Still chilly

I'm sitting here at the Bolt Hole with my fingers wrapped around my coffee cup to keep them warm. I'd start a fire in the wood stove but it'll be getting up to the 70s today if the weather quacks are correct and I'd rather not have it too warm inside.

Yesterday, when I was cutting the lawn, I did manage to break a sweat but that was with a medium weight long sleeve shirt and lots of walking under the sometimes bright sun. I say "sometimes" because the clouds that blew in from the west-northwest predominated and even threatened rain. But the threat never materialized and the clouds along with the strong breeze that blew much of the day disappeared around 9 PM.

(Terry said they missed the record low in Elmira by just 2 degrees. Binghamton and Rochester and other points were not so lucky. They set record lows for the 14th of July.)

No overnight cloud cover and no overnight wind meant that any heat that might have built up during the day (and there was precious little of that as the high was only around 65 degrees) was free to escape out to space. And it did. The corrected thermometers this morning still read 45 degrees or so at 7 AM. The underground weather station about 5 miles from here as the crow flies recorded a low of 43 degrees at 6 AM. (I really have to get a more accurate max-min digital!)

The wind picked up yesterday around 10 in the morning and finally dried out the lawn (heavy, heavy dew) so I was able to get the grass all cut using one of Mark's mowers. No snakes or toads were seen which is unusual for a July day. There's usually a few of each in the grass hunting grasshoppers or crickets. Then again, there weren't many of insects in the grass either.

I'll be spending the better part of the day up on the garage roof with some ring-shanked nails that have washers on them and a bucket of roofing tar. Pull out some of the old nails that have worked loose, put a dollop of tar on the hole and then a new and improved (I hope) nail goes in to hold the metal in place. Sounds easy but time consuming. With any luck, there won't be any bugs and the roof will be a warm place to work.

******

My mind keeps wandering to my wife's cousin's daughter who is hiking the Appalachian trail. She started last summer making it as far north as the Berkshires. She picked it up again this June and is poised to begin the Presidential Range in the White Mountains any day now if she hasn't done so already. The last report on the SPOT Shared page (which was on July 10) shows her to be just shy of Franconia Notch but she's backtracked along the trail for some reason.

Current conditions on the summit of Mt. Washington?

At 8:15 AM on Wednesday morning they report a temperature of 35.7 degrees with winds of 53.9 mph (gusts to 59.8 mph) for a wind chill of 19.2 degrees F.

Translation: Freakin' Cold! But that's somewhat normal for Mt. Washington.