Dry, Drier, Driest

The golden brown over western NY
Indicates a "Severe Drought"

I've been forecaster for central New York for almost 30 years and like fashion, I've seen the weather go in cycles. We'll have periods of wet, dry, cold, warm, snowy, and snowless that will last years, sometimes nearly a decade. The 90's were warm and dry in the summer, but produced some record snow for the winters. The 2000's turned wet, with record breaking floods and billions in damage, but the winters were rather snowless. Of course, there are shorter term periods within these that bucked the trend, but in general there seems to be a cycle of sorts. This year, we are having a very dry summer, in fact a drought, and farmers and owners of shallow wells are very concerned. Some local municipalities are issuing stern warnings about the water supply. The City of Binghamton, which gets it's water from the Susquehanna river, has stated they have no current problems. Who knows, perhaps we are entering a period of warm, dry summers and snowy winters.

The question I always get asked, is if the dry weather is related to climate change. Well, no. Climate change (which I will not get into on this blog) is a large "background' decades long trend upon which our short tern weather is painted. In other words, warm, dry, cold, wet are all short term, normal weather variations that have been, and will continue to be, going on for millions of years despite whatever background temperature change is.

Tree down up at the corner of Park & Grand

Locally, the dry weather has affected my work around the house. I gave up cutting the grass the other day because I could not tell where I had cut, and where I had not. The grass has pretty much gone dormant, and even the weeds have slowed down. I've also given up watering the grass after noting that it was not helping, and also noting that I had doubled my water bill. Yikes! Of course, there has been some rain. A recent storm brought down trees and caused a blackout on the street, but not for us. Our next door neighbor lost power for 3 1/2 hours as did most of the street, but we didn't. Weird thing is our service lines come from the same pole.

The heat caused us to purchased a window air conditioner for the bedroom. I had hoped that the solid masonry construction of the home, along with the ceiling fan, would get us through the hottest weather, but it was just too warm at night, We now are slumbering in a cool albeit noisy cave each night. It's amazing how much noisier air conditioners are once you get them home and it's 3 AM. Thing was as quiet as a church mouse in Sam's Club.

Branches ready for pickup. Note the pitiful excuse
of a "lawn" in the foreground.

Back at work on the graveyard shift this past week severely limited my repairs and improvements. I did manage to trim some more trees along the fence line by the park. Again I did this with my hand saw as my purchase of a chain saw has been stymied by indecision. It was exhausting work in the heat and barring emergencies, I think I'm done trimming for the year, or until I get a chain saw.

Sloppy yet effective repair of Katia's destruction. 

Katia, our rambunctious cat/dog who follows us around the house on all projects and tasks decided to climb the dryer vent which I had carefully cleaned and pieced back together. I used some duct tape to temporarily hold it in place but the heat of the vent actually makes this a poor choice. I should get some aluminum tape soon and do a proper repair job and permanently cat proof the vent.

This week, screen door arrives and we figure out how to get it to work in an irregular size opening. I see head scratching, swear words, and Yuengling in my future.