Wow, is it warm outside! -- 66 degrees in Des Moines, Iowa on January 5th -- and no big cold snap likely for at least the next two weeks. I do not like winter; I detest cold weather; my blood turns to sludge at temperatures under 70. Do you get the picture - I am not a winter person, so a year without winter, in Iowa, is almost heaven. Now, don't get me wrong. I can deal with winter okay, I drive in snow just fine, I have cared for cows and hogs through nasty winter weather. I did the winter Klondike Derby with my boys when they were in Boy Scouts and we camped out at 20 below temperatures. But I prefer warm.
October 2011 in Iowa was nearly ideal harvest weather - warm and dry and I finished harvest amazingly early. The nice weather persisted into November and allowed me to get some sorely needed dirt work done with the bulldozer. I was able to fix some gullies that had begun to develop as a result of the extraordinarily heavy rains of 2010 and 2011. And I thought I was done for the year. But now it is teasingly like Spring. I spent some time during late December rebuilding an anhydrous ammonia fertilizer applicator that I bought at a sale. It was quite comfortable working in the shed -- the sun shining on the steel, warmed the shed and made for nice working conditions, especially since I was working with bare hands on steel. (That can be quite miserable if the steel is cold and my fingers are frozen.)
But today it is warm -- and I am enjoying it. The commodity markets are beginning to fret a bit over excessive heat and dryness in Argentina, and there is already talk of it being quite dry in the northwest part of the cornbelt. But those concerns are not my concerns today. Today, I will bask in the warmth (yes I said warmth) of an Iowa winter day when there is no winter.
