In Our Cozy Home This Week No. 72 – Lake Michigan Weather Impact, Updated Forum, Homeschool Funk

Happy Tuesday! I hope your first week of June was a good one. We’re in the midst of a week of weather more appropriate for July. Our part of Michigan is in a legitimate drought pattern. We were low on snow for the winter and the spring was also low in precipitation. Lake Michigan is down something like 18 inches compared to this time last year so that gives you an idea of how much water we’ve missed out on.

If you’ve never seen Lake Michigan in person, it can be hard to understand how large it is. Here are some fun facts about this massive lake from Livn Fresh Blog:

How Many Gallons of Water are there in Lake Michigan?

Before we give you an answer, let’s put things into perspective. A gallon is around 16 glasses of water, twice the recommended amount you should drink in a day. A pool normally has around 3,000 to 10,000 gallons of water. That’s a whole lot of water to play and swim with. Olympic sized swimming pools have 660,430 gallons of water in them, enough to fill a, well, Olympic sized swimming pool. That amount is already bigger than usual fishing ponds. Some lakes have millions of gallons of water in them, but what about the Great Lakes?

Hundred million is not enough to measure it. Five billion gallons of water is still not enough. Is it starting to sound ridiculous? How about One trillion? One hundred trillion? Nope.

Lake Michigan, according to satellite measurements and formulas, holds One Quadrillion gallons of water. That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of life-giving, weather altering, fish-loving water. It’s so vast that in order to raise the lake’s water level just by one inch, it would take around 400 Billion gallons of water. It really puts storms into perspective when a hurricane can raise the water level by a feet or two. Makes you realize how much rain these storms pour.

Here’s a fun fact: For every inch the lake loses, all cargo ships must lighten their load by 100 tons, otherwise they would touch the lake ground. Think how much they needed to lose when it dropped 2 feet.

It’s hard to fathom some of those numbers! But Lake Michigan plays a huge role in our weather in terms of temperatures, precipitation, weather patterns, etc. It has a significant moderating effect on our temperatures which is why there is some prime fruit growing regions in Michigan along the shoreline.

If you were around on Saturday, you might have seen a post that I put up and then took down shortly afterwards. Long story short, I was going to move my forum to another plugin/platform. We got it all set up and then realized once we were in it, it was not going to work for a few big reasons. So I took the post down and we found another solution. The solution? Doing some major changes to the layout and structure of what I already had. We also fixed some boneheaded mistakes we made that makes the functionality so much better.

I’m still in the process of moving some posts around and doing all the tagging. But wow! What an amazing difference. I am thrilled at how much easier it is to find things now. I hope you find it helpful and will use the forum often. Some of the sections and particular topics get a lot of search engine traffic all day. It’s interesting to watch.

Caroline and I are both in a homeschool funk. We’re keeping up with a few basic things, but that’s it. We’re both tired. I know I’ve already said that recently, but that’s where we are. I try to be honest when I write here. I could go on and on about other things, but I hate fakeness. I’m tired. She’s tired. That’s where we are. Actually, David is tired as well. So we’re all tired for a variety of reasons. But we keep going because life is hard sometimes. In the grand scheme of things, we have nothing to complain about and we are profoundly thankful. But we’re still tired.

How are things in your corner of the world?

Artwork: Joseph DeCamp