Spring Appears to be Delayed.. a bit!

The Magpies can smell a peanut from miles away. I think they have a secret spot where they can watch for a delivery!

 A lot of people don't like Magpies, but I find them to be very interesting, and intelligent.

 Speaking of intelligence, these sparrow find it a lot warmer sitting on the rail letting the sun warm both the front and backside. It was -20C today with a wind chill of -30! It was darn cold. At one time there were 8 sparrows on the rail.

Neither snow, sleet, hail or cold stops Daphnie from retrieving her Kong on a rope. It stopped me after about 1/2 hour.

Then, there was this lone Goose sitting in the middle of the Athabasca River. I think she is smart also because the water and the layer of air above it is probably 25degrees C warmer than sitting on the shore. She still looked miserable!

 My Black Capped Chickadee has returned with a mate. Hopefully they will nest in one of our bird houses again. I read somewhere that they need an equivalent of 250 sunflower seed per day in order to survive at these temperatures!

Okay everybody, have a great weekend and think warmer, please!

What to do When it's -20C or -32C counting the wind chill factor!

Well, I guess the first logical thing to do would be to stay in with a good book. Not so. After 5 days in the above temperature, I decided to grab the camera and see how the wild life was faring.

 The Magpies seemed to be doing well, and not being bothered by the cold.

 Fluffed up and enjoying the sun. We haven't seen it for a week

 This one was face planting, probably looking for a stash of food. The pigeons were out flying about and were extremely skittish.

So much for the birds! There were lots coming to the feeders, but that is for another day. I wandered down to the Athabasca River to see what was going on. This is a picture of ice forming in the current (yep, it's cold) and being sucked under an ice bridge.

 Here is the freezing water being discharged from under the ice bridge. Think very big, unflavoured slushy!

 Just a couple of more frozen water shots. Somebody think "Spring". Please!

We are only getting about 7 hours of daylight now. Anybody in the deep South want to exchange dwellings for 3 months?

Don't You Wish You Were Here?

Summary

A period of very cold wind chills is expected. Very cold temperatures combined with light winds will create extreme cold conditions that will persist until late this morning.

Details

Wear appropriate clothing. - Always wear clothing appropriate for the weather. Synthetic and wool fabrics provide better insulation. Some synthetic fabrics are designed to keep perspiration away from your body which keep you dry and further reduce your risk. - Dress in layers with a wind resistant outer layer. You can remove layers if you get too warm (before you start sweating) or add a layer if you get cold. - Wear warm socks, gloves, a hat and scarf in cold weather. Be sure to cover your nose to protect it. - If you get wet, change into dry clothing as soon as possible. You lose heat faster when you're wet. Extreme cold warnings are issued when very cold temperatures or wind chill creates an elevated risk to health such as frost bite and hypothermia. Environment Canada meteorologists will update alerts as required. Please continue to monitor your local media or Weatheradio for further updates. If you would like to report severe weather, you can call 1-800-239-0484 or send an email to storm@ec.gc.ca or tweet reports to #ABStorm.

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Current Weather

Sun Jan 4 8:05 AM

Clear

-33°C

Feels like -44

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More Feathered Friends

The word got out pretty fast! Fresh Food! Peanuts!

 Within minutes of going back inside they started to arrive. There must be a sentinel someplace near by.

 Today it was -24C  (-11F)  or -35C (-31F) with the wind chill. I guess they were all looking for food.

 The Blue Jays keep coming back, and can sure de-shell peanuts in a hurry!

 Too cold for outside pictures today, but I did go to town to get a protective screen for my camera view screen.

Storms and Normal

Wyoming Hits -26°F in Arctic Blast; 3 Feet of Snow in Michigan's Upper Peninsula - A bitter cold blast of Arctic air more typical of late December is plunging south over the Midwest, and will immerse most of the eastern two-thirds of the country in December-like cold for much of the coming week. Casper, Wyoming bottomed out Wednesday morning at a numbing -26°F, their coldest November temperature since weather records began in 1937. Casper's previous November record cold temperature was -21°F, set on Nov. 23, 1985.
Laramie, Wyoming hit -22°F Wednesday morning, a record low for the date, and Yellowstone hit -20°F. The storm brought very strong winds with it, with several mountaintop locations recording wind gusts in excess of 80 mph earlier this week: 81 mph at Pikes Peak, Colorado, and 84 mph at Snowbasin, Utah. According to the Wednesday morning NOAA Storm Summary, a whopping three feet of snow (36.1") fell at Ishpeming in Michigan's Upper Peninsula over the past three days, and numerous locations in Michigan received more than 20" of snow, including Marquette (20") and Negaunee (32.5".)
Snow amounts in North Central Minnesota were as high as 16.5", and northern Wisconsin got a peak of 26" at Gile. The storm and associated intense cold is being triggered by an usually extreme jet stream pattern, featuring a sharp ridge of high pressure over Alaska and a deep trough of low pressure diving to the south over the Central United States. This extreme jet stream pattern is due, in part, to the influence of Super Typhoon Nuri, which caused a ripple effect on the jet stream after the typhoon became one of the most powerful extratropical storms ever recorded in the waters to the west of Alaska last Saturday. 

http://globaldisasterwatch.blogspot.com/

I don't live in Wyoming or Michigan,or Utah  but I just have to say "Welcome to my world". It can be brutal and leads to hibernation. :-}

Happy March 1st !

Normally, when March rolls in, we are thinking of spring being just around the corner. Not so today, or for the next 3 days coming. Dagnabit, I need heat!

Today will be sit on the couch and vegetate day with a good book and the drapes drawn.

 Anybody know a good heat dance?

-30C ( -22F) for the next few, and last few days! The Tournament of Hearts (curling) is on plus the Olympics. Life is good to be in town in front of the TV and vegetating rather than feeding horses, watering horses and shoveling snow! Life is pretty good in the mini-city!!

December Blues

It's -20C (-4F) and the water softener line is frozen. This takes about 2 hours outside to fix. There is about a 15 mph wind which lowers the temperature another 10 degrees.

The horse trough was empty again which meant another hour outside playing with water and hoses.

Did I mention that I am fighting the flu also?

Alpine

There are two things to cheer me up. Big brown eyes and the fact that there is only about 105 days till spring!

One thing about a good snowstorm is that things are so nice and clean afterwards

 The trees that did not lose their leaves are very heavy and nasty to brush against. I had to shake our Mayberry,  apple and other trees because the branches were right at the break point. The raspberry bushes were flattened.

 It's tough going through the denser part of the Acreage.

 This gives you an idea of how sticky the snow was.

 The horses have been using the old road quite a bit looking for food. Alas, there is none, and winter feeding has started.

 Boots doesn't seem to mind the snow, except that Brooklyn appears to have taken over his dog house. Hopefull, they will learn to share, or I will have to add an addition.

It was fortunate that the onions were drying in the garage out of the snow and -7C (19.4F) temperature. Half are now safely stored in the pantry. The other half will likely be given away.

All in all, not a bad day!

Official Notice

CANADA - Extreme and wacky weather continues as RECORD LOWS hit parts of Canada. Coast-to-coast, Canadians continue to deal with 'weird and wacky' weather. Freezing rain, severe wind chills and mild temperatures persist across the country, with temperatures dropping in the West and winter storm warnings hitting much of the East. Bitterly cold weather has helped Alberta has set a new record for electricity demand. On Monday around the supper hour, demand peaked at an all-time high of 10,609 megawatts, which beat the previous record set Sunday.
On Wednesday, record lows hit Alberta as arctic air moved east. Edmonton faced a severe wind chill of about -43 C while Calgary expected a chill of -35 C. Bitterly cold air combined with a westerly wind of 15 to 30 km/h will produce wind chill values in the -40 to -49 C range in southern Saskatchewan throughout Wednesday and into Thursday. Winnipeg also got a blast of winter as temperatures were set to hit -36 C. At these extreme values, frostbite on exposed skin can occur in less than 10 minutes. 


This is an excerpt from 
http://globaldisasterwatch.blogspot.com/

This is not the sort of records that I like to see. We are only 1 1/2 hours from Edmonton, and pretty much matched what they saw.

On a more cheerful note, do you realize that spring is only 2 months away? Wahooo!

Bring it on!!!

Wordless Wednesday

Digging Out and Freezing

Winter hit with a bang on Saturday with a 6 inch snowfall (15 cm) and a dive in temperature. Our unseasonable period seems to be over. For the next two weeks highs are expected to be -26C and lows  in the -31C range. With the winds that we can expect we will likely see wind chill factors in the -40 to -45C range(-40 to -48F).

The offer made last year to trade Acreages in February with someone in the deep south is still open. Any takers?

I include a couple of shots of the place. The pictures are nice, but don't show the cold. One good thing is the horses aren't slipping on the ice anymore, and are a lot happier, and mobile. They are also eating an extra 10 pounds of hay each, just to keep warm.

Tomorrow, I will likely give them a pint of rolled oats each for added calories.


I took the pictures at -26C. That's all the shots I got before the camera froze up

Have fun and think warm!

Winter, Blecht!!

This is what we woke up to this morning! What doesn't show is the howling wind and blowing snow.

 The view from the window made me want to head back to bed, but alas, there was a work party at the Men's shelter so I had to go out. 10 to 20 cm of snow forecast!

Bring on spring!

Rest Day!

After the previous week and a half, I declared a rest day. This can be seen in Brooklynn for one. She got herself worn out watching all the shenanigans going on with the Well Technician, the steamer truck, and all the work going on trying to keep the horses, chickens, dogs and us all watered.

It is amazing what we take for granted! You turn the tap on, you get water. You flush, water is taken away. After a week with neither water, or unlimited flushing. we got to realize just how lucky we are. Going back to "early primitive" I found it to be a full time job just getting water for all the critters, in a form that was usable.

We don't pamper our horses with a barn, heated stalls or things like that. One of our dogs, Boots, will not drink water from a tap in a bowl, but prefers to eat snow. Yep, even at -40 C . The rest of us like warm water. This gave us a look at what it must have been like in pioneer days, in the dead of winter trying to survive until spring, when a harvest could be planted. My ancestors showed up in Canada from England, had a crop failure and barely made it. Their homestead was never registered as they didn't make the first year let alone the three years required. We still had heat, so did not have to spend a whole bunch of time cutting and hauling firewood. We are truly blessed in these days. We figured we did good at -30C, surviving a week with no water and a few days with a frozen sewer line.
Life as a horse is much simpler. Give them food, give them water and they can make it. The cold made them go into hibernation mode, sort of. Don't move, huddle up and conserve energy.

The Canada Weather office is forecasting another month of severe cold, but I don't agree with them. I have one dog shedding hair, two horses shedding hair, so what do they know that we don't? I will take a horse prediction of spring over whatever a mere rodent can predict. After all, gophers are just slightly smarter than wheat. We shall see.

The last two days have been spent doing the bare minimum as far as acreage work goes, and a lot of time sleeping, 12 hours the first day and 10 the second. The activity also caused a weight loss of 8 pounds over the week. The balance of the awake time was spent mostly eating.

Come warmer weather, I will likely be replacing the water well pump. The controller failed, not the pump, but the well tech guy says it is due to failure as it's life of 14 years is getting up there for a hard water service. I also see some changes that need to be made in the sewer lines, such as clean-outs that are pointed the right way, and a proper "Y" drop leg to the underground part.

Some day, about 10 years out, we will look back and think "Remember the Good Old Times on The Acreage?" You betcha!

-27C (-15F) Random Photos

Boom enjoying the heat of the sun., butt to the wind!

Tuckers Fire Star (aka Tucker) wondering when spring is coming.

Boots guard dog on duty, NOT. He's out of the wind and in a sunny spot. Life is good. Even last night he would not stay inside. He just comes in, eats and wants back out again. Go figure!

It's nice an toasty inside, Now, go away, I want to lay an egg!

(Hen, Red Sussex Cross)

Mr. and Mrs. Leghorn

Our sole Colombian Wyandotte hen

Biz, looking for food.