The snow from last weekend is nearly gone on our south facing farm. The north facing hillsides still have snow on them as do the woods. And again something is scheduled for which being snowed in is a problem, but there is a winter storm warning for tonight into tomorrow morning with 3-5 inches expected again. I got a recall on my old CRV for the master switch in the driver’s door which failed about 2 years ago requiring that you manually lock and unlock the driver’s door then you can unlock the other doors. Because I am not willing to sit in a dealer’s waiting room while it is repaired for an hour or more on Monday and because we decided to go on and have the state inspection and an oil change by our local mechanic, we rented a car to use for two days, but said car will lack the clearance of the CRV and not have all wheel drive.
The good news is that it will stop in the morning and begin warming up quickly, so hopefully, by Monday afternoon, the driveway won’t be an issue. Hopefully, we will have the CRV back before the next round of winter storm weather comes in mid week. This is from the winter that was supposed to be warm and wet according to the Farmer’s Almanac and the weather prognosticators. After a couple of warm winters with little or no snow, we have returned to true Virginia winter weather. Our electric power bill compares each month with the same month from last year and it showed we averaged 8 degrees colder this year than last.
This morning, we went and picked up my new bird feeder and some bird and chicken feed. Since I use lidded 5 gallon buckets for storage, I did a clean up around them and the workbench in the garage before filling the buckets from the bags purchased. The new feeder was filled and hung and it didn’t take the little mixed flock of Chickadees, Tufted Titmouse, assorted Finches, Wrens, and Juncos to find it. I haven’t seen any of the larger birds or woodpeckers yet, but they will discover the change too. You can see the new split tube feeder and the suet tube on the shepherd’s crook in the top photo.
The sky has grayed, the barometer is falling, the snow will begin after dark tonight and we will see in the morning what the storm brought us this time. No matter what the groundhog saw or didn’t see, there are 6 more weeks of winter and here we won’t see the last frost until near Mother’s Day.