Our spring started wet and cold. Not cool, cold. When it finally dried up a bit it went right into no-rain mode for 9 weeks. About midway thru that stretch, I had .55" of rain. In the last two weeks we've seen about three inches of rain and it's all come very late in the day or at night. Twice in 4 days we've had storms that came with three to five hours of lightning. thunder and wind and rain maybe for a half hour out of each big bang fest. Fortunately, we have not seen much hail and what we've had was less than pea sized. 150 miles north of here one community got blasted with tennis size hail in the morning, baseball size hail in the afternoon/early evening. The same community last year got devastated by hail of baseball size.... just about every home in the community has had some sort of hail damage both yesterday and last year. Countless homes lost every window on the windward size of the house. I can't imagine it.
Many say El Nino is a driving factor behind this wicked weather this year and forecasts are leaning towards the same scenario for next year. Here at home we've been in a severe drought mode for a couple months. This recent rain may have helped a little but my yard is mostly brown inspite of good rain lately. We've managed to keep our flowers and vegetable gardens watered [almost daily] but we passed on the grass. I bought a new Honda mower this spring and figured by fall I'd have enough hours on it to dump the break-in oil and put synthetic in, but so far, the mower has seen about 75 minutes of run time.
Winter dumped record amounts of snow in northern Minnesota, which brought record high water down the Mississippi River and basically erased my favorite backwater crappie spot.
The whole country, heck all of North America, has seen some ridiculously weird weather since last fall. I sure hope it works itself out soon so we can get back to some normal living. I know the farmers are already talking of lost corn and bean acreage because of the dry summer. This could spell the end for small farmers who were on the edge going into the growing season. Somehow I feel that this summer's crap weather will touch every one of us in some way.
