Who'll Stop the Rain?

It's always disappointing to look at the weather and see rain in the forecast on the weekend. Weekends and especially Saturdays are when I do my big ride of the week. I don't mind missing a few days of riding because of rain but it seems like we have had a lot of weekends with rain even though the rain totals are low this year. 

Saturday was the predicted total wash out as there were on and off heavy rain all day. This is why this past Wednesday I did a hilly ride with some of the retired folks which was longer than my usual Wednesday rides. 

I spent Saturday taking care of a few chores and taking a few experimental rain pictures. I found out that you can get some cool mirror affects if you focus closely on rain drops on a window.

If you click on the above picture to enlarge it you will see the chair and some flowers being reflected in the raindrops. I think with a little more practice I can make this even better.

In between the rain I took a picture of a few flowers in bloom on the patio to see how the rain looked on them. Cloudy light is the best light to get pictures of flowers. I got a decent shot of a red dahlia.

Luckily on Sunday there was a few hours of sunshine in the morning. As soon as I saw the sun as I woke up I got on my bike cloths and headed out. I was on the road by 7:30am and did a quick 30 mile ride. I was back home by 9:30am. This had to be the earliest I have gotten out for a ride in a long time. It was weird to be back so early but the forecast called for popup showers later in the morning and by 11:15am some light rain started followed by some large thunderstorm. 

The forecast for the next week doesn't look great. I expect there will be clouds of mystery pourin' confusion on the ground as the song suggests. I just hope there will be some moments of clearing so I can get some riding in.

Air Quality

I always check the weather before I ride. I like to know if I have a chance of getting rained on. Even when it is clear I like to know which way and how strong the wind will be blowing so I can adjust my route accordingly. This pass week I had to add another weather check in to my pre ride routine. That is to check the airnow.gov site for air quality. That is because the smoke from the Canadian fires got funneled down to NJ and most of the mid east states by a low sitting up in New England.  Most of the time when smoke from wild fire drifts over us it is usually higher in the atmosphere and doesn't affect air quality that much. This time it made it unhealthy. It gave the sky that post apocalypse feel. 

Not only did you smell the smoke but the sky was gray and you couldn't even see the clouds above. The sun barely shown through the smoke. I took a picture of the sun with my camera and didn't get the usual glare because of all the smoke in the atmosphere. In fact the picture looked like a picture that I take when I have use my solar filter which blocks 99.9% of the suns light. You can easily see the sunspots. This just shows you how much crap was in the air blocking the light. 

I had initially planned to do a ride on Wednesday but after Jim alerted me to the smoke forecast I checked the air quality and canceled the ride. I did actually have to spend a couple of hours outside on Wednesday. My wife volunteers at a rescue farm and feeds the animals once a week. She needed my help Wednesday afternoon for someone who had canceled. The smoke was really heavy in the afternoon we went so I wore a mask while we fed the animals. The farm has a cow 

a few horses

some pigs, a bunch of goats.

and some cats in the barn.

Feeding the animals is a lot of fun especially the goats. These pictures are from Monday morning when we went to fill in for another person who couldn't do their schedule feeding. On Wednesday we didn't spend as much time with them as Monday as we wanted to minimize our time outside. I felt bad for the animals who had to deal with the smokey air for a couple of days.

Luckily by Saturday the smoke had cleared and I was able to get out and lead a ride. We haven't had a lot of rain this year so the risk of fire is high. We had a fire near where I live earlier in the week which took a couple of days to burn out. There are also a couple of fires burning down in the pinelands so until we get some major drenching rain we will have to keep an eye on the air quality before deciding if it is safe to ride.