Twelve Below

Brrrrr. Cold AGAIN. I am really looking forward to our trip to Scotland and Wales, if only to have someone else be responsible for home heating for a few days. I checked the weather in Ardgay, Sutherland, close to where we'll be, and in Cardiff. Ardgay is still in winter, Cardiff in the middle of spring.

Here, we're waiting for the jet stream to move north. The standing wave of the jet stream system in the upper atmosphere controls Maine's weather at this time of year; as the jet stream waves move across, we alternate cold and mild air masses that control our temperature. Cold and mild, cold and mild. As the days lengthen, the influence of the sun begins to beat out the influence of the air mass, and so it can be warm and nice, and and feel very good in the ever-brightening sunshine in the mid-afternoon, even on a very cold day like today is expected to be, but at night the warmth is long gone.

Racing days are another feature, each day and each week brings noticeably more daylight.

In Scotland, in the far north where we're going, the weather has warmed up already from January. I expect we'll see very many fewer snowbanks, if any at all. There will be a snow line on the mountains above which life remains arctic, and that snowline will descend to sea level from time to time. But at low altitude, it will be a weak kind of snow, not the all-pervasive kind we have here. I have a six-foot snowbank in my front yard where the Kubota has been at work, and a good foot in the fields and woods.

In the Welsh valleys where my family lives, it will be warm and sunny, and there will be lambs and daffodils.

Lambs. Bliss. We too will have lambs soon, when we return. Tilley and Tootsie and Jewel and Maggie are bred and will drop sometime after the 10th. Abraram, the patriarch, will get all bolshie again defending his many offspring. Randy old bugger that he is, he's a very prolific parent and grandparent.

Watch this space, and the Sustainability Blog, for both Highlands and lamb pictures.