NOAA Weather Forecasting on the Farm

Here's an email I sent to my pal, MikeB in Great Falls. A great way to start the day here on the farm.
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Mike:

I fooled Lyn this morning, it was funny. Funnier cuz I was fooled too.

I woke up the computer and had saved my webpages last night to come up automatically this morning. You know so the emails and the weather home page would load up and be ready when Lyn and I sat with our breakfast at the window to watch the cows move out of the shelter to the hay and we could chat about the day ahead. Sure enough all the expected web pages came up ready for our morning reading and comments.

A list of a few emails popped up and NOAA Local Weather is our homepage, so that was up. When we sat down to look; weather is always first for Lyn, we were so surprised to see temps rising into the 40s for a couple of days and even the 50s next week. Lyn was going crazy projecting her day and tomorrow with chores all the way from digging a walkway out into the garden to immediately dressing up a little and running outside to let the chickens out of the coop into that early morning sun that must be blazing away already. I was eating a little faster than usual too. With the melting snow we could see being projected for the next few days, I was sensing a need to start the tractor and spear a round bale to be moved on our ice road across a strip of marsh to the heifers favorite winter feeding area' This, before the marsh crossing thawed later this morning in the forecasted heat wave. The narrow lane across the marsh is too slippery for the tractor to make the crossing with a bale hanging on the front loader bale fork.

As we were cleaning up our plates, (good old farm fresh eggs and locally cured bacon, hashbrowns from our potato stash in the cellar and a piece of Great Harvest Bread from Fargo), my head was grinding away at those temperature forecasts and something wasn't computing right. So, I sat down and looked at the weather site again and sure enough, I had saved the Great Falls, MT site instead of my Callaway, MN NOAA homepage last night when I put the computer into sleep mode. Ha, ha on us. Bad, bad, bad for me when I pointed this out to Lyn. I got smacked, harassed and nearly beaten for the "trick" I had played on her. "Crapola man", I had to readjust too, "what the hell, over". Anyway, we had a great laugh, Lyn completely abandoned me to the housework and headed outside recommitted to a couple more weeks in the 20s, but shaking her head in disgust that she had not double checked my math to see what city those NOAA forecasts affected.

You folks in Great Falls are going to have a nice week as far as we are concerned, even though MikeB will be off to maybe warmer weather yet in lovely Rocks Springs, Wyo. to be with the grandboys. We Callawegians will stay below but near freezing and that ain't so bad. We hardly ever get real pumped up for the weeks of mud we get here as the snow load melts and riffles though the yard and driveway and walkways bringing all our of our clay-loam soils to sticky, gooey life again. We'll be sunny and in the 20's above zero though. For us winter hardy farmers that kind of day is a really happy day in any February "up north" on the Blue Moon Farm and Ranch.

The green side is almost up, again.....

Ron and Lyn and the Critters