- Sunday, 8/9: After exchanging blog addresses with high school classmate Alison (Rabich) Boyce, and reading her excellent write-ups, I decided to alter this blog to include pieces similar to editorials I used to write back in my newspaper editor days. So here goes:
One can get great satisfaction from fixing inanimate objects. It happened three times today. My Stihl grass trimmer wasn't running right. After reviewing the Stihl manual, I cleaned its air filter, cleaned soot from its spark plug, and reset the plug's gap. It still failed to gain adequate engine speed. The next step, claimed the manual, was to have a Stihl dealer repair it. "Horse pucky," I declared, and after removing the trimmer's back cover and the exhaust outlet, I found a screen plugged with carbon. Gas and a stiff wire brush cleaned it and subsequently boosted the grass trimmer's operation. Replacing a door knob containing a broken plastic latch with a new one possessing a better metal latch gave Mary and I a smile, now that a slight twist of the upstairs south bedroom door knob opens a door that we used to wrestle with to open. I also wired together an metal conduit box containing a switched 110-volt plug-in to use in coordination with the microwave, so that with the flip of a switch, the microwave is on or off. I love the feeling I get when I solve problems. Like my Grandad Melvin used to say, "Use your head for something other than a hat rack."
Other events of today:- Mary baked 4 loaves of bread.
- We watered both gardens. Mary found a small tomato worm and 3 worm eggs.
- After dark, we used a black light flashlight and found 2 tomato worms, a cabbage looper, and 2 cucumber beetles. Grass mulch, grass seed heads, and worms are fluorescent green under a black light. Tomatillo fruit is reddish/orange.
- Mom texted me a photo of herself on Saturday (see below). She looks great for someone who will be 86 in November.
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| My mom, Ruth Melvin. |
- Monday, 8/10: A quick look at online weather radar indicated severe winds with a front moving in from the west, so I moved vehicles into the driveway. Winds weren't as bad as predicted here. Not so in Iowa and into Illinois, where winds sometimes exceeded 100 mph, according to these online reports...HuffPost, New York Times.
Such forces of nature reveal how vulnerable we are. High wind blasts in 2011 took down large tree limbs on our Missouri property. I remember in the '70s, after checking shrimp pots in Halibut Cove in the 28-foot Little Grizzly fishing boat our family operated back then, hitting huge waves rolling down Kachemak Bay that sent tea I was trying to brew all over the inside of the cab of that boat. Commercial fishing teaches those involved to patiently wait out high seas, or the ebb and flow of the tide. I vividly remember the 1964 Alaskan Earthquake when our family lived in Anchorage, even though I was just a first grader at the time. Earth has a deep, groaning voice during large quakes. Huge winds are scary, but when angry ground rolls up and down and growls at you, it's terrifying. It all boils down to one point...live life to the fullest. Nature can change your life in seconds.
Day's events:- Due to rain, we only had to check gardens...not water them. Mary found a tiny tomato hornworm and 3 worm eggs.
- Specific gravity on the blackberry wine was 1.001, close enough to 1.000, so I racked it to a new 1-gallon jug and added potassium sorbate to stop fermentation (see photos below).
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| Blackberry wine after 2nd racking. |
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| Fines and crude left behind after racking. |
- Tuesday, 8/11: Late at night, Mary and I went outside to watch the Perseid Meteor Shower. I saw 3. Mary saw 2. It wasn't exactly stellar...ha, ha, get it...stellar. When I lived in Alaska, August was the month when you just barely started to see stars, but not a time when you'd be on the lookout for meteors. I love astronomy. I've always been a space nerd. As a kid, I always watched the Gemini astronaut flights on TV with amazement. In 5th grade, I'd crawl into a huge cardboard box, viewed my Stars Golden Book with a toy gun zapper that emitted a red light and identify constellations and planets. In 1968-69, I shoveled snow for Clarence Lafon, the chef at Beaver's Ski Chalet in Winter Park, CO, where my parents worked. I earned a dollar a week to save up enough money to buy a telescope, which was a big deal for me. Mary bought a telescope when we lived in Circle, MT. My dream is to build a dome for that scope, a dream that needs to become a reality.
In daily news:- Mary made venison stroganoff and very yummy pumpkin cake.
- She also harvested comfrey and persimmon leaves and laid them out to dry in the south bedroom.
- I cut tall weeds that were growing through the chicken wire on the SE corner of the chicken yard. They were making it hard to enter the human gate. It took extra time, because I didn't want the long-handled loppers to cut through chicken wire. I removed 2 wheelbarrow loads of weeds from 25 feet of fence.
- I removed an inside board and insulation to the north chicken door that when opened, will give our month-old chicks (as of Monday, 8/10) access to the north end of the chicken yard.
- Mary found 2 cabbage worms, 3 worm eggs, and 2 cucumber beetles in the gardens.
- Donna Bell and David Parmeter (former high school classmates) mentioned an idea of holding a get-together in the Pacific Northwest. Interesting thought.
- Wednesday, 8/12: I installed a 2x4 block at the top of the NE corner of the chicken coop. It holds a pole in place attached to a gate running from the east fence to the coop, thereby dividing the north and south chicken yards. Older chickens stay in the south yard. New chicks roam the north yard. I let the chicks out (see videos below). Month-old chicks venturing outdoors.Chicks in the outdoors with hens watching through fence.
Historically, chicks take a day or more prior to venturing outdoors. Not this crew. They went outside immediately. We got these chicks exactly 1 month ago, on a July Wednesday when they were 2 days old. In the top video, the older hens are peering through the fence to look at the chicks. Silver, a silver Wyandotte hen, is especially fascinated with the chicks. We keep tall ragweed plants, aster plants, and other weeds near all chicken fences. They give chickens a place to hide from hawks, along with giving them shade. There are also Smart Weed seeds that the chicks like to eat. We enjoy viewing the chicks, but more importantly, they provide us with meat for the year (along with venison that I take every fall). Chickens grow very fast. We're partway through our 2nd 50-pound bag of chick feed and they've grown from the size of an egg to about a third of their adult size. In roughly 2.5 months, they'll be ready to butcher. The feed bill grows as they get bigger, but ends when they are processed into meat. Butchering is not fun, but it's necessary if you raise your own meat. Hens that accidentally come in with our chicks join our other hens and eventually enhance our egg count. I've contemplated raising sheep for meat, but stout fencing and a solid overnight building would need to be built, to keep them from becoming coyote food.
Daily events:- Mary found 20 cabbage worms, 3 army worms, and 3 cucumber beetles in the gardens.
- Mary dusted books.
- I drilled holes in 8 plastic Gatorade bottles, put mothballs in them and in old bottles, and put one behind each vehicle tire and at least one in every vehicle engine compartment. They help to keep rodents from chewing up vehicle wiring.
- Bill called. He's going to try to visit during Labor Day. At work, his receiving department job is slow, so he's helping in other areas, such as inventory. He said COVID cases are increasing in St. Louis.
- COVID cases are ballooning, here. The number is at 587 in Quincy and 50 in our county.
- Thursday, 8/13: Today's events:
- Bill texted that he and all other employees where he works were sent home, due to someone there testing positive for coronavirus. They had to bring a company in to deep clean the place. His employer paid everyone's pay for the day.
- Mary dusted the movie DVDs.
- I investigated ABS (antilock brake system) issues online with the GMC pickup. Removed both front wheels in my investigation. Front brake pads are new. Greased front end, since everything was reachable with tires off.
- Mary looked during daylight and we did an after-dark black light search and found 12 cabbage worms, 4 worm eggs, 3 cucumber beetles, and 1 super large tomato worm in the gardens.
- We left the heat lamp off for the first time at night. The chicks are growing nicely.
- The blackberry wine still bubbles slightly, even though I halted fermentation by adding potassium sorbate on Monday.
- Friday, 8/14: Today's exciting details:
- Mary made flour tortillas.
- I tried to eliminate the ABS light in the dash of the GMC pickup after discovering that removing the ABS fuse turns on the red "Brakes not working" light. I removed plastic dash pieces to back out the instrument panel. There are no removable light bulbs. Discovered online that LED lights are soldered into the internal circuit boards of modern vehicle instrument panels. More importantly, online discussion boards indicated that as long as the red brake idiot lights aren't activated, a vehicle with the ABS light on will pass inspection. So, I'm good to go with the pickup's current situation.
- Did online research about engine longevity of the 4.6-liter V8 in the Cadillac vs. the 3.8-liter V6 in the Buick. The Buick engine is better. We decided to keep the Buick and sell the Caddy after it's paid off in November, 2021, but take the Buick off insurance and work to get it ship-shape.
- Mary found and killed 3 cabbage worms, 1 army worm, 1 tomato horn worm, 3 cucumber beetles, and 17 worm eggs.
- The blackberry wine still bubbles...another hard-to-kill yeast variety.
- Saturday, 8/15: The older I get, the more I notice that the imagined mountains we build in our minds are pitifully minuscule compared to the natural workings of earth and the universe. It hit me tonight while walking the dogs and viewing the tiny specks of the Milky Way that spanned the night sky. They Milky Way was bright. Each tiny fleck of light is itself a sun shining light on asteroids and planets around it. We are but one of billions of occupants in space. Every day our tiny ant colony of humans eject verbal toxic waste about other ants of our species, discrepancies about religion, race, nations, and politics. It's trivial and so are we when we fail to realize how we are part of something that's much larger than our own imagination.
Today's happenings:- Katie texted us 2 photos of a musk ox near her worksite in northern Alaska. HERE is what she put on Facebook.
- I reassembled the dash of the GMC pickup, after cleaning the pieces. I saw signs that it was taken apart in the past.
- Worm eggs are on the increase. Mary's garden worm demolition count was 50 worm eggs, 4 cabbage worms, 1 army worm, and 3 cucumber beetles.
- I looked up various pickup parts online.
- We watched the 2013 movie, The Book Thief, one of our favorites.
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