MagAO-X 2020A Stay At Home Day 25: Hot Enough Yet?
External Temperature and Dew Point vs day in April 2020. Less than a month ago, it was below freezing in our back yard. Today we cracked 100 for the first time. Our weather station. It’s not high enough to give NWS quality reports. I’d tell you my Weather Underground station i.d. but apparently that’s broken.
Analog evidence. This was later in the day so it had started to cool off.
Most places, 100F means the dog-days have started. Here, ’tis but a hint of spring. In fact, our gorgeous desert flower show is just getting started. The Saguaros in Sabino have just budded, might be a week or two until they really go.
Our prickly pear have started to flower. The big one in the back of this frame hasn’t yet, but it can be really spectacular when it goes.Closeup of some old-ish flowers. I plan to make prickly pear ice cream one of these days.Here you can see two agave flower stalks reaching for the sky. It’s bittersweet when an agave flowers, since it’s the end for that plant. These smaller agave are impressive, but you should see what the big ones do!
That’s a baby Saguaro in the foreground. We just put it in this year — check this blog in about 4 decades and I’ll show you some flowers on it.Our big Palo Verde bloomed. We gave it a good haircut last fall, so it’s not quite as impressive as before, but it will be back.My favorite tree is the Cat’s Claw Acacia (reason below). They have just started to bloom, but so far only in parts of our yard.This shows why they are so-named, you can see the cat-like claws. This particular tree likes to grab the hat off my head when I walk by.A baby grapefruit, which appears to have survived the freeze back in early April. Looks like we’ll have a good citrus crop this year.Another sign of spring is these little buggers, the Canyon Tree Frog, congregating in our pool. They are LOUD.
I looked at our weather station logs for last year. Amusingly, we actually hit 100 for the second time on 26 April, 2019 — so this year we’re behind. Not to worry though, we were in the 80s still for most of May, with occasional days in the high 90s. It probably won’t be until June when it really kicks in.
Our weather in April, 2019. Stop panicking, the end times (a.k.a. June) aren’t here yet.
