Troubling new developments

As a person who bicycles a lot (massive understatement) I also spend probably more time than most at internet weather sites. Today the first one I checked had added "wind chill" to its "Current Weather Conditions" page. Equally as disturbing was what I discovered at the second site I checked. If you scroll down past forecast and the local radar you come to my personal favorite regional weather radar. I check that a lot. If you check the legend in the lower left corner you can see that rain is depicted in shades of green, mixed precipitation is shades of magenta and frozen precipitation is shades of blue with all three scales ending in red and then purple when the precipitation is heavy. After several months of considering the proximity and direction of the green blobs before heading out to ride I have begun to discover some disturbing magenta bits. Blue cannot be far behind.

The wind chill was reported as 41 when I started out today. Wind chill means nothing, of course, to a person who is prepared to be outdoors. I mean, come on, the effect of temperature and wind on exposed flesh? Who rides a bicycle at this time of year with exposed flesh?

It was actually a bit warmer today, topping out in the 50s, plenty OK weather for bicycling, particularly with the sun out and the trees still working on this whole fall thing. I rode farther away from home than I have been riding the last several days and ventured all the way out to the full 8 lakes tour. Along the way I found this attractive display by one of the brightly colored maples with a mixture of hardwoods in the background with some evergreens for additional contrast.And a nice blue sky.

At one point we heard some grumbling from Michigan that our lake names are a bit lacking in, oh, I don't know, quaintness. The short answer is that when you have 15,000 lakes you use up all the cute names right away and have to fall back rather quickly on descriptive names. So if there are snails in a lake, it is likely to get named Snail Lake. Those trees are on the corner of Rustic Lane and Snail Lake Road.

Rustic Lane seems pretty quaint.

I almost rode out there yesterday and only the appearance of a massive cloud bank while I was nearing the commitment point for going out there prevented me from doing so. It turns out to be a good thing that I did not, as the parks were restricted yesterday for the annual vermin culling.That particular notice is posted at Vadnais. At Vadnais non-hunting users are still permitted to use the paved areas of the reservoir property. Further up the road at Sucker Lake (I suspect there were suckers in the lake) all non-archers were barred from the park. Note that Sucker Lake is part of the regional park, Vadnais is the property of the Saint Paul city water utility. Slightly different jurisdictions, slightly different rules.

I spotted some non-vermin wildlife near the north end of the lake with some of those attractive mixed hardwoods still showing off in the background.It was a very pretty day and plenty warm enough for properly layered up bicycling, all in all another great day to have an excuse to be outside.