Sept. 15-21, 2019

Weather | 9/15, 0.07" rain, 69°, 87° | 9/16, 68°, 89° | 9/17, 67°, 89° | 9/18, 66°, 89° | 9/19, 0.01" rain, 67°, 89° | 9/20, 69°, 87° | 9/21, 70°, 77° |

• Sunday-Monday (9/15-9/16): On Sunday, I watched Vikings/Packers football game on Mom's TV, plus 2.5 hours of bull riding. Monday, I drove Mom's Buick and recommended she change struts/shocks and have someone check suspension on her car. Back home, Mary picked more garden items.
• Tuesday-Wednesday (9/17-9/18): Drove from Circle to home, stopping overnight in Watertown, SD. Uneventful trip. Car ran wonderfully. I bought coffee beans, honey, and limes in the Sam's Club in Sioux City, IA. After I got home, Mary and I talked into the early morning hours, although she claims there was no "we" about it. Texted Katie Wednesday evening and she was on her way from Bethel to Anchorage, starting a 2-week break from work. Mary had fun chasing snakes, vultures, and chickens on Wednesday. First, she removed 3 garter snakes from the laundry room. Then, she gently chased 6 turkey vultures away who wanted to land on our chimney. Finally, a chick found a hole in the gate, mixing hens with chicks and it took Mary half an hour to sort young birds from old chickens. She stuffed bricks into the hole.
• Thursday (9/19): I asked Katie in a text where she was and she answered, Denver. I caught up on rest and took a 2-hour nap in the early afternoon. We had a lightning strike very close to the west at 3pm right when we were starting to eat our midday meal. Soon after, our power went off. I called Lewis County Electric Co-op and she said it was a service-wide outage. Later, I looked on Facebook and the co-op said it was a problem with their Lewistown substation. After chores, we lit 7 big candles and played Michigan Rummy. The power came on at 8:30pm. We played our game for another 2 hours. I just barely won...344-343...I won by 1 white chip! Right before we started playing our game, Bill called. I told him about my Montana trip. He brewed beer on Sunday with his friend, Mike. The call kept cutting out, so he said he might call tomorrow.
• Friday (9/20): Mary dug up the sweet potatoes, since they're predicting 2-3" rain, and mucking them out of mud isn't nice. Instead, she chiseled them out of hard clay soil. It was a chore, but several were very big. I fixed fence in the chicken yard where a decaying oak post leaned outward and made for a gap in the chicken wire allowing chicks to get into the hen-side of the yard. First, I cut a path through the bottom of a cedar tree to the outside of that post. How things grow?!! When we first put together the chicken coop in 2010, you could easily walk around all of the fence. Since then, trees have grown to press against the fence, requiring me to hack a path to the outside of the fence, as if I'm macheteing my way through the jungle. I hammered 4 fence staples to better attach the chicken wire to the post, then I leaned a cedar pole against the oak post to straighten it upright. Then, I started picking tomatoes, which lasted for hours. Mary can only pick tomatoes for a short time, because the green tomato residue puts itchy welts on her arms. As a result, I found many ripe tomatoes buried deep inside the vines. I picked 2/3 of a cat litter bucket of big tomatoes and about half a bucket of small tomatoes. There are hordes of green tomatoes still on the vines. Mary picked half a bucket of tomatillos and filled the rest of the bucket with hot peppers. One of the Hot Portugal peppers was a foot long. She also picked 3 very nice bell peppers. Mary also picked 9 acorn squash. She did the chores, while I picked tomatoes until nearly sunset. We ate shrimp. Interesting, since I also ate shrimp for a meal Mom fixed earlier in the week. Bathing was interesting. After 4 times washing my arms, I finally came clean of the "Jolly Green Giant" chartreuse green tomato crud. Went to bed very tired after stretching out in all directions picking tomatoes in the garden.
• Saturday (9/21): Mary thought there were some Black Prince tomatoes that I missed, so we made a quick look, which turned into another longer tomato picking session. We found them and many more, adding up to half a cat litter bucket of new tomatoes. Then, Mary processed all of the tomatoes from the past 2 days of picking, which equaled 5.5 gallon bags of tomatoes for the freezer. There are still several picked green ones waiting to ripen. Mary then threaded hot peppers on pink sewing thread (a color she says she'll never use as indicated by its age...older than Katie) and hung them in the upstairs south room. Next, I helped Mary peel husks off tomatillos, she washed them and we froze a gallon and a half of them...more than enough for 2-3 batches of salsa. Katie texted me the following, "Hiked 16.2 miles today. Elevation change from top to bottom was 4530 feet...and had to climb back up." She's at the Grand Canyon. We watched the movie Inferno.