July 18-24, 2021

Weather | 7/18, 60°, 81° | 7/19, 63°, 82° |7/20, 65°, 85° | 7/21, 65°, 86° | 7/22, 65°, 86° | 7/23, 67°, 87° | 7/24, 1.00 " rain, 70°, 91° |

• Sunday, 7/18: Family Calls, Text
  
  • Katie called. She's working hard. They got supplies for their housing, but are still waiting on supplies for the school's construction. The housing building, which is a teacher housing, is coming along nicely. We talked about her retirement funds.
    
  • Bill called while we were on the phone with Katie, so we called him back. He was babysitting 2 challenging pit bull dogs for friends of his. One is deaf, so getting his attention is hard. Bill's employer requires employees to wear a face mask if not vaccinated. Most got their vaccinations so they don't have to wear a face mask. He will be visiting us starting Friday, which he has off from work.
    
  • Mom texted that Karen and Lynn left on Friday. They're heading to north Georgia to find a home. They were dropping off their leased Subaru car in Rapid City, SD. Mom said it's incredible hot...104° predicted today and 108° tomorrow. She's watering the garden to try to save her plants and grasshoppers are thick.
    
  • I worked on emptying shingles out of the pickup. Finished up emptying black 3-tag shingles, with many more to go.
    
  • Mary made flour tortillas.
    
  • Mary and I picked blackberries for an hour and froze 3 more quarts for a grand total of 29.
  • Mary startled the buck with a velvet-covered rack on Bramble Hill. We also heard a belted kingfisher, which must have a nest in that area. We both heard fish jumping in Swim Pond and saw several bass swimming near the shore.
  • Mary discovered 10 tiny ticks on her feet after picking blackberries. Rubbing alcohol on a cotton ball removed all of them. She learned after an online search that dry weather kills off ticks. Plus, heavy deer populations equate to high tick numbers. Our June/July rains and high deer numbers equals armies of ticks this summer.
    
  • Two crop duster airplanes are using the dairy's runway, flying over our land. WILL THEY EVER STOP!!! This has been going on for over a week.
  • I picked 45 blackberries right before nightfall for tomorrow's breakfast oatmeal.
    
  • Springfield, MO is witnessing an influx of COVID cases with unvaccinated residents. I'm happy that everyone in our immediate family is smart enough to get vaccinated.
    
    
• Monday, 7/19: Bass Fishing
  
  • Mary and I went fishing at the Swim Pond. It was a blast! We kept 5 fish and tossed back several small bass. Of course the bass that unhooked themselves were monsters...the more you couldn't see them, the bigger they became. Also, the smaller bass are the harder fighters, so they're more fun to catch. The bass were biting softly, so a couple shakes and they unhooked, easily. Mary tried a large lure that resembles a northern pike minnow and got a bite on it.
    
  • Mary watered garden plants and picked ripe strawberries while I cleaned fish. A pair of adult great crested flycatchers battle each other in the trees nearby as I worked on fish. 
  • The bass tasted great for our midday meal.
    
  • Mary worked up a shopping list, and finished 3 Halloween ornaments.
  • The baby chimney swifts were out flying around the yard in the afternoon.
    
  • I stacked more shingles into the machine shed from the pickup. 
  • At twilight, I picked 50 blackberries for tomorrow's breakfast oatmeal...yum!
    
    
• Tuesday, 7/20: A Bunch of Shingles
  
  • I finished moving shingles from the pickup to neat stacks in the machine shed. I got 393 free shingles, or the equivalent of about 18 bundles. Plus, 283 of them are architectural shingles, which are larger, better constructed, and more expensive. Now I must add up our own stack of shingles, measure the SE part of our roof, then figure out how many more shingles I need to get to resurface that roof section.
  • Mary cleaned house and made venison General Tso for our main meal.
  • We saw several chimney swifts heading south. The baby chimney swifts raised in our chimney are still flying around and cheeping in the evenings.
  • I got another batch of breakfast blackberries.
    
    
• Wednesday, 7/21: Shopping
  
  • Mary and I went shopping in Quincy, IL. We wore masks. The ratio of people vaccinated for COVID in Adams County, home to Quincy, is 40%. It's only 33% in Lewis County, where we live. With the current COVID variant infecting unvaccinated people, we'll keep wearing masks when in public. We saw a few masks, but very few. There were signs all over town in Quincy saying "School board, keep masks off our children." If Jonas Salk were alive today introducing the polio vaccine, that disease would survive. We've grown dumber, not smarter, with time.
  • We texted with Bill, who will visit us starting Friday. He asked if he can make pizzas during his visit. He said that he's been working 6 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. this week and "haven't properly cooked all week," so he'd love to make and eat some pizzas. We said that would be fine.
  • This morning, we had a doe and her twin fawns in our yard (see photos, below). They really loved the long grass in our yard. One fawn started gnawing on a wild lettuce, quickly quit it, obviously not liking its taste, and went on to eat something else. We notice that deer really love mulberry leaves, since several are stripped from trees. This evening, I saw mama deer eating grass down south on our lane.

Twin fawns through our south window & screen.

Hungry mama deer and one baby.

Fawn trying wild lettuce...YUCK!

Deer family high-tailing it west of house.

• Thursday, 7/22: Beating Back High Grass
  
  • I sharpened the mower blade. Then we traded off on mowing for the entire day. With high humidity and heat, 30 to 40 minutes is about all a person can take at pushing a mower.
    
  • Mary mowed the east and west yards and raked some of the grass into mounds. I mowed the lane so our son, with his Hyundai car, won't get lost in high grass while driving up our lane, tomorrow. All of the grass is really high.
    
  • I weedwhacked a little over half of the growing weeds and grass under the electric fence of the far garden.
  • Mary replanted bean seeds in areas that didn't sprout and mulched the rows of beans with grass she mowed in the east lawn.
    
  • I swept asphalt shingle granules out of the pickup bed.
  • Our dogs are low grass lovers. When the grass is high, they won't go very far down the lane. Cut the grass and they trot as far as they can over the shorn lane. Plato loves the taste of wild blackberries. He chews them thoroughly to savor the flavor. Amber tenderly takes a blackberry from your hand, then promptly spits it out on the ground.
  • Today, the Missouri Supreme Court's nine judges unanimously overruled a lower court's decision on not giving Medicaid benefits to low income residents. The lower court said the constitutional amendment approved last year by voters was illegal, because it didn't contain language on how to pay for it. The supreme court said it isn't illegal and sent the case back to a lower to implement its start. Our governor, who stopped the Federal application process, and now has a court order to restart it, said at the end of this year's legislative session, he'd have to wait to see what the courts say. They've spoken.
    
    
• Friday, 7/23: Our Son Arrives
  
  • Mary and I cracked 4 handfuls of hickory nuts. It took an hour.
    
  • Mary set up the twin bed in the north bedroom for Bill. Plato smelled the bed once it was set up and started wagging his tail. He knew that his favorite friend was arriving, soon.
    
  • Bill arrived around 12:15 p.m. Bill and I ate and Mary made Bill's favorite dessert, pistachio tort. It's topped with nuts, which is why we cracked hickory nuts, earlier.
    
  • Bill & I picked 8 quarts of blackberries. We went to all of the major blackberry patches on our property. It took several hours. Bill took a photo of some blackberries (see below). Three quarts went into the freezer, giving us a grand total of 32 quarts. Five quarts were frozen and are for Bill to use for making blackberry wine, if he wants, and to eat.
  • Bill got into a huge number of baby ticks. Using tape, he collected 167 ticks off his clothing and his body. Only 3 were adult ticks. That's a record for the most ticks off of one person in an outing. He also wiped himself down with alcohol on a paper towel. 
  • We spotted a monarch caterpillar on a milkweed next to the lane (see photo, below).
    
  • Mary raked up some of the grass that was cut yesterday and mulched the peppers, sweet potatoes, acorn squash, tomatillos, and corn plants.
    
  • After chores, we built a fire, and had a wienie roast, accompanies by a dark IPA beer that Bill and his friend, Mike, made. It was amazing. Right after sunset, we saw 3 bats flying above us. A whip-poor-will sang to the west. We watched Venus set in the west and the full moon rise over the roof and chimney of our house.

Blackberry photo taken by Bill.

Several ripening red blackberries.

A Monarch caterpillar feeding on milkweed.

• Saturday, 7/24: A Quiet Day with Bill
  
  • Bill opened his birthday presents from us. It's early, since his birthday isn't until August 3rd, but he's going on a Kentucky trip with friends on the end of the week of his birthday, so we gave gifts to him now.
  • We had a quiet day. Bill and I discussed making blackberry wine. He snapped photos on his iPad of pages in my winemaking diary related to making blackberry wine.
    
  • Mary did some cross stitching.
  • Mary and I looked at the garden. We have fruit on all types of melons and pumpkins. Several cucumbers big enough to pick. We also have developing tomatoes and peppers.
  • Bill made 3 really great pizzas.
  • After eating pizzas, we had a thunderstorm roll through from Iowa with an inch of rain.
  • We watched a 2018 movie picked out by Bill called The House with a Clock in its Walls.
  • Lightning was still flashing to the SW when we walked the dogs after midnight.