A tad chilly

Winter gets me tingly but not with excitement. It starts with the fingers and toes and moves in from there...

Harvest time at my place.  Bad year though, as a result of all of the hail I'm looking at a lot of bruised apples.  We'll see what we can salvage.

Forecast of 29° C (84.2° F) for here tomorrow.  Good thing they keep me locked up in an air conditioned office building.

Last night's temp continued downward, almost becoming my first freeze as well as my first dip below 40 F ; it bottomed out at 32.5 F .  There was probably somewhere in my yard where it was half a degree colder.  

  Care to make a prediction of when you'll see the first snow fly at your place.?

Just the reverse here in beertopia NW. Right now is the most heat we've had this summer. The forecast, after 91 today:

Too bad you couldn't have gotten some of that heat at the beginning of your growing season.  Any decent veggies coming in?

I've been getting cucumbers and cherry tomatoes for a few weeks now. The Brandywine tomatoes are reddening so I expect I'll get a few ripe ones at least.

My lemon cucumber, which is a favorite of mine for both taste and production, is getting mildewy, so it won't be a good producer for much longer. Happens every year, being an heirloom, and I guess the soil must carry the spores. The other cucumber plant is a hybrid and is okay as it has some built in resistance to mildew.

So, I'll have the makings for a few more salads before the growing year is done.

Maybe next year will be more promising and I'll be able to plant other stuff that needs plenty of heat. I really miss having fresh melons; They're just garden candy.

It's a bumper year for fruit in the LP!  Every four or five years we have a good berry year 'round here.  This was the year.  Blackberries and raspberries everywhere.  One morning, a couple of weeks ago, I walked outside my door about 10 feet to gather ripe raspberries to put on my PANCAKES--no sissified waffles fer me.

The pears are really good this year, too.  I know Mr.Guy will never believe it, but I have two Bartlett Pear trees between house and barn.  They're loaded with fruit.  If I had slacked on my trimming in February, broken branches would have been a certainty.  There's got to be over 500 lbs. of fruit on those two trees as I write.

Ding Ding Ding!  5:54 a.m. here, and 5 minutes ago my thermometer just hit 32.0 F , heralding the first freeze at the Phailure Ranch for the 2011-12 winter.

   It's 52 here, I have my sweatshirt on and it's just absolutely glorious to have the cold weather back. Warm weather is just not my style. Give me a cold, windy, and rainy 40 degree day with some thunder and I am a very happy person. 

   -Mark

Pretty cool-- the UARS satellite is expected to come down within the next hour or so, and the spaceflightnow.com website has a live feed showing the position of the satellite as it orbits.  If if makes it through another orbit it may last long enough to make another pass over Canada and the U.S., and if it looks like it's going to expire anywhere around me you can bet I'll be out on my porch looking up and hoping for a great light show!  

At this instant (11:15 p.m. EDT) it's approaching central Africa traveling SE at an altitude of only 85 miles.

http://spaceflightnow.com/uars/status.html

11:29 p.m. -- it just crossed the eastern coast of Madagascar, so now a long stretch over mostly water, across the Indian Ocean and back up to the NW across the Pacific.  Not sure where it's going to pass through Oceania, as the graphic is showing a globe, not an orbital path on a Mercator projection.

The odds greatly favor an ocean splashdown, but it'll be a shame if it's in a place where hardly anyone gets to see it.

Hey, here's another live stream, this one showing the projection on a flat map, though unfortunately not a very big area shown at a time:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/theweatherspace-news

Could be.  At 11:45 NASA said they expect within the next 60 minutes.  Currently (11:54) UARS is just west of New Zealand, paralleling the 2 islands and starting its run back northward.

I just messaged goldendog (offline at the moment)-- he's got a shot at a view too.

I just briefly saw a projection and then it changed.  It looks like it will cross fairly near the U.S.-Canada border, perhaps north of the border.  But it's still continuing northward there and most of its pass over western and central Canada will be FAR north of the border, looks like way north or any of us.

12:09-- UARS is just about to pass a little bit eastward of the big island of Hawaii, headed goldendog's general direction.