Oct. 6-12, 2025

Weather | 10/6, sunny, 60°, 82° | 10/7, 0.60" rain, cloudy to sun, 55°, 65° | 10/8, sunny, 43°, 70° | 10/9, sunny, 43°, 73° | 10/10, .41" rain, p. cloudy, 52°, 69° | 10/11, fog to p. cloudy, 49°, 70° | 10/12, p. cloudy, 46°, 76° |

• Monday, 10/6: Halloween Decorations
  • We heard coyotes howling during our predawn walk with Plato. Coyotes aren't usually howling at that hour.
  • I took the .22 rifle north to the machine shed to blast squirrels first thing in the morning. Two squirrels bounded across that building's tin roof and gave me a quick eyeball look, then spun around and loudly ran away. There's nothing quiet about a squirrel running on a tin roof! I never got a shot off.
  • An American kestrel flew over the yard as I was looking for squirrels this morning. Mary saw it, too.
  • After we let the chickens out and were back inside, I spotted a buck deer between the machine shed and the grain bins. He had a nice rack.
  • I picked up all of the soiled wall calendars and chicken feathers on the dirt floor of the machine shed. In past years, I left this stuff. I'm trying to eliminate feathers that mice stuff into the cracks and crevices of the woodsplitter engine.
  • Mary vacuumed spiders from throughout the house and found 11 Asian lady bugs, so the autumn/winter bug invasion has commenced.
  • I hunted squirrels in the late afternoon while sitting on a stool at the east side of the machine shed. I saw nothing. Then during evening chores I checked and two squirrels were in the tops of trees northeast of the machine shed. I tried a long shot and got another fox squirrel.
  • We put up the Halloween tree and decorations (see photos, below).
  • I finished Alexander Kent's 12th nautical novel, Signal—Close Action!, and started the 13th novel of the series, The Inshore Squadron.
  The fully decorated Halloween tree, this year with blinking lights.
   

  

  New Halloween pumpkin lights over a door in our kitchen.
  

• Tuesday, 10/7: House Plants & Racking Wine
  • We experienced a big rain at 4:30 a.m., when we weren't supposed to get much moisture. It amounted to 0.60 inches. Lightning and thunder got Mary out of bed to unplug appliances. She said rain was pounding on the house roof.
  • Mary cleaned all of the house plants and repotted the bay trees, which were brought inside the house from the woodshed where they were for the summer. She also started three plants, which were the rosemary plant, a ficas tree, and a pothos plant. The rosemary plant is 3-4 foot long and hangs to the floor off an old wooden chair seat. She wants to keep the ficas tree small. The pothos plant grew to about 25 feet long, wrapped around the pot. Once her restarts grow, she'll discard old plants.
  • Mary also cleaned the sunroom.
  • I racked the following two wines:
    
    • Apple - Deep fines meant I lost about a half gallon of liquid from must that was in a 3-gallon carboy and two 1-gallon jugs. The resulting must filled a 3-gallon carboy, a half-gallon jug, and a 750-ml wine bottle. This was the second racking, so I added 0.7 grams of Kmeta. The specific gravity was 1.000 and the pH was 3.0. Mary and I tasted a bit of it. This batch has a very strong apple flavor.
    • Cherry - Fines were much smaller on the third racking of this wine. The resulting liquid filled a 6.5-gallon and a 5-gallon carboy, along with a 750-ml wine bottle. I went directly from carboys to carboys, without adding any additives. The specific gravity was 0.994 and the pH was 3.1. The 500 ml of leftover wine was our before supper treat. It was good, even for a young wine. It will get better with aging.
  • Mary spotted the first duck of the season. It was impossible to identify...a small, dark form against a dim sky.
  • She also heard a big tree fall in the southwest woods. The sound of it falling at first resembled firecrackers. A few seconds later she heard creaking and groaning, followed by a loud crash. We might have future firewood to seek out. It's not far from the west yard.

• Wednesday, 10/8: A Woolly Worm Army
  • This year's woolly worm numbers are huge. They're everywhere and it's hard not to accidentally step on them.
  • Mary and I washed a big amount of dishes, mainly because after racking two wines yesterday, I produced several dirty items.
  • I drove to Quincy to pick up three drug prescriptions. I also got a few other items.
  • Mary picked and froze more tomatoes. She started gallon bag number 14 in the freezer. Fifteen is the magic number of gallons we need for making enough salsa for a year, so we're almost there.
  • We watched the third Harry Potter movie.

• Thursday, 10/9: Purple Painting Property Lines & Picking Pears
  • During our predawn walk of Plato, we heard a white-throated sparrow for the first time this autumn. HERE is a link to their pretty song.
  • Last year we bought a gallon of what was supposed to be purple latex paint from Menards, but it turned out to be blue. I added several ounces of red paint to the can and turned it into purple color for painting our property borders. In Missouri, purple paint on tree trunks or fence posts indicates no trespassing to hunters.
  • Mary picked four cat litter buckets full of pears from the big Bartlett pear tree. Some were exceedingly big (see photo, below). Each bucket weighed about 20-25 pounds, so she brought about 80-100 pounds of pears into the house. She wrapped each pear in a piece of newspaper and put them in a chest of drawers at the top of the stairs landing, with the drawers partially open to release humidity.
  • I purple painted our property borders, starting on the south border running adjacent to the gravel road. Tomorrow is the start of a three-day early anterless deer hunting season. I won't be hunting, because the temperatures are too warm for adequately cooling venison meat. I had to stomp down emerging autumn olive saplings that grew next to our south fence line. I walked half of the west property line and only painted a couple trees with purple paint. Most old paint marks were perfect. A walk down the north property line showed excellent paint marks, so I didn't add any paint. The same was true down the east property line. 
  • I heard deer running away in two different instances during my march around the property.
  • I noticed that just a few feet west of our west field, our neighbor has a fresh salt block planted in front of a trail camera. We are a CWD (Chronic Wasting Disease) county, so salt blocks to attract deer are unlawful. Deer possessing CWD pass on the disease in saliva left behind in the soil under a salt block, so that's why they are outlawed. I might have to say something to the Lewis County Conservation Agent.
  • I scared up a wood duck at the east side of Wood Duck Pond. I never saw it, but heard the telltale call of a female wood duck flying away.
  • On the way home from the east property line, I cut through the woods and walked home via the trail to Wood Duck Pond. It's filled with weeds. I dropped by the blind I built last fall that's next to Wood Duck Pond. It looks to be in good shape and just needs a roof on top.

  

  A massive Bartlett pear dwarfs Mary's hand.
  

• Friday, 10/10: More Nice Rain
  • Bright lightning, followed by a thunder crash, woke both of us around 5 a.m., when we jumped out of bed and pulled the electric plugs on appliances. The thunderstorm gave us 0.41 inch of rain.
  • On a morning squirrel hunt, I shot one that at first peered at me from the northeast corner of the machine shed roof. It crawled into some small trees along the north side of the machine shed, where I got off an easy shot.
  • I gave Mary a haircut. She says it feels wonderful.
  • Some of the lilacs are blooming. Nature is whacked out, this year!
  • I heard four shots before darkness fell. They were all from down in the Troublesome Creek bottom, west of us. Today is the opening day of an early anterless deer season that ends on Sunday. 
  • We watched the fourth Harry Potter movie.

• Saturday, 10/11: Working On the Woodstove
  • A bunch of cardinals were eating ragweed seeds just outside of the living room's west window in the morning. We keep seeing more and more cardinals on this property.
  • Mary picked and froze more tomatoes. She finished filling the 15th gallon bag for the freezer, so we now have enough for salsa. She started on the 16th bag. Now we save tomatoes for wintertime soup-making.
  • I worked on the woodstove. First, I removed the stovepipe from the stove's exhaust flange, and then the outer casing, using the ratchet box wrenches that Mom gave me a few months ago to remove 10 nuts. Mary and I moved the outer casing to the machine shed, where I'll remove peeling paint on the back and paint it, tomorrow. I thought I'd have to order one or two grate support angle iron pieces, but they were fine. The defective part I found once I cleaned out ashes was a cracked and warped grate. 
  • I checked the woodstove stored in the first grain bin. It was in this house when we first moved here in 2009. I thought because Herman, Mary's uncle, owned it and probably abused it, that it was nearly shot. It's actually in better shape than our current stove, which we bought in 2011. Herman's old stove just has rust on the outer casing. I swapped one of the grates in Herman's old stove with the warped grate in this stove.
  • I removed two of the three nuts and bolts holding the brick retainer and swung it up to gain access to the firebricks. Two were cracked along the back of the stove. I replaced them with two I stored in the machine shed and replaced the nuts and bolts to the brick retainer. Several other nuts were loose, so I got Mary to help as we tightened all nuts. I swept hairy dust off internal parts that were out in the open now with the outer casing removed. I closed off the end of the stovepipe by tying a plastic grocery bag over it. I'll proceed with more woodstove work tomorrow.
  • We heard a number of barred owls while walking Plato at night.

• Sunday, 10/12: Big Pears & Repainting the Woodstove
  • When I walked to the east side of the machine shed to see if squirrels were in the pecan trees, a barred owl flew into the top of one of those trees. Three bluejays were instantly interested in harassing the owl and flew in to nip it, occasionally. A flock of noisy crows flew by to the north. After a bit, the barred owl moved to the cottonwood tree north of the machine shed and several crows started calling. I clapped real loud. The crows and bluejays flew away, leaving the owl in peace. 
  • I attached small wire brushes to the DeWalt cordless drill and removed rust and chipped paint from the woodstove's outer casing. For the first time in several months, I recharged the 20 volt batteries to those tools, and I use them almost every week. I used a natural hair paint brush and a clean cloth to remove dust, then spray painted these areas with flat black Rust-Oleum paint that's good to 2000°F. I touched up a couple places on the front with flat aluminum spray paint with the same temperature capability. The casing dried through the afternoon. Mary and I moved it back inside prior to sunset and put it over the woodstove's interior burner section.
  • Mary made flour tortillas and then venison fajitas. I picked a bowl of greens from our tubs. Mary included some ripe garden tomatoes. It was yummy!
  • Mary finished picking pears from the big Bartlett tree. She collected even bigger pears than when she picked them two days ago. I weighed the largest pear (see photo, below) and it weighed 1.21 pounds. The chest of drawers at the top of the stairs is full of pears wrapped in newspaper, as is an apple box. There are more pears on the tree, but we probably have enough. The Kieffer pear tree is also loaded with fruit that we haven't touched.
  • I put on old boots, rolled walnut husks off nuts that fell on our lane, and collected black walnuts. I got about two inches in the bottom of a milk crate.
  • We watched the film, The Sorcerer's Apprentice. 
  • While watching the movie, we shared a wonderful bottle of 2021 pear wine. After aging almost four years, this wine is super smooth and has a marvelous taste. It also has a deep golden color and a great aroma that fills the house the instant the bottle is opened.
  • Mary discovered that an early morning shooting in South Carolina where four people were killed involved folks who were celebrating at a popular bar who were alumni of Battery Creek High School, which is the school that Mary graduated from in South Carolina's Sea Islands. She's hoping that no one she knows was killed or injured.

  

  Our biggest pear picked today that weighed 1.21 pounds!