ONLY IN WINTERS do you celebrate the 4th of July on the 3rd of July. We have been doing this for a couple of years now, and maybe I’ll get used to it at some point, but will the out-of-towners?
I’m sure we save money on the launching of the fireworks, but is it worth the savings to celebrate a day early? If you like to celebrate with friends and relatives out of town, this is the perfect situation. You can watch the fireworks with your friends and relatives in Winters and then travel to watch them again on the 4th.
We skipped the fireworks one year when there wasn’t enough money in the kitty, but since then the city has stepped up, big time, and has helped raise and pay for the fireworks.
You will find a donation envelope in this week’s Express as well as your city bill. I’m not sure how much we are spending this year, but I’m sure the fireworks committee would like to have a buffer for next year’s fundraising.
There are just over 2,000 housing units in Winters and if we each kicked in $5, we would be close to funding the fireworks. We all know that not everyone is going to put $5 in the envelope, so some of us will have to put in more. I would hope that half the people would like to pay for the fireworks, so if the rest of us put in $10, we should be in good shape. I’ll check with the city on July 5 to see how we did with the fundraising. I would still like to see a fireworks booth tax to help pay for our community fireworks, but that idea has not caught on.
ARE WE FINISHED WITH THE RAIN? I was surprised when the rain woke me up last week. I was even more surprised when Joe the Weatherman reported that we had .03” of rain. You can’t start measuring the rainfall unless you get .01” and that is what I was expecting. My sidewalks looked wet at 4 a.m. when I heard the rain on our metal patio cover, but .03” of rain would start to puddle up. Maybe Joe stayed up after I went back to sleep.
We are up to 42.37” for the rainfall year, which goes from July 1 until June 30. It won’t be a record, but we should all be thankful for a great rainy year. I’m hoping that we have a repeat of the 1981-82 and 1982-83 years when we had back to back gushers. 35.98” for 1981-2 and 44.68” for 1982-3. Those two years filled up the lake, too.
I was looking at some rainfall figures in my father’s office, from the U.S. Weather Service. According to Joe Cline (who has since retired as our district manager for the weather service) from 1971 to 2000 our average rainfall was 22.82. That is a little higher than the number I am used to quoting, 21.76, so I’m not sure what number we should be using. I’ll find out before July 1 when the new season starts.
If you think about average rainfall, it should change every year, but I always thought it was a 10 year average, but again, I’ll find out for anyone who cares where and how we get our rainfall numbers. Maybe this is a job for Joe the Weatherman.
I haven’t checked the entrants in the Express Rainfall Contest, but my guess is that whoever picked the highest is going to win. My official guess of 25.22” wasn’t even close.
Have a good week.
