Is Winter Coming Early

I must say that the changes in temperature these days are rather confusing to me. How can it be so warm one day and the next day drop so far down? Seriously, it has been so chilly outside recently, at least in the mornings, that I have had to wear my windbreaker for morning walks the last few days. By afternoon many times though, it gets warm and the last thing I possibly need is to wear a coat.

In reality, who knows what the winter will actually be like. I saw these comments on the Farmers' Almanac weather site that may well be true:

"While last winter was a reprieve from shoveling and high fuel bills, the party is over. According to the 2017 Farmers’ Almanac, “winter is back!

...The 2017 Farmers’ Almanac, which hits store shelves everywhere on August 15, 2016, forewarns that exceptionally cold, if not downright frigid weather will predominate over parts of the Northern Plains, Great Lakes, Midwest, Ohio Valley, the Middle Atlantic, Northeast, and New England this winter. The Farmers’ Almanac’s long-range weather predictions also suggest shots of very cold weather will periodically reach as far south as Florida and the Gulf Coast.”

I have read other predictions that suggest that we will have a lot more snow this year than we have had in the past. For me, in my new residence, that really doesn't bother me at all that much because our outside snow cleaning service, at least last year, came very early in the morning to clear our roads and sidewalks so that we can get out of our residences fairly easily. I hope they do the same this year and do the kind of good job that they did before.

I only went swimming a few times this summer believe it or not. It was just too hot outside to go from our house to the swimming pool for all of the condominiums in the area. I really enjoyed swimming last year and expected to do a lot more this year but unfortunately with the many days with temperatures above 30°C, it was just too hot to go out for a swim. It just seemed too far to have to go from our house to the pool area.

Thank goodness that our new air-conditioning system in our new residence worked so well even though we had several major problems when we first purchased it.  Last year, I think we turned the air conditioner on only several times throughout the entire summer months. Not this year. It was turned on quite often even during the nighttime hours as well.  It should be interesting to see how much we paid out this year for electricity costs because of the warmer weather compared with last year.

I don't know if it is the same thing at your house but the grass growing in front of my condo unit was a bit strange. Because of the very hot weather and lack of rain, for quite a bit of the summer months, my grass did not grow very well. In addition, the grass turned brown as well because of the lack of moisture. Nevertheless, with the recent rain that has fallen now, I noticed that the grass has turned back to green and has grown higher very quickly.  It seems that the grass growing is more springlike now for this year than before.

What was also odd though for me was the growth rate of the bushes. I cannot believe how big a number of them have grown and how quickly even with the amount of rain that has fallen before. I must admit that I just don't understand that at all.  I expect that the landscape company will have a lot more work to do towards the end of the growth year to cut down the size of the bushes because of the substantial growth that some of the plants have undertaken so far.

One good thing that I noticed in the grocery world this summer is how much fruit and vegetable prices have dropped compared with the prices during last winter. I assume that prices have dropped because we are selling "locally" grown products rather than selling outside growing products as happened during the wintertime. Some of the prices were pretty horrible. In fact, at one of the grocery stores where I shop, one of the vegetable people there expressed his disgust at how high the prices were but there was nothing that he could do about it. It should be interesting to see what happens next winter as well. For me though, it may well be that I'm going to have to buy a lot of products that I can freeze so that we can use the local products in the winter rather than be forced to buy the expensive ones.

I had better go and finally do some summer work at my condo house before autumn comes here in a few days and I will have to think instead about what I must do later on this year.