look back and say to themselves, “Hey, he was right.” That is if they ever have time enough to stop diddling around text messaging, Tweeting and playing on Facebook to read it.
Fall harvest should be all but complete in this area by the time it reaches the press on Wednesday. Yes there may be a few who aren’t completely done but there isn’t any award for being done first. The worst thing about people being done this early is they have a lot of free time on their hands. That free time can be a dangerous thing when it comes to recreational tillage. Working these dry fields down this fall could lead to dust storms of the Great Depression proportions if we’re not careful. Leaving them in a somewhat roughened state may not only help stop soil from blowing it may also catch more snow, something that could become more important if we don’t start getting precipitation soon to replenish our stored soil moisture before winter. Speaking of precipitation, in the SROC’s final installment of their Crop Weather Update for the season, it was noted that this has been the driest August-September-October period since they began keeping records in 1915 at 2.22 inches. At Bugtussle in the official Mall for Men rain gauge, we fared slightly better at 2.3 inches. At the ranch, we tallied a whopping 2.53 inches for the same timeframe. We must be living right.
The pockets of color remained through much of last week although when the thermometer dropped to 25 at the ranch on the morning of the 29th, things began changing more rapidly. Some of the green leaves still on the trees were suddenly in a free-fall and the sheep of course were loving that. The pin oak and northern red oak leaves went from a deep red to a dull red in a matter of a day. It won’t be long and the leaves on the red oak will fall off and the leaves on the pin oak will be a rusty brown, hanging on until spring. The Autumn Blaze maples around town added some late color to the boulevards of Bugtussle even though they too were starting to fall on Saturday, making those who are obsessed with their lawns perhaps a bit perturbed. Even some of the hard maples that stay green then brown when it freezes then lose their leaves are showing some color this fall. What an odd year it has been.
We sold a ram that we weren’t sorry to see go on Saturday. Weighing in at around 250 lbs., he was a big, muscular, brute as Cheviot rams go with a penchant for jumping over panels and getting into places he didn’t belong when penned up. He had an attitude and wasn’t real pleasant to deal with when it came shearing time either. Knowing he was a pain to handle, we had limited his escape routes and had a stout wooden panel he’d think twice about jumping over ready to move in behind him in the alleyway. When we opened the pen he came out in a hurry as I grabbed the panel. He decided to suddenly turn on me and wouldn’t have thought twice about trying to flatten me with the panel on top. About that time 30 lbs. worth of Ruby had crawled under the trailer and sprang into action. Diverting his attention, she got in behind the bruiser and drove him toward the trailer. This allowed me to move expeditiously with the gate, severely limiting his options. In the trailer he went as we looked at each other in disbelief when Mrs. Cheviot slammed the door behind him. We expected to be winded after chasing this ram around the yard for a half hour. Instead we were ahead of schedule and able to enjoy a breather thanks to the little dog’s bravery. Maybe that dog food and treat expense is worth it after all.
See you next week…real good then.