Saturday October 30th, 2010

Greetings and welcome!

The storm was a distraction this week, so I ended up a little behind on what I usually report here. My apologies.

I checked on a few places for people and so far they were all ok. The storm took down a lot of dead and dying trees and the occasional live one. Driving through the woods you wouldn’t know that there was a big storm other than the occasional dead fall. It sure wasn’t the easy pickin’s firewood bonanza that I expected.

We are expecting a nice weekend with temps at about 45-50 and lows at about 25-30. That is pretty normal for this time of year.

The next rain in the GFS is Tuesday when we catch the southern edge of a Canadian storm. The NWS says that there is a chance of snow too, but the GFS doesn’t show cold enough upper air temperatures at the moment. After that it shows a little rain possible about the 10th.

Checking the WPS web site it looks like most people in the area are back in power. They still have some work to do north of Rhinelander and up in Vilas County, with Minoqua being the place with the most remaining outages.

In these parts is shows a total of 4 people on the Wausaukee grid, 24 on the Wabeno grid, and one on the Marinette Menominee grid that remain without power. Statewide there are 100 outages remaining affecting 453 people.

From what I can tell locally there were people that only lost power for a few hours, but there were some that lost it for several days.

At one point Thursday night the conversation turned to what would the storm have done in winter? Based on the path of the storm we would have been well into the warm side of it. The low tracked over Northern MN, and for snow we need it to track between Chicago and Green Bay.

Depending on temperatures, it could have been what it was last week, or, it could have been a massive ice storm, followed by high winds. That would have been pretty destructive. Since we have had a few strong storms follow that path, an ice storm over the winter is a possibility that I am not looking forward to.

Since tomorrow is Halloween, there are a few Halloween parties. Dockside Bar n Grill is having a Halloween Party with Karaoke, Peshtigo River Resort usually has a big party and big bucks costume contest. Other places include Wheel Inn, Timberline Resort, The Woods, and Nimrod’s. The Woods has Cest La Vie, a popular and very good local band playing.

In other events the Silver Cliff annual budget meeting is this coming Wednesday, and there is a VFW Gun & Knife show in Crivitz next Saturday at the Village Hall.

People that have the towns plow their driveway will want to check into that. Some towns have an early deadline, like Nov 1, Monday, to get signed up and paid.

The storm this week did not go as expected.  I had visions of being well prepared and hunkering down for 3 days and really getting some work done on web sites. Not. It ended up being 1,000 & 1 distractions. Now I have some catching up to do. At the same time outside work will resume now that it is mostly clear and around 50.

On the list of outside work is getting the water system ready for winter. I have plans to insulate the well house a little better, and once it starts getting colder, starting up the light bulb and heater in the well house and plugging in the heat tape for the pipes. Usually that comes about the end of November when we see nights in the low 20s and teens.

Well I am off to go and jump into a beautiful Fall day. It is the last weekend before daylight savings kicks in, so I am going to go and get some stuff done. Have a good weekend and thank you for visiting!

RJB