These Chill Days in September….

Today is the 1^st Day of Autumn (officially), just past the Ides of September, and while the outdoor temps have been hanging around mid-70s day and night since the beginning of the 4^th week in August, I woke to a chilly house (low 50s) and had to shut the windows. It’s like someone hit a switch and said “Summer’s done. Get over it. Welcome to The Cold.” My cat is buried under two blankets now. When will I turn on the furnace? Probably tonight. In fact, we had a dry, chilly summer here in my kingdom. Now a wet, chilly fall (normal) is underway.

There are strange stirrings in the air.

Vlad Putin is limiting natural gas sales to Europe.  WHATTTTT???? Oh, my Dawg, how on the Great Blue Marble will “what’s her name” (Merkel) ever survive??? The Horror!!!!!  What it really means is that if Europe/UK are almost completely dependent on Russia’s resources for cooking, heating and other necessities, and Russia is reducing its volume of sales to Those People, then those concerns that should be in place (e.g., heating and cooking and electricity) should soar like frightened geese during hunting season. There is an enormous load of pure foolishness going on the UK, thanks to BJ’s ecohippie girlfriend Princess Nut-Nut not only winding him around her little finger, but also yanking him by the short hairs. The forecast for the UK for winter is not good and they may have to return to coal and gas just for electricity. It’s not quite that bad on the Continent, but it’s still bad, because the Ecohippies and Green Idiots are trying to run everything.

Why does this matter? Well, France is already having weather-related issues in the vineyards, where freezing temperatures in July and August (yes, both August and July) had hit the vines and were endangering the volume of available fruit (grapes) for the vintners to produce France’s best-known product – aside from cheese, of course.  Okay, cheese, quiches, and bread… and pommes tartes Normandes… and poulet au vin…. Okay I’ll shut up now.

But if we are slapped with another and a very unnecessary lockdown, we must be prepared well ahead of that possibility. And don’t think it can’t happen. You know what sits on its butt in WDC just as well as I do.

If you didn’t get the news bulletin, snow in July and August left deep piles down to the elevation of 2200 meters (3.3 feet per meter) in the Austrian Alps. The vineyards in France were in peril of losing entire crops of future wine. Don’t have a report on hops harvest in Germany, but they are also the fruit of a vine.

We’re in a solar minimum, which does not make this a surprise to me or any other sensible person, but the Greenbeaners and ecohippies ignore it. They believe that heat creates cold. They really do. They ignore the simplest thing in physics, e.g., cold is the absence of heat, which has to be generated by something.

We’re having the same things happen over here in various places – early cold, early snows here and there, too much rain or not enough.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-is-concerned-about-russia-limiting-nat-gas-exports/vi-AAOEaBW?ocid=mailsignout

Well, this move by Russia may just prove tragic to the UK and Europeans, e.g., Germany under Merkel, who rely on Vlad Putin’s Gazprom to provide them with natural gas.

According to both of our Almanacs, the coming winter will, in some areas, be harsh. Normal weather for those of us living in mountainous areas or on the prairies, or near any one of the Great Lakes, and of course, that makes for good ice fishing weather, doesn’t it? And iceboat races!

The Old Farmers Almanac general forecast is here:  https://www.almanac.com/winter-extended-forecast-farmers-almanac

And the Farmers Almanac forecast is here:  https://www.farmersalmanac.com/extended-forecast

I do like the maps instead of long, prosaic prosing about why the planet is somehow doomed but natural gas as a means of heating your home and cooking food is a bad thing. Wind and solar are proving to be both unreliable and not as adequate to carry the demand of the load as had been predicted by “Experts”.

Yes, those Almanac forecasts are generalized for each region, but they aren’t doing the day-to-day stuff that your local meteorologists do. There have been too many times when the weather guessers on TV failed, and failed badly, resulting in tragedies that did not have to happen. Two stick in my memory: the 1967 blizzard that buried Chicago and left people completely stranded on buses and trains, and the 2011 blizzard that stranded people on roads and left them to freeze to death.

Taking into consideration last winter’s egregious mistakes about the Texas grid into account (plants that normally shut down early did so, just ahead of the freeze, and the remaining power stations were inadequate), it’s almost as if the people who are in charge are asleep at the switch… and that’s more scary than a werewolf in your closet.  And yes, depending on where you are, winter may come early if you watch the migratory birds (geese and ducks).

Stock ahead; keep a list of what you use the most. If another lockdown comes up (yes, there is chatter about it), think now about important food resources like popcorn (and oil and the stovetop popper) and butter, beef, bacon, sausage, and cheesecake… er, bread – yeah, that’s it: bread! I’m up for pancakes and maple syrup, myself.

Think like a Colonial homeowner: everything was stored ahead for the Fall and Winter and the possibility of a late Spring. I may post some of those old recipes again. Definitely posting the buttermilk pancakes tomorrow!

I will be out foraging today, to stock the shelves in the fridge and the pantry, and try to settle in for the approaching winter.  We may all have to settle in for a good winter’s nap.

Category: "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves", COVID-19, Economy