Sept. 1-7, 2025

 Weather | 9/1, p. cloudy, 60°, 78° | 9/2, sunny, 54°, 79° | 9/3, cloudy, 0.11" rain, 56°, 77° | 9/4, sunny, 47°, 71° | 9/5, cloudy, 55°, 68° | 9/6, sunny, 45°, 72° | 9/7, sunny, 40°, 69° |

• Monday, 9/1: Labor Day
  • Today is Labor Day and the first day of dove season. We never heard a single shotgun go off, so the doves are safe in this neighborhood.
  • I found two more apples under the Porter's Perfection tree that I cleaned up and put in the fridge. They are tart and tasty.
  • While Mary watered the far garden, I watered small fruit trees and blueberries. They seem to be doing better from my twice-per-week watering. I helped Mary with the very end of watering the far garden and watering the near garden.
  • I picked a small handful of strawberries. Since Mary has all of the zucchinis that she needs, I picked three medium zucs, chopped them up, and fed them to the hens. By the end of the day, they devoured everything, including the skins. 
  • Mary picked a few tomatoes and some cucumbers. She made a cucumber salad. We probably won't get enough cucumbers for making pickles. 
  • Our water pressure at the kitchen faucet was so low last week that I called the water district about it. Then, we noticed plenty of water pressure at the bathroom faucet and outside at the hydrant. I removed the aerator fitting at the end of the kitchen faucet's spout. I removed a tiny decayed valve ahead of the aerator. Upon opening it up a second time this weekend, Mary noticed that pieces of a plastic screen broke and fell into the water outlet, significantly blocking water flow. She removed the plastic pieces with tweezers and our flow increased. Today, we noticed an even stronger flow of water, so the water district also fixed a leak to boost the pressure.
  • Ben Woodruff, who owns property west of us, leaves his home in St. Louis and shows up with his kids every holiday. They roar around on four-wheelers, making loud noise, usually in the evenings. We always know when these city morons are here, because the internet slows to a snail's pace, as his kids download movies and eat up bandwidth coming off cell towers. By tonight, after they left for home, the internet was back to normal.

• Tuesday, 9/2: Watering & Woodsplitter Engine Maintenance
  • Mary made some very yummy venison stew and biscuits for our midday meal.
  • She also watered all gardens. We're in a dry cycle, where garden plants require daily watering.
  • I cleaned the woodsplitter's engine crevices that were filled with oil-soaked chicken feathers and nut shells that mice moved into place. What an absolute mess! With various sized screwdrivers and needle nose pliers, I removed a ton of junk. There were times when I wondered how on earth a hickory or pecan nut got wedged between the fins of that eight horsepower Briggs & Stratton engine. I changed the spark plug, tightened the spring in the pull start so the pull cord returns correctly, lubed it and the throttle cable with WD-40, and sprayed carb cleaner on the throttle and governor springs to clean them. I put everything together and fired up the engine. It sounds better. From the engine numbers I determined that it was built in 1989. At night, I ordered the following parts for the engine: gas filter, air cleaner foam, and a magneto armature (coil). The last part includes a spark plug wire, which is badly chewed by mice right now. 
  • We ate four of the five Porter's Perfection apples that were in the fridge. They're very bitter. In the description of this apple on Fedco's website, it indicates that the apple is not for eating, but best for enhancing apple cider flavor. We're weird, because we like eating it, anyway.
  • I finished reading Alexander Kent's With All Despatch, his eighth in the series of British Navy novels.

• Wednesday, 9/3: First Rain in Almost a Month!
  • While viewing online images of the engine that we have in our log splitter, I noticed that I didn't assemble the parts of the rope pull start mechanism correctly, so I took it apart and put the parts in the right way. Then I changed oil in that engine. It was black. I need to do a better job at changing oil in that machine.
  • Mary watered garden plants. We just don't trust the forecast for rain. I helped her with watering the near garden. She also picked some tomatoes and cucumbers.
  • Mary took photos of a swallowtail butterfly larvae in the parsnips (see photo, below). They love parsnip leaves.
  • We had rain for the first time in nearly a month when a thunderstorm rumbled through. We were outside putting the chickens to bed when the only two lightning strikes hit nearby. It made us move quickly for the protection of the house.
  • I found two apples under trees after wind knocked them out of trees during the thunderstorm. One was a Roxbury Russet and the other was a Goldrush apple.
  • I started Form Line of Battle, Alexander Kent's ninth book of the series. These last two books we purchased at the Quincy Library Book Sale for 50 cents an inch.

  

  A swallowtail butterfly caterpillar in parsnip leaves.
  

• Thursday, 9/4: Shopping Trip, New Phones
  • While walking Plato on the lane this morning, we spotted a turkey poult at the curve of the lane near Bluegill Pond. It is nearly adult size.
  • I cut out bad parts and we ate the two apples I found that I found yesterday in our morning oatmeal breakfast. The Roxbury Russet apple tastes excellent after cooking with the oatmeal. It will be a great baking apple in the future.
  • We shopped in Quincy. Farm & Home has a sale going on and we got extra bags of hen and cat food, two more pairs of rubber boots, AA and AAA batteries, and a big thermometer for inside the chicken coop. Mary bought a couple books at Salvation Army and Goodwill. They are Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America's Most Notorious Pirates, and The Illustrated History of Canada. Then, we spent two hours at US Cellular and got two new iPhone 16s.
  • While looking west from Quincy, we could see smoke in the air. When we crossed the Mississippi River while going home, we really noticed the smokey air. On Plato's final walk before going to bed, the moon was orange, due to the smoke.

• Friday, 9/5: Another Day Without Rain
  • After letting out the chickens this morning, we looked up after closing the gate and saw our resident deer family munching on grass in the east yard. It's a doe and twin fawns. Her kids are pretty big.
  • When Mary picked tomatoes, she saw a mouse staring up at her from the tomato patch. She tapped it gently on the rump to get it to move out of the way. It moved a couple inches and stopped, again. Mary tapped it a second time to get it to move on. It was rather tame. 
  • It was watering day, again, because even though clouds looked like rain many times today, we never received a drop. Mary watered gardens and I watered small trees and blueberry bushes.
  • I found a Goldrush apple under that tree. I cut out bad parts and we ate it. Goldrush apples are very tasty. 
  • Mary cut up and froze two pork loins that we picked up yesterday while shopping in Quincy. They were on sale at Niemann's for $1.77 a pound. Mary also froze tomatoes. We have half a gallon of tomatoes in the freezer. We need 15 gallons to make the three batches of salsa that Mary wants to make, so we have a long ways to go to reach her goal.
  • The wood splitter engine parts that I ordered on Tuesday arrived in today's mail. The online Briggs & Stratton store is in Florida, but the order came from Iowa, which was nice.
  • We watched a movie we picked up yesterday. It's a 2009 film called New in Town, which was filmed in Winnipeg in the winter to depict life in Minnesota. In the extras after the movie we learned that some of the nighttime filming took place when temperatures were -57° F. The movie was predictable, but we liked it for the northern cold aspect and some of the Minnesota lingo bantered about by the actors. The film stars Renée Zellweger and Harry Connick Jr.

• Saturday, 9/6: Cool Temperatures
  • We're experiencing really nice cool temperatures. The U.S. Weather Service says we're 10 degrees colder than normal, which is fine with us. Unfortunately, the forecast for the upcoming week gets temperatures into the lower 90s...double YUCK!
  • Mary cleaned house and washed furniture covers and blankets, which includes a small red plaid fuzzy blanket that we got on our last shopping trip with Gandalf in mind. He was on it for the first time tonight. He purred as he kneaded the blanket with this claws. He likes it.
  • I installed the new parts in the wood splitter's engine. First, I put in the new fuel filter. Next, I tossed the old foam air filter, cleaned the air filter housing and parts, oiled the new foam and installed it. Finally, I removed the old coil, loosened two bolts to slide the new coil's ground wire through a loop in the engine housing cover, retightened those bolts and the nut on the ground wire, snipped the old spark plug wire to slide off the spark plug boot, cleaned it, shortened the spark plug wire, stripped the wire and crimped on a new spark plug snap tab, slid the boot over the tab, snugged down nuts holding the coil to the flywheel after getting it .010 inches away from the flywheel, then cleaned and installed the blower housing cover. The engine started on the first pull and ran nicely. A new coil made a huge difference.
  • I found another apple under the Goldrush tree. This one was bad.
  • We marveled over several of the features found in the latest Apple cell phone operating system in our iPhone 16s. Our old iPhone SE (1st generation) phones couldn't update beyond system 15. These new phones are on system 18. We're still waiting for a confirmation from Apple to change Mary's password, so we can finish linking the phones to iCloud.
  • We heard a screech owl at night while walking Plato. It was in the east yard.

• Sunday, 9/7: Processing Peppers & Removing Wood Splitter Hoses
  • Mary picked bell peppers from the far garden and put 29 bags of cut up green peppers in the freezer. She would like to put away 60-70 bags of peppers. We have predicted highs in the 90s next week and she didn't want the peppers to go bad. As it was, a couple had sun scald, so it was time to act.
  • Mary watered all garden plants.
  • I added mothballs to all of the plastic bottles we use to keep mice from chewing up wiring in vehicles and drilled holes in five more bottles to store around the log splitter engine. We have 32 bottles in and around the pickup, 10 for the riding mower, and now six at the splitter engine. I draped an old plastic laundry basket over the splitter engine to keep the mothball bottles from blowing away in the wind or getting knocked off by critters.
  • I drained the hydraulic fluid from the log splitter and removed all five of the hydraulic hoses. These rubber hoses had cracks in them when we first inherited the splitter in 2009 and every year since then, I've commented on how we need to change the hoses. They're rather expensive, so we kept putting it off. Since we rely on that splitter, it's time to change them. Several fittings are tight enough that I had to use a pipe as a cheater bar on the end of the wrench to break them. This splitter is homemade and obviously cobbled together by a local farmer, but it's much more powerful than anything I ever see in a store. The hose running from the tank to the pump was a piece of old hydraulic hose with the fittings cut off and clamped onto hose barbs at both ends. I was extremely hard to remove from the hose barbs and I tore up one end of the hose while digging at it with a screwdriver to get it off the barbs. I covered all 10 of the exposed and open hose fittings on the splitter by stretching plastic wrap on them and securing the wrap with rubber bands.
  • I cleaned up my tools after dark while using a head lamp. Several wild birds that roost inside the machine shed were upset with some guy wondering around with a bright light on his head.