Today got off to a bad start. It was windy. Really windy. Really, really windy. Hurricane force kind of windy. For starters, it was garbage day for a lot of people. Being garbage day and having horrendous winds is a bad combination for the environment. Stuff was blowing everywhere, including from my neighbors garbage can. I went out to pick some of it up and moved her garbage can back out of the wind.
I came back in the house turned around and looked back out the window and realized the big ol 25 foot tall blue spruce tree I had just walked by was now laying in the yard **sigh**…**sing along**…Happy Anniversary to me…Happy Anniversary to me…Phooey! Well, at least I didn’t get flattened by the thing.
In case you were not aware, there are lots of people who are amateur weather people. They install weather stations at their homes and then connect them to the Internet where you can go look at them. We have several within a few miles of us and I pulled one up to see just how strong the winds were. As you can see from the below chart we had sustained winds of around 50 mph with gusts up to 84 mph at the time of our trees demise.
Now the odd thing here is that it’s not stormy outside. Perfectly clear sky, sunny and quite nice temperature-wise. Nevertheless, the winds can really come roaring off the mountains onto the plains and we seem to be in a micro-climate that gets to experience that neat little phenomena. Continue reading
