Winter is almost upon us

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Sorry to hear of the stroke.
Maybe your wife can help with learning to use the big snowblower again?

I've not had a chance to use my snowblower this season. There hasn't been more than an inch of snow on the ground and that was usually followed by rain which melted it.

Jakki wrote,

Yes, that is a good way to avoid getting sick in winter. Make sure you have humidity in your home and use an air filter such as a Hepa filter to keep the air clean.

Yes she is a very good wife, but we are both getting old. Two heads are always better then one.

Well the first winter storm has begun. The local weather forecast has declared 4 to 8 inches of snow today, about 0.1 inches of sleet/freezing rain tonight and then 1 to 3 inches of additional snow tomorrow morning. The current temperature sits at 23.4 degrees F. It sounds like we are in for out first winter storm. In the countryside many times this causes power outages, so we may lose electricity.

Now the other thing to keep track of is the wind speed. They are predicting wind speeds around 20 mph. So I think we will be O.K. I remember many years ago, that wind played an important factor in this type of storm. There were winters with very high wind speeds. The winds would collect the snow and move the snow to form mountains of snow. One year the mountains down the main road reached 30 or 40 feet in clusters making it impossible to go anywhere.

So I think we are in for a snowstorm. Time to batten down the hatches.



The snow is falling and falling. My wife just reminded me that we need to feed the birds. We live in the forest with many trees but also many birds. During a winter storm they are unable to find food because snow and ice keeps them from finding food. So that is one of our many jobs is to protect the birds during a snowstorm. I had purchased some birdseed earlier and now was the time to put this birdseed in the bird feeders. So into the storm I went and filled up all the bird feeders.

So in a desprate. rush to get rsdy and go. down south to visit our friends on a farm ..the severe cold came in and paying attention to any but loading made myself quite ill , then pavement turned to ice. Took my body back to bed..
pretty ill. Now is a foot of snow....no food all is packed and am too weak to deal with that..heat and water is running.

Guess winter is upon us.

The temperatures fell down to 21.7 degrees F this morning. We received 7 inches of snow last night and it is still snowing. I began clearing off a little bit of the driveway using my shovel. It pulled the snow well. It is the type of snow that makes good snowballs. But we still have around 6 more hours of snow before the snowfall stops. So my wife said "What are you doing, come in, and wait for it to stop."

Because I had filled up the bird feeders yesterday, we have at least 15 birds flying around the bird feeders. I even saw a woodpecker. Woodpeckers are a very good bird, an unbelievably good bird. Why? Because they kill insects.

According to the internet discussion of woodpeckers:
Some would probably say the incessant pecking and tapping of a woodpecker nearby could drive a person crazy, but it's vital to the birds' survival for more reasons than you may think. One important purpose of all that pecking is searching for food, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Many insects, as well as insect eggs and larvae, can be found under a tree's bark or in the wood of a tree, and pecking into a tree helps the woodpecker uncover a meal. Woodpeckers also peck into trees to build nesting cavities, and some woodpecker species excavate holes for storing food caches.

Now here is the main point. It is my humble belief that a major pandemic that is moving across the bird and animal species is getting very close to producing a variant that can strike humans. A form of H5N1 can kill or significantly damage humans. The numbers of humans affected are off the charts. It is at our doorstep. This disease is spread by insects, primarily mosquitoes. So we are partnered with woodpeckers and other species to overcome this threat.

We have many friends. Some are birds like woodpeckers, some are other insects like dragonflies, some are fish like gambusia affinis.

Thank you Jimmy for updates on the birds that help reduce bugs .. very important role they play ..!
Hope you guys stay safe up there in Indiana ...over in the heart of middle of the country , we are right in the middle of the path of the blizzard . ....
All snow gear got moved away . When someone showed up last year and bought it from us. Still hunting for the illusive snow shovel... And yes some flu like thing took me out of the running for best snowshovelor of the year .
Sm so glad you are helping to preserve the good wildlife Where you are Jimmy...Was regretting not having some standby bird seed ourselves . Breathing is still a issue for me . Think this might be a weak variant of the possible flu

Currently 16 F .....lows minus 5f do far

We got down to 8 F this morning, but no snow overnight. There was a very light dusting of snow Sunday morning, but it disappeared by mid afternoon even though we never got above freezing -- I think it is called sublimation.

I didn't think we were supposed to get above freezing today, but the forecast high is 35 F.

A couple of flakes today but not enough to cover the roofs across the street. We are too far North of the storm!

We had over four inches of rain last month but not enough snow to use the snowblower!

There are a half dozen different species of wood peckers that visit my yard, including the big pileated woodpecker!

I've been drinking Matcha, powdered green tea. Will start taking mid-winter prescription vitamin D.

How much Vitamin D do you take? I've been taking 5,000 IU of Vitamin D daily for about twenty years now.

Where I live, nobody has snow blowers. We get snow, but road graders clear the highways pretty quickly and the snow doesn't generally last more than a few days.

The coldest day of my life was the day after a blizzard. School was cancelled and I spent the day on horseback looking for cattle that had gotten out during the blizzard. The horse got enough exercise to warm up a little, but riding on the horse did nothing for me.

5000 IU once a week for six weeks in the middle of winter.

I have a 26" wide 2 stage snowblower that has easily handled all the snow storms in CT in the last twenty years.
Past few years it hasn't been needed.

When I was in high school, one of my neighbors bought a snowmobile. I thought that was pretty odd since in the average year around here, he would probably only be able to use it for maybe 7 days. Of course, it could easily pay for itself in that 7 days if it helped him haul feed to cattle and to look for lost cattle.

If you want a better chance against getting Sick...The above advise for. vitamin D would be a mimum requirement to try to ensure better health i think...!

I have a pair of snow shoes that I've only used half a dozen times in twenty years.

The birds are flying around the house and gobbling up the bird seed. I have even seen a couple Woodpeckers (one large male and one small female). They seem happy to find food when the ground is covered with 7 inches of snow. I went down my driveway with my snowblower yesterday. It went half way down and then died. So I had to bring the snowblower back to the garage. That was a feat. It weighed a couple hundred pounds and it was hard moving it by hand up the hill. I think I understand what went wrong. The snowblower had sat there for many years and the gasoline absorbed too much moisture. So when I began using it, the internal water froze and the snowblower died. So I have to empty out some of the gasoline and fill it with new gasoline in order to get it to work properly.

So instead of cleaning the driveway by snowblower, I had to do it by hand. That is a lot of work moving 7 inches of snow off my driveway by hand with just a snow shovel. So I had a good workout yesterday.

The weather forecasters are saying we are in for some really cold weather for the next couple days. Temperatures will drop below 0 degrees F, this will be frigid weather. This morning the temperature dropped down to 22.8 degrees F. So very cold weather is about to hit.

My wife managed to talk to one of our neighbor's kids who will bring over his snowblower and clean up the rest of our driveway today. So life will slowly come back to normal. My snowblower is around 30 years old and works well. But when I use it, it throws snow very high into the air and then some of the flacks of snow fall back down. So I am covered with snow when I am finished. Here is a modern small snowblower in operation.

My snowblower would die after a couple minutes as well.
Turns out that there was an aluminum disk inside the gas cap and it went missing!
It works fine now that I replaced the gas cap with a new one. The disk is intended to vent the gas tank.

I bought Ethanol Shield to put in the gas so it would last longer. If I don't use it during the winter I siphon it out and use it for mowing the lawn during the summer and fall.