Summer's Inflection Week

July 31st through August 6th

Last week started out at full Summer. The sky was sunny. The air was hot. The lake was warm. The bar's lawn needed mowing. All that was about to change.

Early in the week it was good to be a merganser, bad to be a fish.

Wee furry thug puts its fingers together and smiles, "Nice bird feeder youse got there. Be a pity if something happened to it." Discussion over seed drop frequencies and amounts to provide "protection" follow.

A day after Wednesday's water show the character of the season changed.

The cooler weather that flowed over the northwoods was accompanied by a rain event. The predictions were for over 1.5 inches, but the reality was only about 0.6 inches. The lake level has gone down a few inches since the beginning of July. We'll get a measurement this week to determine exactly how much it has lost.

By Saturday, the weather had moved on. This seems to have helped fatten the attendance at the annual Lake Lucerne Fun Days.

Saturday's well attended bar night flowed into Sunday morning and featured well garnished cocktails and fiery shots.

Last Saturday, there were a lot of boats on the water making for some very bouncy ski runs. By Sunday, boat traffic on the lake dropped.

An inflection point is loosely defined as a point on a curve where the function goes from convex to concave. Last Thursday was the inflection point of Summer 2017. Over night, the 80's and 90's became the 60's and 70's (℉), the lake dropped 10 degrees (!), and there was talk of jackets. It's not all bad though. Silver linings include fewer mosquitoes, a greater appreciation of campfires, and fewer mosquitoes. Did we mention that the mosquito counts are down? This is no small thing to those of us that, at one point in the Summer, had become more of a collection of walking bug bites than man.<br><br><br>-Nemo paid for protection but still had the bird feeder raided.