May 10-16, 2020

Weather | 5/10, 42°, 56° | 5/11, 33°, 59° | 5/12, 41°, 57° | 5/13, 43°, 57° | 5/14, 59°, 77° | 5/15, 1.15" rain, 58°, 73° | 5/16, 0.34" rain, 57°, 71° |

• Sunday, 5/10: We had sun, but strong winds with gusts to 35 mph, so we were inside most of the day. I did online research on gas line hoses. You shouldn't put ordinary rubber hoses on anything today, not due to alcohol in the gas, but because of all the gasoline additives that eat normal rubber from the inside out. That's what happened to Mary's lawnmower. I sent an e-card and then called Mom for Mother's Day. Mary got phone calls from Katie and Bill. Katie is talking regularly with her old boss in Alaska and hopes to start that work up north in a few months. Bill is supposed to work 35 hours per week, but was able to snag 38 hours last week. Checked the dandelion wine specific gravity and it dropped 30 points. The yeast is very active, burping the airlock every 2 seconds with CO2 gas (see below). We watched the The Sound of Music from a blu-ray that features improved clarity. I remember seeing this movie as a kid in 1965 in a Fergus Falls, MN movie theater and I think this blu-ray disc is better. After midnight, we covered garden plants with sheets and blankets, again. It was 37° then, but calm, hence the reason for waiting until after midnight to lay out light-weight sheets.

• Monday, 5/11: Another frosty morning, so we removed plant covers, dried them, and put them away. Mary mowed the near garden, both inside and outside of the fence, then raked it up and mulched all of the spinach, lettuce, and part of the radishes. She also washed sheets and furniture covers. I sharpened the blade to the lawnmower Mary's using. Then I removed the air cleaner to the other mower in order to measure the diameter of the gas inlet tube at the carburetor...it's 5/16, not 1/4 inch, like I thought it was. Spent a bunch of time to find the correct gas hose and appropriate clamps, then ordered them from RockAuto. Then, I found gas filters with 5/16" connections originally made for John Deere lawn tractors that I'll make work for these mowers and ordered them. After our evening meal, I checked my dandy wine...it was burping every 1.5 seconds and the specific gravity (S.G.) dropped to 1.050, which was 32 points down from yesterday's S.G. of 1.082 (see video below). Since it was foaming more, I put a plastic wash basin under the gallon jug in the pantry.

• Tuesday, 5/12: Cloudy day that cleared at dusk, but grew partly cloudy after dark. Mary washed clothes. I moved buckets of strawberries and apple rootstock trees out of the woodshed and back into the east end of the far garden. Five of our strawberry buckets of plants are dead...never sprouted leaves. We both mowed the lane, with me relieving Mary halfway through the mow job. Katie texted Mary that she received a $3 raise. Her boss told her that Katie does good work and gained experience in the past year. In the evening, after a meal, relaxing, and washing dishes, the dandelion wine check showed a specific gravity of 1.028, another 32-point drop in a day, and the airlock is burping every 4 seconds, meaning the alcohol content is rising and the yeast activity is slowing down. It's color changed from orange to yellow. For two nights, a whip-poor-will, shows up on our south porch railing and says, "Where is Bill, Where is Bill...!" When Bill slept in the upstairs north bedroom, a whip-poor-will would sit on the roof just outside that bedroom window and drive him crazy every night. They're still looking for him.


• Wednesday, 5/13: It was cloudy and cool, so we were inside much of the day. Mary made flour tortillas and chimichangas. She also did house cleaning. I was on the laptop all day.


• Thursday, 5/14: Much warmer, so we opened windows once it went from cloudy to partly sunny. My fuel hose and clamps arrived. The clamps are the wrong size...I didn't pay attention to minimum and maximum opening of clamps, so I ordered gas clamps from Summit Racing...man those mowers are really going to rock, now. Mary mowed the rest of the lawn that needed mowing. I raked up what she mowed, then Mary mulched the rest of the radishes, all of the shallots, and almost half of the onions. Katie texted about her virtual graduation from her community college that will be May 28th at 6 pm. I downloaded an app on my phone that tells you free wifi locations, so we might be able to go somewhere and view this. Thunderstorms came through after dark and it rained hard through the night, mainly in the early morning.


• Friday, 5/15: Mary moved all of the houseplants to under the weeping willow tree. She also fertilized the blueberry bushes. The specific gravity of the dandelion wine was at 0.997, below where I needed to stop the yeast, so I racked it into a newly sanitized gallon jug and added a crushed Campden tablet. CO2 gas release slowed significantly, with the airlock burping between 30-40 seconds. I folded a flour sack towel into quarters and strained the floaties out of the grapefruit wine while slowly pouring it into my 1.4-gallon bigmouth carboy. Doing that put a ton of oxygen into the wine, so I'll let it set for a couple days to let the bubbles dissipate. In the evening, we watched The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, a 1995 movie featuring Hugh Grant. It's wacky and funny and a good movie.


• Saturday, 5/16: Mary made an apple pie...it was very yummy. Her new Tilley hat came in the mail...so clean and white. I got a notice from Amazon that the place handling my order for lawnmower gas filters never confirmed the order by their deadline. I canceled the order, and then ordered gas filters and air filters for the lawnmowers through a S.C. company on eBay. I spent hours trying to determine the specific spark plug for those mowers, then decided to not buy any, since the current plugs look good. Rain started in mid-afternoon. Did chores between rain storms. In the evening, we watched the Young Victoria movie and its extras. Katie texted Mary that Southern Mississippi University got her application. When I went out with the dogs on their last walk, I spotted something going across the lane that shrunk down into the grass between the 2 lanes of the driveway when I shined my flashlight on it. Plato and Amber were really good about staying back when I told them. I got up close. I think it was a baby ground hog, even though at first I thought it was a muskrat, because it was about that size...it didn't have a muskrat tail. We left it alone and went back inside. It continued raining throughout the night.