Sept. 20-26, 2020

 

Weather | 9/20, 43°, 76° | 9/21, 43°, 74° | 9/22, 53°,78° | 9/23, 53°, 77° | 9/24, 55°, 78° | 9/25, 53°, 79° | 9/26, 60°, 83° |

• Sunday, 9/20: What we did:
  
  • I crawled up the 45-degree of the NE valley of our roof to the chimney and measured distances for putting together scaffolding for a chimney repair job. It would be extremely difficult to construct. The chimney is in desperate shape, with 2-inch splits at the top on the north and south sides through several layers of brick. I was hoping to cinch it back together and patch if up, but it probably needs to be replaced with newly laid bricks. Mary and I talked about our options for quite some time.
    
  • I picked 2 more quarts of autumn olive berries.
  • Mary baked bread.
  • She also picked and froze 27 ears of sweet corn.
  • We both picked tomatoes.
    


• Monday, 9/21: Today:
  
  • Our chicks are 10 weeks old today.
  • I was online for most of the day, looking up bricklaying details and where I can rent a manlift in Quincy for helping me to get safely on our roof for chimney repair. Three locations exist in Quincy and one has a towable 34-foot articulating manlift. One of the businesses also is a masonry contractor that covers 40 miles around Quincy, which would include us.
    
  • I measured heights to our rooftop...it's 22.5 feet and 9 feet in from the west side of our house to the peak. The 34' manlift would work. I checked the angle of the roof peak. It's at 90 degrees, so our roof slope is 12/12, or for every 12" out, it drops 12" down.
  • While I was going up the ladder for roof measurements, I spotted 4 pelicans high overhead, riding air currents while floating eastward. 
  • At one point in the afternoon, I heard chickens raising a stink, then Mary hollered and I went running outside. She saw a big red tailed hawk fly off and we had a dead chicken, a buff Orpington cockerel, in the north chicken run. The hawk ate most of the bird...feathers were spread out in a 2-foot square area, and the mostly-eaten carcass about 10 feet away. Most all of the young chickens were in the coop, but a few were hiding in the weeds along the fence lines. 
  • Later, when we put the chickens to bed, we had a barred rock cockerel outside of the fence on east side of the north chicken run. He must have flown over the fence when the hawk struck. I had to wade through head-high ragweed and stickery cedar branches to chase it south to the human gate, where Mary drove it into the chicken run. Then, we chased it out of inside the fence line of the south chicken run, where hens stay, through the gate separating the north and south chicken runs, and then through the north coop chicken door to where he and his mates roost safe inside the coop. What an ordeal!
    
  • Mary picked tomatoes and 15 ears of corn. We both watered the gardens. I transplanted 2 strawberry plants into 4-gallon buckets. These plants were once shoots off our existing strawberry plants. I've got 12 more prior strawberry shoots that are now plants to transplant.
    
  • Mary washed and dried half of our fall and winter jackets and coats.
  • On the way to get the mail, I saw a doe and a yearling deer midway down our driveway. They trotted off to the west, but just watched me walk by, then went back to munch clover on our lane. Then, a cooper's hawk flew overhead.
    
  • We watched QBVII, a television 3-part series about a London trial between an American playwright and author of a WWII holocaust book and a Polish doctor who practiced in a German concentration camp. It was quite a moving series about forced sterilization of Jews. It hits home with recent reports of hysterectomies of Hispanic immigrants in ICE facilities in this country...an eerie example of history repeating itself.
    


• Tuesday, 9/22: Undertakings:
  • Before letting chicks outside, Mary said, "I hope today is a better day...nope, there's a red tailed hawk!" It was sitting in a tree just NW of our north chicken run. It flew off to the south. Mary walked to where it flew, made some noise with a plastic tree guard, and walked back while I released the chicks. We kept a keen eye out for hawks all day long, but didn't see any.
  • Mary picked and froze most of the ears of corn remaining in the garden. She also picked more tomatoes. They are slow to ripen, this year.
    
  • Mary mowed grass in the west yard in front of the chicken coop and south chicken run.
    
  • She also picked the rest of the hazelnuts, which amounted to a large full basket. We both husked them in the evening, while dinner was cooking.
    
  • I picked another 3 quarts of autumn olives. We now have 16 quarts from this year in the freezer.
    


• Wednesday, 9/23: I read a piece of news today that quite literally put terror in my heart. Our president says he will have to see whether he will peacefully transfer power if he loses the election. This guy is teetering on the brink of dictatorship. I don't like anything at all with the tone of his comments. My only hope is that all elected members of our government demand that the oath of office and the U.S. Constitution be implemented to the fullest extent.
  
  In other activities:
  
  • Mary checked the woods for hickory nuts. They don't exist, just like black walnuts are nonexistent this year. We're guessing that the snow we got this April nailed tree blossoms. Then, we got several weeks of dry weather, which didn't help. It might be tough on squirrels this winter.
  • Mary watered the gardens and picked some tomatoes. 
  • I picked a quart of autumn olive berries to raise our total from this year to 17 quarts.
    


• Thursday, 9/24: Today's events:
  
  • Mary cut down, sorted and put away our crop of garlic. Six varieties of garlic filled 3 old grapefruit bags that once held 18 pounds, each, of grapefruit. She also put away 6 boxes of the largest bulbs to be replanted in November for our next garlic crop. Only 4 garlic bulbs were thrown out. One was bad and three were chewed by mice, although Mary thinks they didn't develop a taste for garlic.
  • Mary also finished washing coats and jackets, and made a turkey pot pie for dinner.
  • Mary and I picked several more tomatoes and Mary found 3 more small ears of corn. She froze another gallon of ripe tomatoes, giving us 4 gallons in the freezer.
    
  • I balanced our checkbook.
  • I found old bricks and laid them on a sheet of plywood to determine their configuration to make our chimney that is 17.5" on the outside and about 8" on the inside. Each course of bricks includes 6 bricks.
  • I then dug out bricks stored behind the machine shed and sorted them according to size and condition. I came up with enough good bricks for 17 courses of 6 bricks each, way more than I require to redo the top of our chimney.
    


• Friday, 9/25: Merchandise packaging is stupid. In an attempt to disguise higher prices, stuff is packaged into diminishing sizes, plus volume amounts are all over the place. I checked out prices for stuff to use to fix our roof and chimney today. Blackjack tar is sold in 10.1-ounce tubes, when it once was in 12- or 16-ounce sizes. You can find mortar in 80-pound, 75-pound, 70-pound, 65-pound, 60-pound, 55-pound, and 50-pound bags. Want to buy a can of roof cement? It's not in a gallon can, but in a 0.90-gallon can. I wish merchandisers would be honest in their efforts to squeeze more money out of our wallets. Just raise the price. Don't squish the quantity down in size!
  
  Events:
  
  • Mary washed and dried sheets and blankets, figured 2 months of our savings funds, and stored hay that she cut several days ago in the 2nd grain bin.
  • I read books on laying bricks, then went to Quincy, shopped for a few groceries, and items to fix the chimney. The manlift isn't available through the weekend, because it's rented out. I reserved it for a week to be picked up on Tuesday at noon, which is perfectly matched to weather predictions of rain on Sunday through Monday. I found prices for mortar and other supplies at Lowes, Home Depot, and Menards and bought Portland cement, lime, and sand at the last place. My kids would have loved this trip...hours staring at bags of cement at 3 different home supply stores. It's kind of a standing joke in our family. I added 2 bushels of potting soil and a bag of chick feed, then drove my loaded Caddy home.
  • Meanwhile, Mary mowed 2 sections of lawn.
    
  • Mary and I picked tomatoes. I unloaded the car as Mary watered the gardens.
  • We ate nachos and watched a horrible movie call The Heartbreak Kid, starring Ben Stiller. We'll donate that DVD back to the Salvation Army. It's garbage.
    


• Saturday, 9/26: My sister has been posting autumn colors on Facebook as Karen and Lynn drive their pickup and camper trailer through northern states. I remember driving tour buses in late August along the Alaskan Highway between Beaver Creek, Yukon Territory, and Tok, Alaska, with brilliant yellow fall colors in aspen trees along the highway. We start seeing fall colors here in mid-September. First, it's yellow goldenrod flowers. Then, ash trees turn red to dark purple. Virginia creeper, a vine in trees, turns a bright red. It's beautiful right now. Next, shagbark hickory trees turn yellow. We're just starting to see the first tinge of that, now. Finally, deep dark shades of red and purple show as oak trees turn, which is a few weeks away. I love how our autumn in Missouri evolves over several weeks. It gives you time to enjoy the fall colors.
  
  Our day:
  
  • Mary did partial cleaning of the upstairs south bedroom...what we call the room of requirement, from the Harry Potter movies. It's one place in the house where we can block cats from marauding through our stuff. With freezing temperatures expected next week, it's where green tomatoes will be put to ripen. That's why Mary is trying to free up space in the room.
  • She also re-potted several of the house plants and moved them into the house. Tin foil covers the tops of pots, to keep cats out, which works well. We now have a large ficus tree in our living room (see photo below).
  • I transferred sacks of mortar materials into 4-gallon plastic cat litter buckets, giving the Portland cement, lime, mortar sand, and old Rapid Set mortar mix a drier place to be and it gets it out of the house. I labeled all 11 buckets and stored them in the machine shed. 
  • I found an old roll of aluminum flashing, left over from when we re-roofed our house in Circle, MT. It's 15' long, which is enough for putting new flashing on our current chimney.
  • Mary and I picked half a bucket of tomatoes, the most we've collected so far this year.
  • It was almost dark when I got the mail. A quarter of the way back from the mailbox, I mumbled something to myself and a deer that was probably only 10 feet away snorted. I watched 2 white tails bob up and down as they ran off to the west.
  • We watched the movie, Darkest Hour, one of our favorites.
    

Ficus tree in living room.