Temps have been in the 50’s, ranging to 30’s at night, and there’s SNOW on Mt. Spokane. Cold and clear all week, and the leaves on the azaleas and burning bush are turning, the hops vine is dying, and the pretty huge-bloom clematis has now produced the fine crown of tiny white flowers it does in fall.
I think we’re in the slide toward winter…
by CJ | Oct 5, 2013 | Journal | 20 comments
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Down in SoCal, we’ve decided to try Summer again, actual Summer disrupted by a series of tropical storms spinning humidity from Baja. Today it’s suppose to be 92°F, but the humidity of 4%(!) drops the heat index to 88°. (Why isn’t “°” on our keyboards? I suppose because it used to be superscript “o”.) But considering we have winds gusting to 60 mph, the heat index isn’t real: you’d have to be totally protected from the wind to actually fell as hot as 88°. Heat index doesn’t account for wind chill or perspiration cooling. The military has some kind of heat stress index that does account for it, but I’ve never found a conversion based on relative humidity. Anyway, at 4% humidity it takes a temperature near a hundred for the wind to feel warm, as long as you’re hydrated and wearing loose clothing.
Still, probably not a good day to visit Death Valley.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bu was in the military. I hope that helps.
Here in Toronto we are cooling off a bit but still see 20°C or so some of this week and I will have to cut the grass again my wife has remarked!Some Roses remain and also the Fucia are still in great form.
Re Walt’s comment about missing things on our keyboards if your using W7 or W8 (may work in XP also and possibly Mac’s),type character in search and a Character Map is then available for selection. This allows the selection of a character from it and then one can paste that into a document/message. Hope that may help from a very infrequent poster but a very frequent reader. (Lurker is the usual name for one such as I)
The Character Map (though not the search) goes back to W3, I think. And that’s what I used for °. But, really? That’s as easy as M$ can make it? And good luck finding € or ₩! And some of the standard keyboard keys ({}|\) are useless for English, and only used for computer languages because they were already on the keyboard. Very strange.
The guys in India claiming to be Microsoft’s free tech support keep calling. Yeah, fat chance any of their “help” is going to work on my handmade Linux system. EXE? What’s that? I’m just going to quit answering the phone between 9:45 & 10PM. It’s been them every evening this week.
Try Alt and 0176 at the same time. The shortcut works for MS, not sure about wordpress…
I’ll try a demo ° – yep it works!
That’s pressing the Alt key and typing 0176 on the the numeric key pad at the same time, it won’t work for the numbers above the letters… Rats!
Feels like summer here today in central MD, though Weather Channel on my phone says it’s only 84°F. Since I lived in Texas most of my life, 84°F seems downright temperate. But then in Texas I would have been running the air conditioner since April, which we haven’t had to do this year. This is probably the last gasp, since next week it’s supposed to be down in the 70s again, and our first frost date is between October 15th and 31st.
We were supposed to get some rain from Karen, but it looks like she won’t be heading in our direction after all. We could use the rain; September was really dry.
Thanks for the tip about character map guys – I hadn’t known how to do that when I wasn’t in Word!
Last night was clear, raising ground fog on my hay field in back. Being clear all night, without our old grey blanket, it was nippy this morning, but bright and sunny. The dew was very heavy, soaking boots. But it was a very good day to go pick Pinot! The vines were 35 years old, trunks nearly as thick as my wrist. 🙂 🙂 It was the owner and two sets of partners in a 3-way split. There were 7 of us picking and we got all the Pinot picked pretty clean by lunch time. Except at one shadey corner there was little mould on them. 🙁 🙂 The weighings came out so we got another 180# of Pinot to do. 🙂 This contrasts with the earlier similar batch we picked, bit was from 5 year old vines not so much larger than my thumb! 😉 I think this will make much better wine–we’ll see. Crushing this evening. 🙂
The whole vineyard is about .6A mas o menos, more than half in Riesling, which we’ll pick in another 10 days to two weeks.
Would that by chance be the ‘noble mold’ so sought after by wine makers?
Maybe pick those grapes, process them separately, and see if you get the sweet Botrytis-ized (is that truly a word) juices from them. I’m not sure Pinot grapes are susceptible, but the proximity to the Rieslings — which are — may produce something interesting.
It’s one thing to have a vinyard that is known to be infected with botrytis, quite another to let any old wild mold into one’s must. None of the wine makers in our local club have ever evidenced any desire to have moldy grapes at picking. As in Europe vinyards have been dumping post-fermentation musts back in their vinyards for centuries and can reasonably risk fermentation with whatever yeasts are naturally on the grapes; what we do is sterilize it at crush and later innoculate with cultured and refined yeasts. 😉
any idea which variety of hop you have? Just curious…..I’d find it amusingly coincidental if it were Cascade.
Re the Character Map I do agree with Walt that it’s not the easiest thing to scan through, just offered it as something which could help perhaps.
In my version (W8 at the moment), I find ₤₩€ all on the same line but quite a way down the array.
On a lighter note I am just enjoying a reread of “Deceiver” and like everyone else looking forward to a new “Bren” novel as usual.
We have been having warm days with cool nights, with no frost in sight. Due to all the rain in June I planted flowers late….finally the morning glories and moon flowers are in bloom. The trees have begun to change, particularly the swamp maples and beech. Pond and pool are both at 54 F. The fishies swim merrily. Soon it will be time to put the net on.
Our apple tree is covered with sky blue morning glories, twining up to the highest branches. We call it our Apple Glory tree. The marigolds remain in full bloom, as do the fall asters that self seed everywhere here in New England. Indeed, the garden is still lovely and lush as, in the Boston area, we haven’t had any frosts yet. The problem is, we’ve also had prescious little rain since mid August, although this Sunday was somewhat wet with drizzle. I’m still watering my tomato and other potted plants almost every day.
Actually, this Sunday my spouse, friends and I took a 6 hour train ride on the Conway Scenic Railway from N. Conway, NH in the Mount Washington valley up to (and then back) the Crawford Notch pass over 1300 feet higher. Even though it was overcast and peak autumn folliage was probably a few days to a week before, it was delightful and well worth the experience. The actual rain held off until we returned to N. Conway.
And now back to reading the Ancient Egyptian art chapter I assigned my students for tomorrow evening’s art history class: I’ve procrastinated long enough.
I had to go out with the hedge trimmers and have at the fountain grass that is trying to self-seed all over the back yard. Too tough for the hand mower, and even argues with the weed whacker, but steel shears still do the job. The neighbors have hacked off several branches that were reaching over the fence line into their yard and thrown them into mine. If they simply asked nicely, I’d have cut them back, but many times stuff from their yard ends up in mine; they have few neats. The irony is that the tree they trimmed is in yet another neighbor’s yard, but too hard for them to throw back the branches.
starting to prune trees that should never have gotten this far along. I have a dogwood tree in the front that has too many suckers, too many low hanging branches, and should have been trimmed before the house was sold. Same problem in the back yard. My chain saw isn’t working right now, so I don’t know when I’ll get it into the shop for service. There’s a crab apple tree, and another unidentified tree (which looks more like a very large shrub), as well as the roses and other assorted flowers in the bed that need to be worked on. Weeds are too prevalent, too.
Be careful about trimming a dogwood: they have a natural layering. Limb it ‘up’ definitely. And no suckers.
I’ve to take after the espaliered apple tree, which is trying to go wild this year.
I’m trying to trim the branches that are growing toward the center, or straight up, or rubbing each other, since they either won’t get enough sunlight to “pay back” the energy expenditure of growing them, or the ones that rub open up the bark and make the tree vulnerable to bugs. Otherwise, I’m not going hacking at it wholesale.