Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Aerie Report, May 25, 2010

An exceptionally warm day here at the Aerie. The bright sunshine and lack of a breeze brought the temperature up to 87 degrees late this afternoon. The official weather.com high was just 82 which, while above the average for the day was well below the record high of 89 degrees. I have to assume the weather station is over at the Corning-Elmira airport and they interpolate temperatures for our area from that station and a few others. "Interpolate"...that's a fancy assed way of saying they make an educated guess.

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It's supposed to be even warmer tomorrow and we just may set a new record. Terry has a group of her lady friends coming over in at 10 AM for some stitching and lunch. I was thinking of going out but may just hunker down in the basement where the temperature is a cool 64 on even the warmest days.

The heat will break on Thursday, they say, when a front moves through with a chance of T-storms. After that we'll be in the more reasonable/seasonable 75-80 degree range for a while.

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The lack of any breeze is unusual for the Aerie. Normally a still morning will become 10-15 mph breezes by afternoon as the ridges heat up. Not today and not anytime in the last three or four days. It's brought the windmills to a near standstill. I've only seen them turning a couple of hours each day. And when they are standing still, the three on the opposite hill are, as often as not, pointing in three different directions. I sure hope that who ever is buying the power from these turbines has a back-up plan.

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Standing on the deck this morning I heard a sweet, loud, repetitive bird call coming from the trees a short distance away. I finally isolated the source and saw that it was a male Baltimore Oriole perched near the top of the aspens. It continued to sing as it moved from tree to tree for about ten minutes before moving to the edge of the field on the back end of the property and finally disappeared from hearing. I believe this was the first Oriole I've seen in the yard. Alas, this poor boy didn't seem to get any response to his calls and so has probably moved on. A beautiful bird in its bright orange plumage. I wish there were more of them around the Aerie.

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14 days to go.

1 comment:

Rev. Paul said...

87? Saints preserve us! We got up to 58 for awhile today ... the gnomes predict 70 for tomorrow. I'll believe that when I see it, and not before.

Still sunny w/ blue skies, though. I think that's the pattern for this summer.