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Winter's Epitaph

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March 3rd through 9th, 2015

Winter has been packing on a large amount of excess calendar for the last few years making it fat, cold, and complacent. This trend continued during the beginning of last week and ended suddenly on the weekend. The snow and cold through Thursday wrapped the sap shack and the aux cooker in a blanket of delay. Tree tapping was planned to be weeks away and firing the collected sap a few days after that. During one of the clear and less windy days we got the drone up to check on the lake and I almost froze my thumbs working the controller for about 10 bare handed minutes. There were no docks or piers in yet on the North end. The ice that is keeping those docks and piers on the shore is almost 20 inches thick with the bottom 12 inches as clear as crystal. Back on Knott Lane, the deer shaped suet feeder has become very popular among the pecky class. The warm up started on Saturday. Winter must have had a massive MI or something. Saturday's celebratory bar night included the fiery Bailey's Comet. We drank and watched drone videos of last year's Crandon Water Shows longer than a work crew should have the day before tree tapping. The season that was, at the start of the week, 3 weeks away, was upon us. Buckets were piled into trailers... ...and hauled to the sugarbush on sort of packed trails. Spile was then joined to tree. This occurred about 135 times on Sunday. That makes just under 250 to go. Trees that were frozen just days before, began to drip. Huzzah. Winter's finished, but there are still small pockets of snowy resistance that need to be crushed. The most stubborn Winter remnant is the 20 inches of ice covering Lake Lucerne. Optimists are predicting an ice free lake by Easter and the same for golf. Between collecting hundreds of gallons of sap and night, we'll try to measure the ice thickness and post the results.<br><br><br>-Nemo, among other things, dances on Winter's grave.

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