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The long hot summer of 2017

When will it get cool again!
After a record snowfall and quite a bit of rain in the spring, the faucet turned off to nothing! Very little rain early on and now nothing worth recording, rain wise, since May.
Even with very few thunderstorms, way less than what would have been "usual", only area forest fires due to dry lightning strikes, still no moisture. Just dry hot weather.
It was on the news that in most areas, including this area, there was no rainfall recorded the entire month of July. Many unwatered fields in the area, and our lawn, since many don't have irrigation systems installed or even set up for one are dead dry brown with the occasional weed spots throughout instead of being on that second or even third cutting of Alfalfa by now.

A 'usual' summer used to be mostly 80s with a week or two of mid to upper 90s and even 100s in the area but then back down to the 80s range. Not this year! This summer has been primarily around 90, plus or minus, with the occasional day or two of into the eighties temps.
At least it will cool off at night with mornings in the mid-50s. Cool mornings till about 11 am then the temps get toasty if out in the sun working. By late afternoon, our areas hottest part of the day, really warm with the temps staying high until about 9 pm, then it starts cooling down.
And now, the last few weeks anyway, smoke- lots of smoke from the massive fires burning in British Columbia, mid-Washington, and even Eastern Montana all being trapped by the high-pressure inversion over the region.
In the winter a very similar high-pressure system, when parked over Southern Canada and North Western USA keeps the rain and snow off the region and shifts it east to the mid-West and East coast states.


The screenshot above is of the wind patterns from the stagnant high-pressure system and the smoke from fires in the West as they blow across the country. In the US state outlines, I'm typing from the very tip of Idaho and I am in the obscured by smoke area right at the Canadian border. While this graphic was from last week, it hasn't changed yet!

Hot and very hazy reminds both me and Stacy of our years in California. Ah, all those summers in the San Bernardino Valley back then!

After almost 6 months, our kitchen remodel is almost done!!
All the work of the past months, taking out the living room/kitchen wall and all involved with that, taking out all the flooring and installing all new flooring, finally getting the two months delayed new cabinets and getting them, almost all, secured and totally leveled as of yesterday (08/06/17) with the quartz countertop measuring set for this Thursday.
Before Labor Day, we might have a kitchen again!!!!!
This is just phase one of a grand remodel taking about a year or so to do it from last February, we just had not expected all the delays in the kitchen cabinets. The delay was due to an error by our designer and her failing to order them when she was supposed to.

With working around the order delay, work related trips, our vacation with our daughter and the grandkids, it has all been part of a long, long summer of primarily working on the house.
It means, with the exception of the things listed above, not any time for much else, no posts here to speak of, no weekend drives to any place except Home Depot and back, nope all house stuff all the time!

Tad





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