Another strange new and eerily beautiful weather system coming through, it will be very hot and very humid for the next couple of days, we are learning to live with climate change and understand it.

Every season is strange, different, unexpected. This summer was the hottest in many years, also somewhat wet, almost tropical. We are getting three inches or so of rain in the next few days and a couple of hours to the East, in New England, there is a serious drought.

Our grass, usually brown and dry by now, is wet and growing. We have to mow every week, very unusual in August. There are no apples of any kind on our trees, no lilac bushes have bloomed, yet the garden is a riot of color and growth.

I expected a grazing crisis, but the grass is still rich and growing. We are preparing for the usual winter, but the winters have been anything but usual. Last winter, we barely had a cold week, it didn’t snow at all, hard on the plowers and auto body shop people.

Easy on the budget, with our two wood stoves our heating oil bill for the season was just a few hundred dollars. The previous year, it was five or six times that, we have no idea what to expect for this year.

Around the country, hay is getting expensive, but there is enough hay around here, we bought ours from Ed and Carol Gulley, it will be coming soon. All around us, drought is causing difficult hay crops. In the Southwest, it is often $10 a bale. Some people have to give up their animals.

Tonight, the sky opened up and I got this photograph with my IR camera, the flies are awful this year, and they bite. Every time I go outside, I am covered in welts.  Climate change is good for my photography, the skies are  beautiful every night. You can’t live on a farm and not see it, every year is very different from every other.

I get e-mails every day from people suffering from drought, fires, extreme heat. I wonder if it will make life very hard for the animals.