The scurs and the Weather Eye are tanned, rested and ready after yet another Christmas. Well, rested and ready anyway. Two out of three ain’t bad. Is Old Man Winter entrenched or will he vacation for another week? Starting Wednesday, cloudy with snow. Highs around the freezing mark with lows around 20. Mostly cloudy on Thursday with a slight chance of snow. Highs in the upper 20’s with lows around 10 above. Mostly sunny on Friday with highs in the upper teens with lows near 10 above. Saturday, partly sunny with highs in the upper teens and lows around 10 above. Partly sunny Sunday with highs in the upper teens and lows in the low teens. Monday, mostly sunny with highs in the mid-20’s and lows around zero. Partly sunny on Tuesday with highs in the upper 20’s and lows in the low 20’s. We start to gain over one minute of daylight starting January 5th, the Full Moon arrives on the 6th and on the 7th, sunrise happens at 7:47 a.m. after being stuck at 7:48 since December 30th. The normal high for all of those days is 22 and the normal low is 6. The scurs are making sure their woodpile is well stocked for the next few weeks. Cutting up the large hunks of trees from the recent ice storm should help.
The first Full Moon of the New Year happens as mentioned on the 6th. It generally goes by the Full Wolf Moon as packs of hungry wolves typically set up shop outside of Native American encampments. This Full Moon also goes by The Old Moon or The Moon after the Yule. The Ojibwe called this the Great Spirit Moon and the Sioux knew it as the Frost in the Teepee Moon or Moon when Wolves run Together. At the ranch we know it as the Cross your Fingers Moon. If you’re lucky, there are no frozen hydrants, buckets, lambs, or other issues making one’s twice daily venture out into the cold any more time consuming than it needs to be.
We came out of 2022 with nearly 30” of snow across much of the area between the months of October, November, and December. That’s well above the 18.4” normal at the SROC in Waseca. The normal for October through May is 52.3” there, so we are already over halfway there. There are some weather forecasters calling for above normal precip the rest of the winter while NOAA is calling it even chances for above or below normal. NOAA is calling for better than even odds of above normal temperatures for January anyway, so we’ll take it after the cold we experienced in December. It wasn’t necessarily so much that it was so brutally cold; we just weren’t ready for it after the moderate temps the first several weeks of the month.
Since the last edition of Fencelines, we recorded another 7+” of snow and lived through some blizzard conditions just before Christmas. This resulted in some spectacular drifts and ugly road conditions. It also piled some snow on top of the heavy drifts af
terwards, making it deceiving to navigate around some farmyards. Most were patient and let the snow come rather than attempting to move it as it fell. Indeed, at the ranch it accumulated more evenly overall than it appeared from the house, often 8” – 12” deep. When one found one of those hard drifts hidden underneath, it made the tractor snort. Fortunately temperatures had moderated, so that one could operate in comfortably inside a cab without a lot of heat.
It's been a habit of mine to try to make sure I clean the snow up around the mailbox. It’s not a big deal, but I like getting the mail, especially when there are seed catalogs, tool catalogs, the Sparks magazine, and circulars from the store where you go to the bathroom in the big orange silo. It’s a small task to get the skidsteer or blower out and clear a path to the mailbox. I’m just thankful the box is right down the hill on the end of the driveway. At the Little House on the Prairie where I lived in ND, my mailbox was three miles from the building site. I could’ve placed it about a mile and a half away with a Rolla address, but opted for Rock Lake instead. When working the acres I was responsible for, most frequently I was coming home from that direction. And since Armourdale didn’t have a post office, that was my choice. There was rail and a galvanized elevator that rose above the landscape that could be seen for miles there, but that was about it.
Sunday Christmas and New Years holidays seem less like holidays and more like weekends without benefits. When we were kids, it didn’t seem that way as we usually had that Monday off anyway. This most recent set of holidays, many businesses were open while others, including the banks and post office, were closed. Still tough to do much business in most cases without either one of those in small town America. Cell phones and the internet may confound that somewhat as some just can’t seem to leave others alone even on holidays. By and large though, when checking back through town, there were very few vehicles parked at the businesses that were open on Monday. That’s a clue.
Another week of recovery for Mrs. Cheviot and more activity as she mastered the knee scooter well enough to decorate for a wedding many miles away. Poppy and I held down the fort in her absence and kept the home fires burning. Poppy had the last of her puppy shots before the New Year, so she’s good to go now for a while. Tipping the scales at a whopping 14 pounds, we figure she’s about 3⁄4 of her adult size and weight. Her mother weighs in somewhere in the low to mid-20’s and Poppy’s length appears similar. She’ll get a little girthier like most of us do as we age, so take comfort, it's not just a human thing. Besides, Corgis are generally happy, and you seldom see a skinny Corgi.
See you next week...real good then.