Just in case you have not noticed, it has been a wee bit breezy lately.

OK, before you start that letter to the editor, that first sentence was meant to be a bit of a joke.

First off, I am fairly sure that if you live anywhere in Faribault County or anywhere in southern Minnesota for that matter, you have definitely noticed that it has been breezy. And secondly, it has not actually been breezy because some days in the past week or two, it has been downright gale force winds.

And, unless I am wrong, this has been a pretty windy spring all around.

Today, Thursday, is the first relatively calm day for the first time in a long while.

The Thursday before (May 15, the day property taxes were due), it was downright difficult to remain standing upright. In fact, a huge blast of wind sent me into the railing of my deck at home.

That is not all, that same gust blast of wind started tearing up metal soffets under the overhang of my garage. Then another mega blast took a piece of the metal wraparound on one of my windows.

And then there were the sticks, which are small branches, as well as some good sized ones. As the wind blew day after day, the number of little branches kept growing…and growing.

Now, with seven mature trees in our yard, we are pretty used to picking up sticks and branches. But this time it was ridiculous. There were hundreds and hundreds of them.

I was pretty lucky. There were reports of others having big tree branches and whole trees fall over and some hit things like sheds.

That was not our only experience with the wind. On Friday afternoon about 3 p.m. my wife, Pam, and I drove to Owatonna, taking I-90 and I-35 to get there.

It was hard to keep the vehicle on the roadway. It was howling wind again, and you know how it is, you get a slight break from it when you go past a shelterbelt or pass a semi, but then, wham, it hits you hard when you get around them.

And speaking of semis, they were having some trouble keeping in their lanes because of the wind.

Later that night, on the drive home from Owatonna, we hit three rainstorms on the trip back.

Well, everyone has some similar tales. The weather outside has been frightful, at times, this spring.

But, I guess we can consider ourselves lucky. We missed the violent thunderstorms – and tornadoes in Minnesota and Wisconsin – a few weeks ago.

And we certainly have nothing to really moan about if you look at what has happened in the south, from Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma to Kentucky, Tennessee and a bunch of other states.

Every day on the weather forecasts there seems to be a string of possible violent weather from Texas northeast to New York – and everything in between.

You can blame Mother Nature, or you can blame Climate Change or you can just blame it all on bad luck. The truth is that there has been a lot of storms and damage and deaths due to the weather and that is a real shame.

Plus, the end result is that the cost of homeowners’ insurance, including ours here in Minnesota, is bound to continue to go up.

Overall, our weather here in Minnesota has not been all that bad, despite me whining about the strong winds. In fact it can be downright pleasant sometimes.

And I am sure hoping it is downright pleasant this weekend for all of the Memorial Day activities we all plan to do. As for me, I am going to go get lost in the woods…