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tamarack

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Everything posted by tamarack

  1. Trees grow and trees decay, resulting in new weaklings being recruited every year. I'm always looking for damage each late spring/summer when the deciduous trees "unfurl the sails". I rather no heat in the winter.. you can always put more cloths on Can't get the plumbing to do the same - split pipes and resulting water damage is a bummer.
  2. Location dependent, of course. First one here was pretty good despite the ratty December - no blockbusters but long snowpack that reached 40" in March. Last winter didn't rate ratter status here, more like meh - not much happened until after the equinox.
  3. Try to find out if it's a hybrid Oriental/American chestnut, perhaps from the American Chestnut Foundation, or more likely a pure Oriental chestnut. The hybrid's resistance/tolerance would depend on the breeding. I'm not aware of any ACF trees being sold - they usually donate stock so to have more widespread planting and testing. The Oriental would be blight tolerant and would produce nuts but would not get nearly as big as the American.
  4. A station in western VA recorded 26" in 5 hours from the remains of Camille. 30-40% of that 'cane's fatalities came from VA flash floods. For stalled TS in odd places I'd note CAR getting >6.5" in 2.5 hours on 8/17/1981. That was a strange system in many ways. Co-workers at Russell Stream (upper Allagash River) reported heavy RA at 8 AM, the CAR blitz was 10-12:30, another co-worker at the US border with St.-Pamphile, PQ had RA+ 1-4 PM and in Fort Kent we got 2" from 6 to 8 PM. Next morning I drove thru Dickey (western part of the town of Allagash) and up the Hafey Mountain Road, and hit dusty going about 1/4 mile north of the St. John.
  5. We had hundreds of the teeny things appear quite suddenly in June. Put out some ant traps and some borax-sugar mix (our recipe for carpenter ants) and we're now seeing them only rarely.
  6. Winter moth or Bruce spanworm (they're somewhat similar in appearance and phenology, moths flying in late fall) would be my guesses.
  7. lol. Gotta say where - ORH? BOX? Somerville?
  8. Blow like a whale until it thaws loose. My junior year in HS I managed to freeze both lips to the receiver of my Ithaca pump shotgun. I'd been waiting for deer that didn't come and probably taking the gun from the warm house to the breezy teens resulted in the action freezing after I had gone into the woods and loaded the three buckshot shells. Things wouldn't move to let me unload the gun when legal hunting time expired so I leaned down to breathe into the ejection slot and got a bit too close. The panic urge was quelled, barely, and after five minutes or so of huffing and puffing I was freed with lips intact though very slightly frostbit, and by then the action was thawed, I took out the shells and walked home.
  9. Kind of like repainting the centerline the week before the resurfacing crew arrives.
  10. We had 39 on 8/31/65 in NNJ. Only 7° above freezing but the kids on the swim club still had to be at the beach ready to practice by 7 AM.
  11. 1st sub-50 low since 6/18 and tomorrow I pinch off the tops of the cherry tomatoes in hopes that doing so will turn the plants' efforts to ripening the fruit already set rather than setting even more. Maybe a back-to-the-future spell early next week, but I think the warmups will be less warm and the cooldowns more cool. No true Canadian CAA in the models I see, however, and after 8/15 those air masses often bring upper 30s here.
  12. Only an inch at CAR but sites WVL south had around 3", not all that much compared to points west and some PRE may be included.
  13. Hey, 7 letters beginning with M? What's the difference? Thanks for the correction.
  14. Wrong storm? What was the one that flooded Jacksonville?
  15. Recurve timing/location usually spares N. FL and GA - Michael was an exception. Hugo was the classic exception though farther north. I think it's significant recurving began around KY.
  16. This reminds me of 3 years ago when a fellow from RI got all excited seeing Andover, Maine reporting a 76" pack and drove up to see. He didn't realize that NNE plow drivers start planning for the next storm as soon as the present one is cleared, and that the roadside piles thus look modest because they've been pushed back. He never left the paved road but when he headed west on the East B Hill Road and got behind the Mahoosucs his GPS feed disappeared. With gas running low and no idea where he really was, he was more than a bit anxious, and when he got back home he excoriated Maine roads, Maine snow reporting and all things Maine. I probably didn't help his mood when I mentioned old fashioned paper maps. (And if he really wanted to see pack, he should've gone to Machias in Feb 2015.)
  17. Our place has far less elevation with which to work, but it's an ideal set-up for cold. The field to our north drains cold air across the road and into the yard but it doesn't infiltrate into the dense forest next to our lawn - only 100' elevation change from the top of the field to my recording thermometer but I'd guess my growing season is 3 weeks shorter than at the trailer a quarter mile away just north of the top of the field. Upper 40s this morning, first sub-50 since June 18. Haven't checked the records (and may not bother) but the 49-day run of minima 50+ is undoubtedly the longest here, as no July before last month had recorded fewer than 3 sub-50 minima
  18. Maybe this event was enough crisis to spur action, though I doubt it. Our small (1400 or so) town dithered for 30 years about replacing our decrepit and wholly inadequate fire station, and about the moldy and asbestos-filled town office for the latter half of that period. Even a winter of seeing the office equipment under plastic (roof leaking) when one visited the town clerk for excise tax, dog licenses, etc., didn't move the needle, though I think it kind of prepped things. Then last fall an asbestos-wrapped steam pipe blew, forcing the office to close - nice folks in Chesterville made a place for our town clerk to work temporarily. That did the trick - a well-attended meeting early last December presented plans for a new town office/fire station and attendees approved the expense by an 11:1 margin. Most of those folks had voted down a (better, IMO) proposal 3 years earlier. Squeaky wheels come in many forms. Edit: Saw yesterday that my old NNJ stomping ground was mostly still dark, and Jersey Central said that 95% of its customers would have power back by this coming Tuesday. Yay!
  19. Our place had a Burnham, maybe 4 years old when we moved here in 1998. Seven years ago it began to leak and I thought we might need to replace the seals, maybe up to $1000. The repairman looked into it while I was at work, then asked my wife if she wanted the good news first or the bad news. "Good news." "Today is Tuesday." "Okay, the bad." "The boiler is cracked, the whole thing needs to be replaced." We had a similar unit put in, would have to go downstairs to check the brand but not a Burnham. Fortunately our little (200 cords) timber sale a few months before had earned enough to pay cash.
  20. And they were about a mile away. Some of the later clips came from 2+ miles.
  21. Our 13KW Generac install was twice that, though 40% was for purchase, installation and filling of 2 hundred-gallon propane tanks, whereas you would only need a couple hundred if there's natural gas. We finally coughed up the cash after 6-7 outages Oct-April, longest 31 hours in April with others 2-20. Heat was never the issue with the big Jotul in the living room, but food and other things plus our no longer being young led to the decision.
  22. Doesn't always take large differences in elevation. On still clear Fort Kent winter mornings, my commute from the back settlement at 970' led east and then due north so I could see the cedar mill and its cone burner across the river in Clair, NB. If there was a smoke layer about 50 yards above that burner, I knew it would be 10-15F colder at our riverside office (about 540') than it had been at home.
  23. Greater than any single conventional weapon. This event led me to look up the 1917 explosion in Halifax harbor. That was a munitions ship and the blast was evaluated as being equal to about 2,900 tons of TNT. It pretty much leveled everything within a half mile and tossed heavy pieces of metal over 3 miles. Nearly 2,000 fatalities - I hope Beirut casualties remain in the low hundreds.
  24. We've occasionally had paper wasps in underground nests here - once did a partial striptease in my driveway (sometimes being at the end of a dead-end road is good) when those critters flew into my clothing on my 4th lawnmower pass by their hole in the ground. They have kind of a reverse yellowjacket pattern, skinny yellowish stripes on a black background.
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