Category Archives: Weather

Littleton

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I am in Littleton, Co, right now, visiting old friends. Leah, unfortunately, had to stay at home with Sam and the cats.

I arrived at my friends’ house around 9:30 local time on Friday after an almost 900-mile drive from O’Fallon, Il, where I had spent the night after driving from the New River Gorge in West Virginia. The weather along the way was quite nice, and it continued into Saturday.

On Saturday most of us went to see a car museum and then to a brewery, where they were having an animal benefit. There was a big crowd that had spilled outside into the bright and warm afternoon. There we sat and (most of us) sipped a beer while watching the people, the dogs, and this:

A French bulldog disguised as a mountain lion.

The weather has turned cold and snowy, resulting in this scene in my friends’ back yard on Monday.

Today, Tuesday, the snow is around 4 or 5 inches deep. There is light snow falling with more expected through the day. The roads are slippery enough that a trip to see a motorcycle museum in Colorado Springs this morning was cancelled, along with some school and work. My weather app tells me it’s 17F now in Littleton, while it’s 67F back home in Georgia. We’re going for a high of 19F, and a low tonight of 9F.

My friends have a dog, Elroy, whose picture I have posted before. Here he is getting ready to go outside for a quick bathroom break.

Poor Elroy is suffering from arthritis that makes it hard for him to walk and painful for us to watch. He’s snoring right now on a pad next to where I am typing this.

I have remarked before on how much he looks like Zeke. When I hear his nails tapping on the floor I expect to see my old dog.

A little rain

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We have been having quite the summer so far this fall. It has been hot and dry for most of the last half of summer and now into late September. We finally had some rain last Friday. We got about two tenths of an inch in the afternoon. The rain was preceded by a double rainbow.

The outer bow is hard to see, especially in this shot.

Later in the evening we got more. The total was about eight tenths of an inch, not nearly what we needed but we’re grateful for what we got.

But it’s still supposed to be over 90F for the rest of this week. The Atlanta TV weather people have been tracking the number of days this summer with highs over 90. The record is 90 days, and as of Sunday, it was 86 for this year. They expect to break the record.

Next weekend the highs are supposed to drop into the low 80’s. That’s still higher than the average high temperature at the beginning of October, but it has been so hot for so long that those temperatures will be a relief.

Late summer color

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For about two years we have been staring out our bedroom window at a bare, red-clay area between the house and the driveway. This is how it looked.

I was just getting ready to start some landscaping when I took this photo. Now it looks like this.

There is actually a small Japanese maple in the middle of the bare area between the foreground vincas and the back ground vincas. The vinca plants have been doing quite well. Unfortunately, it has been so hot and dry here that they were beginning to wilt. I put about 30 gallons on them on Saturday, all from one of our rainwater collector tanks, which you can see at the left side of the house.

The hot and dry weather has caused some of the hardwoods to start turning color. I had not noticed this maple until Saturday.

The color is nice, but it’s way too early. Some other maples have started to turn red. Some of the other hardwoods, including oaks, which usually turn brownish yellow, are starting to turn brown. No color. That is sometimes a bad sign, especially for dogwoods. I have noticed that dogwoods whose leaves turn brown late in the summer often don’t come back next spring. I have mentioned before that we have lost most of the native dogwoods that used to grow on our property. We will probably lose more after this summer.

Thunderstorm in the distance

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Wednesday afternoon a thunderstorm appeared within a matter of about 45 minutes to the east of us. I walked out on the front porch and told Leah to come out and see a classic thunderstorm anvil cloud.

It was late enough in the day that the shadow of the Earth was creeping up the base of the cloud. There was an occasional lightning flash beneath it. I checked my phone’s weather radar app to see how far away it was.

The pushpin shows our house. The storm was about 15 miles away. Unfortunately it was not heading our way. We have experienced a few light showers lately, but the strong storms have avoided us. We are very dry up here on the mountain top. I would like a light rain that lasts for a couple of hours, but I would settle for a heavy rain that lasts for 30 minutes.

The East at Sunset

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Leah and I were driving back home from town Friday night close to dusk. The sky was full of clouds lit by the setting sun. A view of the sunset itself would have been nice, but we had to settle for this.

This is the view from our front porch looking east over town.

The sky had been full of puffy cumulus clouds all day. There were some thundershowers 20 or 30 miles south of us. They didn’t come to visit here, unfortunately. We are quite dry here, although there has been a lot of rain all around us. We have watched significant storms brew and creep around us, parting as they crossed over us so we remained dry, or simply disappearing before they reached us. This is a typical summertime pattern.

Our Atlanta TV meteorologists have attributed some of our current weather to Tropical Storm Barry, which is really too far away to have much effect here. We are hoping some of the moisture channeled up from the Gulf will make its way here and maybe cause enough rain to encourage our new plantings to live another day.