August 17-23, 2026

Weather | 8/17, p. cloudy, 63°, 81° | 8/18, cloudy, 63°, 81° | 8/19, cloudy, 1.89" rain, 69°, 80° | 8/20, p. cloudy, 63°, 80° | 8/21, sunny, 63°, 84° | 8/22, sunny, 62°, 80° | 8/23, sunny, 57°, 77° |

• Monday, 8/17: Canning Pickles & Removing Pickup Wiper Motor
  • Mary picked more cucumbers from the near garden. She then washed and prepared all of the cucumbers, except for a few that we ate in an evening salad.
  • Mary canned six quarts of pickles. All jars sealed perfectly.
  • She collected 12 worms and six worm eggs off the garden plants.
  • I drove to Lewistown and bought a package of 25 amp mini spade fuses.
  • I tore open the cowling under the wipers to gain access to the wiper motor. It's a drawn out exercise, but with the help of some YouTube videos, I knew appropriate steps required. An old battery cable puller that Dad owned worked perfectly for removing the wiper arms. The wiper motor wiring cannot be unplugged without first removing the entire wiper mechanism, called the wiper transmission...nice GM engineering!
  • Once I had the wiring disconnected, I turned on and off the wiper switch, then checked the new fuse. It didn't blow, which probably indicates a faulty wiper motor, not a short in the wire harness to the wiper motor. I then labeled all of my bolts, clips, and parts with masking tape, putting like parts into sandwich bags.
  • The missing plastic cowling puts a huge gap at the base of the pickup's windshield, so I moved three mothball bottles into that area. I also added two moth balls per plastic bottle stored in the pickup to dissuade mice from fooling around. I put two mothballs in the area under the air filter, which makes for a total of 66 new mothballs in plastic bottles in and under the pickup. It makes for a strong smelling truck, but helps to back up vermin.
  • In the evening, I ordered a new wiper motor for the pickup. Mary helped me find a new one that will be sent from New Jersey. It was through eBay and at half the price of those on the RockAuto website.
  • We haven't had the pickup's windshield washer for over a year, due to a leak. I looked into how to remove the windshield washer container in this pickup. It's a mess, because it's crammed under the battery tray on the inside of the driver's side front fender. To get to it, you first remove an engine compartment brace, the battery, the battery tray, the driver's front tire, and then that tire's plastic wheel well. Gee...could GM bury it any deeper in the vehicle? The windshield will stay dry a little longer.

   

• Tuesday, 8/18: Gun Scope Virtual Lesson
  • We took the day off from outside activities.
  • Our new air conditioner in the living room is significantly quieter compared to the one it replaced. We find it hard to tell when the compressor is on based on sound. It's also better at blowing cool air into the kitchen.
  • Mary found one worm and three hornworm eggs in the gardens.
  • I sorted and stored chicken feathers away in various ziplock bags. The chickens are molting, so now is the time to collect feathers for fly tying. Mary and I grab good ones as we see them in the chicken yard and store them in my rolltop desk. Today, when I rolled that top open, it looked like a chicken died on my desk.
  • I took in a Missouri Department of Conservation virtual session on how to install a gun scope and learned a great deal. I asked about the 30:30 rifle with the shorter barrel I own. It seems to make no difference after making scope adjustments on target results. It might be because I'm sighting it in at distances shorter than 100 yards, when scope adjustments need to be multiplied several fold. A scope I thought was bad probably is just fine. I've harvested several deer with that rifle and scope.
  • An email came in related to the new wiper motor I ordered for the pickup. It's not coming from New Jersey. Instead, it's originating from China. This probably means getting tags for the pickup will be late...after the end of this month.

   

• Wednesday, 8/19: Bookshelf as Cat Litter Box
  • I put a piece of quarter-inch plywood across a lower bookshelf in the sunroom. I made the bookshelf unit out of particle board when we lived in Circle, MT. The bottom shelf got wet a few years ago prior to when we fixed the roof of this house. Mary pulled all books off and never put them back, since the wood particles in that board expanded. Gandalf, who is sometimes an ass of a cat, decided that it made a good alternative for a cat litter box. The board received multiple layers of cleaning fluids. Recently, Cooper started eating cat pooh left there. Why do dogs love to eat cat feces? I found a chunk of plywood in the machine shed with the exact height between shelving boards and cut it down to the four-foot width, then screwed it into place over the outer edges of the shelving. Nothing is getting in there, now!
  • Mary vacuumed the refrigerator coils. Our old fridge gets loud while the compressor is running when it's dirty. After sucking dust and pet hair out of the coils, it sounds normal.
  • I mowed the lane.
  • Mary performed her daily worm/egg patrol and found a handful of tiny worms. 
  • Mary spotted where the electric company sprayed under the electric line that runs to our house. They did a better job this year of not bothering our hazelnut bushes. In past years, they sprayed some of those bushes, which have since recovered. 
  • Around 9 p.m., a heavy rain fell after a couple intense cracks of thunder from a thunderstorm. After about 40 minutes of rain, we got almost two inches of moisture.

   

• Thursday, 8/20: Quiet Times
  • Mary and I were bums and stayed inside a bulk of today, enjoying my homemade waffles with fresh strawberries as our midday meal. After last night's big rain, grass was way too wet to attempt any mowing.
  • Mary noticed the first goldenrod blooming just east of our lane. It's our initial indication of autumn and cooler temperatures.
  • When I took Cooper on his late afternoon walk to check the mail, his nose took him under the Sargent crabapple tree, where he found a snake skin hanging on lower branches (see photos, below). Mary says it's from a western rat snake. It's exactly five feet long. Online research tells us they eat mice, voles, rats and full-grown squirrels. They obviously climb trees. They are non-venomous.
  • I finished reading Alexander Kent's 26th novel, Man of War, and started the 27th book, Heart of Oak.

Cooper found this snake skin on the Sargent tree.

Me with the skin that is five feet long.

 
• Friday, 8/21: Even 84° Seems Hot
  • When I looked at the package tracking from Yun Express of the wiper motor that I ordered, I noticed for the first time that it's not shipping from China, but it's coming from the U.S. east coast and departed Glendale Heights, IL, a Chicago suburb, yesterday.
  • I removed the pickup's wiper motor from the wiper motor transmission. It was a quick job. I also took a garden hose and scrub brush to the plastic cowling that sits below the wiper arms.
  • I raked up dead grass on the lane in front of the house just before a 50 pound bag of oatmeal arrived via FedEx. We're ordering 50 pounds of oatmeal every 2.5 months from Webstaurant.com.
  • Mary moved the onions that finished drying in the upstairs south bedroom. All of this year's onions and shallots are in two milk crates in the back porch closet.
  • Mary picked a half of a plastic grocery sack of hot and bell peppers and a bag of cucumbers. 
  • At 84°, it's feeling too hot outside. We can't stand the heat as we're getting older. It's probably due to the high humidity.
  • We're seeing more monarch butterflies all of the time. Mary says it's the most we've seen since 2009.
  • We watched two movies. The first was the third session of the 2002 British TV series, Foyle's War and the second film was White House Down (2013).

   

• Saturday, 8/22: Google Tour of Former Residences
  • When we opened the chicken door to the coop this morning, a Rhode Island red hen walked down the ramp, collapsed on the ground and died. It's the last of that breed that we bought in 2020.
  • Our chicks aren't chicks anymore. They're almost the size of our full-grown hens.
  • The wiper motor I ordered reached the U.S. Postal Service's St. Louis distribution center and we should see it by Monday.
  • Mary heard some Canada geese calls for the first time since May 5th.
  • The far garden is full of small frogs.
  • I started reading the book written by Christopher Ingraham entitled If You Lived Here You'd be Home by Now. He wrote an article in the Washington Post that the worst place to live in the U.S. was Red Lake Falls, MN. That town invited him to visit. He did and moved his family from D.C. to Red Lake Falls.
  • Mary and I took a Google Maps tour of Red Lake Falls, then Roseau, MN, then Circle, MT and looked at images of places where we once lived. The old house we rented in Red Lake Falls is gone. Grain bins were added to the land where our mobile home once sat northwest of Roseau. We were startled by the absence of trees outside of Roseau. Farmers have cleared a lot of land of trees. We also looked at Circle's changes since we lived there.

   

• Sunday, 8/23: Taking Out Weeds
  • Mary picked more cucumbers and reported that some of those plants are dying back.
  • She took a photo of a tiny gray tree frog that was on a persimmon leaf near the far garden (see photo, below).
  • I put the steel blade on the Stihl trimmer and whacked down tall horse weeds in the east lawn between the house and the lane. I also got tall weeds south of the house. Then I took out about a third of the gangly sweet clover in the south orchard. Finally, I used a pitch fork to remove the weed mess and toss it to the east edge of the south orchard.
  • I enjoyed reading Christopher Ingraham's book this evening about moving from Baltimore to Red Lake Falls, MN. He had a four-hour roundtrip commute from his home in Baltimore to his job at the Washington Post in D.C. He was so impressed with the friendly people in Red Lake Falls that he decided to move his family there and work remotely. Their new home was down in the river bottom, not that far away from where we once lived in Red Lake Falls. In digging around online, Mary discovered he had a cancer health scare at age 42, is fully recovered, and moved to New York state, to be near family. He's a good writer and is no longer with the Washington Post.

  

  A small gray tree frog on a persimmon leaf.

  
   

August 10-16, 2026

Weather | 8/10, p. cloudy, 73°, 89° | 8/11, p. cloudy, 74°, 91° | 8/12, 0.16" rain, 73°, 83° | 8/13, cloudy to sunny, 72°, 87° | 8/14, cloudy, 72°, 83° | 8/15, 0.70" rain, 72°, 87° | 8/16, 0.65" rain, 73°, 80° |

• Monday, 8/10: Chicken Feathers & Baked Bread
  • Today was another day of hot and swimmingly humid conditions outside, so we stayed inside for most of the day. At least we aren't getting as hot as some weather websites announce as our high temperatures. I saw the Weather Channel listing us at 91°, when we were in the upper 80s. I think they get Lewistown's temperatures from some low-lying town filled with asphalt and concrete, such as Quincy or Hannibal. Our greenery keeps us a little cooler in the summer.
  • Mary baked four loaves of bread, putting an amazing aroma throughout the house.
  • I stored away several chicken feathers. The hens are molting, so every evening while putting chickens to bed, we collect nice-looking feathers. They get dumped into my roll-top desk. I store them in labeled ziplock bags according to how I'll use them for tying flies. For instance, some will resemble bug wings. Large wing feathers become bug bodies or tails. I also sort them according to color and size. 
  • Mary and I watered gardens. Abundant grass mulch is keeping the ground around garden plants moist during this high heat cycle, so all plants look great.
  • Mary found 22 hornworm eggs and one hornworm.
  • Cooper loves chasing bunnies every evening when he's with me as I dump water used to clean chicken waterers around south orchard trees.
  • I reviewed mouse issues related to our vintage of pickup by viewing videos online. Mice get into the cabs of these GMC and Chevy trucks by entering drainage spots on each side of air inlet grill panel under the wiper blades. A solution is to cover these areas with quarter-inch hardware cloth held by self-tapping screws with washers. Cleaning mouse nests out of air ducts in the dash is quite a disassembling ordeal.

   

• Tuesday, 8/11: Cooper, The Bird Dog
  • We've got horrible humidity and heat, so it was another day inside.
  • I assembled a two month to-do list.
  • I put away more chicken feathers. 
  • We watered gardens in the evening. Mary found nine hornworm eggs. She noticed that she needs to pick cucumbers.
  • Cooper is a bird dog. On our daily evening visit to the south orchard for me to dump dirty water after washing chicken waterers and for Cooper to look for bunnies, he spotted a dove on the electrical power line and gave it the hairy eyeball. Past dogs in our lives ignore birds perched high on power lines, but not Cooper. He takes in everything.
  • On our nightly outing for Cooper's final walk, we spotted two Perseid meteors in the matter of a couple minutes. Tomorrow is the height of that meteor shower.

   

• Wednesday, 8/12: Replaced Pickup Parts
  • Right after morning chores and fixing breakfast, a thunderstorm came through, giving us a nice bit of rain that meant we didn't need to water garden plants today.
  • UPS delivered an order from Rockauto, if you call dumping a cardboard box onto wet poison ivy plants under our mailbox delivering a package. Our UPS driver is lazy!
  • I replaced the wiper blades and the blower fan on our pickup. Once I removed the old blower, I discovered about a dozen pecan nuts inside the squirrel cage fan...no wonder the fan made such a racket! The fan's motor had an obvious looseness. It was made by Continental, which is more of an economy part. The new GM Genuine fan is built bulkier and feels tight when you spin it. Once installed, it is whisper quiet through all of the five settings. Unfortunately, it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't spin. So, I still need to order a blower motor control module/resistor. Based on the records I keep on a card in the glove box, the wiper blades are six years old and the blower motor is five years old.
  • Mary picked a plastic shopping bag of cucumbers about six hot peppers from the garden.
  • She also found four worms in the garden. One was a hornworm. She removed 14 hornworm eggs.
  • Mary's Merlin app on her phone identified the call of a Bewick's (pronounced buick) wren in our yard. It's not supposed to be here, but we've occasionally noticed it here in the spring. She produced the Merlin app to identify an unfamiliar bird call, which turned out to be that of a Carolina wren. It turns out Carolina wrens possess all kinds vocabulary. She also noticed the sound of a yellow-breasted chat, according to the Merlin app.

   

• Thursday, 8/13: Onions Harvested & Work on the Pickup
  • Mary harvested the rest of the onions and shallots. There were a bunch of bigger ones.
  • She picked nine hornworm eggs and three worms off the tomato, tomatillo and pepper plants. Two of the worms were hornworms eating on the hot pepper plants.
  • A couple days ago while looking at the crack in the pickup's windshield, I noticed a bumpy surface. It's sap coming out of a black walnut tree above the truck. Today I noticed that black mold is growing on that sap, so I washed the entire pickup and moved it to a nearby parking spot. The old white wash rag I used turned pitch black, as did the water. The pickup is shiny, now.
  • I cleaned out the air vents in the cab with a small winemaking brush I have that's usually used for cleaning out the inside of tubing. Afterwards, I cleaned the brush with bleach so I could use it again.
  • I tried adding air conditioning refrigerant to the pickup for several minutes in full sun with a running engine blowing heat on my face. Nothing seemed to transfer. Online searches revealed that newer refrigerant cans use a self-sealing technology, which requires a different type of refrigerant transfer connection and hose. I need to buy a new setup.
  • I fixed the crack in the windshield. After carefully reading of the directions, I realized that the package's wording that it handles a "1 1/4" hole or crack" meant it can cover one nick that's a quarter inch in size, not 1.25 inches in size. So, I didn't follow their directions to cover my crack that's a half circle and covers about 1.25 inches. Instead, I put a small amount of resin on the crack, covered it with clear plastic, and used the UV flashlight to harden the resin, instead of the directions suggesting sitting it in the sun. It worked. Mary says the crack is much less visible. I'll see of it passes a vehicle inspection. If not, we'll need to get a new windshield. At least I tried.
  • A quick check of the horn, which I never use, failed to make a sound. I checked the horn's fuse. The 15 amp fuse seemed to have corrosion. Above it in the fuse box was another 15 amp fuse for fog lights. Our pickup is without fog lights, so I swapped fuses and now have a horn.

   

• Friday, 8/14: Cooler But Muggy!
  • We have slightly lower temperatures, but extremely high humidity, so the end result is it still feels horrible while doing anything outside. With this humidity, it felt like storm-producing weather all day.
  • Mary picked 11 hornworm eggs and seven worms from garden plants.
  • On the trip to the mailbox, I noticed brown leaves on saplings due to the electric company spraying under the power lines that are in the right-of-way along the gravel road. Unlike past years, there is no evidence of spraying on our property, which is just fine with us.
  • We watched the second installment of the 2002 British TV series, Foyle's War and the 1989 film, Field of Dreams.
  • On Cooper's last outing, we stayed in the yard, due to lightning and thunder close by.

   

• Saturday, 8/15: New Large Window AC
  • When I opened a new container of blood glucose test strips this morning, I realized that they were the wrong variety and didn't fit my glucometer.
  • Our largest air conditioner's compressor quit operating correctly. I turned it off twice, and got it running, but the compressor turns off eventually. I shopped online for the best price, which is Menards, where we purchased our current 8000 btu unit in May, 2019.
  • While I drove to Quincy, Mary cleaned our fans.
  • She also picked about two-thirds of a plastic grocery bag of cucumbers. It's time to make pickles. We had a cucumber salad as part of our evening meal...YUM!
  • Mary found nine hornworm eggs, a tiny hornworm, and an army worm.
  • I bought a new 8000 btu air conditioner in Quincy that was on sale, some auto AC refrigerant (on sale, too), a modern automotive AC recharge hose with a gauge, the correct test strips to match my glucometer, plus dog, cat, hen, and chick foods. It was hot and sunny in Quincy. Look to the west and I could see it was cloudy back at home, therefore cooler.
  • When I returned home, The living room AC was just blowing warm air, even though Mary said the compressor was on the entire time I was gone. We just used our big fan in the living room this evening with the two small ACs on upstairs.
  • Mary and I shared a bottle of 2023 pumpkin wine. I left this wine on the lees too long when I made it, so it's a tough wine to drink. It goes down after you swallow it with a clunk! Plus, it has an alcohol content close to 13 percent, so it's a bit harsh. We're trying to use it up, because it is stored with poor corks. We'll just soldier through!

   

• Sunday, 8/16: Air Conditioning Work
  • The early morning hours were filled with thunderstorms. A 1:30 a.m. storm with a brief bout of thunder woke Mary. She unplugged appliances and plugged them back in when it all quit. Then at 3:30 a.m., we both woke to a crack of thunder directly overhead and pulled the plugs, again. There was another thunderstorm at noon and rain in the afternoon. Mary found a tiny bit of hail damage in the tomato plants. She thinks it was from the 3:30 storm.
  • I mentioned this morning that I haven't seen deer for several days. Just moments later, a doe and two fawns with fading spots appeared near the east end of the near garden. They walked through the base of the cedars south of the garden. We saw the doe a bit later on. It was on our lane. 
  • I installed a can of refrigerant into the pickup's air conditioning system. The new recharge hose worked perfectly and now cold air blasts out of the ducts. Mary and I did a check of all lights, which were fine. However, I discovered we have no wipers. The wiper fuse was blown. I put a a second fuse in and it instantly blew. I'll need to track down the problem and fix it before I can take the pickup in for an inspection prior to getting plate tags. They always check to see if the wipers work.
  • Online research revealed that a circuit board involved with the wiper motor located just under the plastic cowling under the wipers gets affected by the elements and is notorious for going bad and shorting out on 2002 to 2005 GMC and Chevy pickups. That might be our problem. 
  • Mary helped me swap out the air conditioners in the living room. The new 8000 btu AC is more compact and considerably quieter. It's good to be back with air conditioned coolness on the first floor of our home.
  • Mary found 13 hornworm eggs and nine worms. Most of the worms were in the hot pepper plants and some were large. 

August 3-9, 2026

Weather | 8/3, sunny, 60°, 84° | 8/4, sunny, 63°, 87° | 8/5, 0.56" rain, 69°, 74° | 8/6, 0.08" rain to sunny, 67°, 75° | 8/7, sunny, 66°, 85° | 8/8, hazy, 68°, 85° | 8/9, hazy, 70°, 87° |

• Monday, 8/3: Long Line at the License Bureau
  • Bill left for his St. Charles apartment around 1 p.m.
  • Before leaving our county, Bill drove to our county seat of Monticello to get his driver's license. All licensing offices have Monday through Friday hours similar to when he works, plus long wait times in St. Louis, so he thought it best to try his luck here. When he arrived in the Monticello office, there were 11 people waiting in front of him. I've never witnessed that many people in that tiny office! He was done and leaving for home at 3:30 p.m., which was an extremely long wait period. But, he got his renewed driver's license. 
  • Mary turned the hay she cut yesterday in the front lawn. It's looking good.
  • I finished draining the solar generator to 60 percent by trying it out on the refrigerator. The manual suggests to fully charge it, then drain the charge to 60 percent for long-term storage. I linked it to our wifi modem and downloaded the latest firmware update. With that update came an improved link from my cell phone to the unit. I also changed some settings on the unit.
  • I investigated linking the two solar panels in parallel, compared to in a series and learned that one needs a fuse on the positive side after each panel. Otherwise, a panel can turn to toast. Additional cables are needed for the parallel connection. I decided against using that type of a connection.
  • Mary put extra hay into the chicken coop.
  • While adding new bags of feed to the chicken coop, we discovered a young white cockerel escape artist outside of the chicken fence. We got him into the coop, then searched the fences for a possible hole. We noticed an area at the bottom of the east side of the north chicken yard where the chicken wire fencing was lifted up. We figured that some cement blocks or bricks could block that hole until I do a major fence reconstruction.

   

• Tuesday, 8/4: Missouri Primary Election Day
  • While Mary fed and watered chickens this morning, I moved eight bricks and put them in spots in the east fence of the north chicken yard where the bottom of chicken wire curled upward. When I went to leave, I watched a white cockerel on a low cedar branch that reaches out into the yard. It was hopping up the branch and was only a few inches away from leaping down over the edge of the fence to the other side. I chased him off the branch, then got my Stihl pruning saw and cut off four cedar branches that chickens might climb on. I threw them beyond the north end of the chicken yard...enough of that nonsense!
  • We did some voting research online, then drove to Lewistown and voted in the Missouri primary. The governor put two measures on the primary ballet with the intention that a lower voter turnout might allow them to pass. One was to halt the state income tax and allow legislators to boost sales taxes as they see fit, which might result in up to 16 percent in sales taxes. Another was a way to restrict voters' ability to admen the state constitution. Mary and I wanted to make sure and vote no on both of these measures, which we did.
  • I finished weedwhacking under the electric fence of the near garden. It was super humid outside, especially in the late afternoon.
  • Mary picked up the new hay that she cut and was drying for two days. She stored it in the second grain bin.
  • She also harvested a handful of white wing onions that had flopped over.
  • I heard, but didn't see, two birds that were flying overhead. They were making a loud, raspy sound. They turned out to be two great egrets. Verification came from Mary's Merlin app on her phone.
  • Thunderstorms developed to our northwest and went by just five miles north of us this evening.
  • Election results told us this evening that those two measures that we voted against failed miserably. The income tax to sales tax measure vote was 84 percent against versus 16 percent for it. The other measure failed, also. We learned that Greg Sharpe won the Republican side of our state senate race. That's good. The other two losing candidates filled our mailbox with cards telling us how rotten Sharpe and each other were. Sharpe never stooped to their level of throwing rotten eggs and he won...good for him!

   

• Wednesday, 8/5: Rainy Day
  • The ass who flies a crop dusting airplane from the dairy's airport a mile west of us buzzed over our house early in the morning. He was spraying a nearby field with huge black thunderstorm clouds rolling in from the west. Minutes later, we received a big rain, which wiped out any spray he put down. Following herbicide directions is not part of his agenda.
  • We experienced rain throughout the day.
  • Mary saw a juvenile red-headed woodpecker on the power pole just outside the north window.
  • She cross stitched on the Red Fox Profile pattern.
  • I practiced fly tying skills demonstrated on intheriffle YouTube videos. One video detailed tying on goose and turkey biots. A biot is the fiber on the leading or shorter edge of a wing feather. We have both turkey and goose wing feathers, so I have free biots collected from wild birds. Biots are usually used to resemble insect tails.
  • I finished reading the 25th Alexander Kent novel, Relentless Pursuit.
  • Prior to bedtime, we kept hearing thunder to the southwest. Looking online, the nearest thunderstorm was at Shelbyville, which is 27 miles away. That's quite a distance away to be hearing thunder. On our last outdoor walk, the humidity level was extremely high.

   

• Thursday, 8/6: Dusting Books & Weed Whacking
  • Mary dusted all of the books and bookshelves in the living room.
  • I weed whacked under the far garden electric fence. It involved two sessions and always takes a few hours, due to the large size of that garden. The electric fencer unit is still not going to the top. I suspect it's because of mud plastered from the trimmer onto fence insulators that are grounding out wires. I'll work on fixing that issue, tomorrow.
  • I took in a Missouri Department of Conservation black bear webinar. Surprisingly, on a  map showing recent black bear sightings, our Lewis County is included. Black bears are mainly in the southern third of Missouri, moving up from Arkansas, where they once were transplanted from Minnesota.
  • Mary stitched on her red fox pattern for about an hour.

   

• Friday, 8/7: Electric Fence Short
  • I spent most of the day investigating electric fence issues. By isolating sections of the fencing, I discovered that the short wasn't at the fencer unit or around the near garden. Large amounts of dried dirt and dead grass accumulated in the lower insulators on all posts of the far garden from yesterday's weed whacking, so I took a whisk broom to them. I switched two inch diameter PVC pipe used to insulate tops of rebar posts with pieces of garden hose. The PVC pipe often blew off in the wind. I think pieces of half inch hose will stay on the rebar. I still had a low reading at the fencer unit. Mary joined me as we went around all fences. She dusted more dirt from lower fence insulators. Still no change. I turned on the fencer while Mary was between gardens and she heard a snapping noise. A bit of bare wire of the piece feeding the far garden from the near garden was shorting out on the wire connecting an insulator to the metal post at the southeast corner of the near garden. I rerouted that connecting wire, giving me full strength at the fencer unit.
  • Humidity levels are high. A few minutes outside and you're dripping.
  • Retrieving a ball is more important than food, according to Cooper. After a late afternoon walk, I grabbed the ball and even though cats were eating and food was waiting in his bowl, he was eager to go right back outside to chase and retrieve the ball. He's now getting to where he watches for it in the sky and catches it either while the ball is coming down, or on the first bounce.
  • We watched two movies. The first was the initial show of a British period drama called Foyle's War (2002), depicting a police detective in 1940 wartime England. It's very good. The second movie was Ticket to Paradise (2022). We liked it...critics didn't...patooyee on the critics!

   

• Saturday, 8/8: Onion & Apple Harvest
  • Mary harvested 80 percent of the onions. Their tops were bent over and ready, even though several of the bulbs were small. High heat of earlier days curtailed onion bulb growth, plus we'll soon experience more hot days. After cutting off tops, she laid the onions out on plastic in the upstairs south-facing bedroom we call the "room of requirement," temporarily named the "room of onions." The smell coming from that room reminds us of eating homemade hamburgers.
  • Mary emptied a 40-pound bag of sunflowers into three cat liter buckets, which are stored in the chicken coop. Hens get a few handfuls every morning and evening, a trick that makes it a cinch in putting them to bed in the evening.
  • Mary also cleaned up giant ragweeds that were growing just outside of the living room air conditioner.
  • She watered both gardens and found the start of hornworm eggs on various garden plants. Mary killed four army worms and a cabbage worm.
  • There are three-inch cucumbers growing in the cucumber patch.
  • I harvested all of the Empire apples. It didn't take long. We're lucky to get anything after a morning of 3° back in March when buds were developing. That temperature completely wiped out this year's pear crop. I picked 19 apples that weren't drilled with holes from woodpeckers. Since the apple crop was so low, I didn't spray apple trees for bugs this year. Several apples got wormy, which attracted woodpeckers. They did in about two-thirds of the Empire apples. I picked all woodpeckered apples and tossed them into the woods.
  • I chopped up the good apples, put them through the food processor and made 16 sandwich baggies of what Mary calls apple slush. Each baggie holds about five tablespoons of apple slush that we freeze. When winter storms prevent us from buying Granny Smith apples that we like putting on breakfast oatmeal, we grab an apple slush baggie per bowl of oatmeal to use instead of the real thing. It tastes great and makes for an easy way to preserve apples.
  • Cooper watched each section of apple core drop from the paring knife into a bucket on the floor in front of the kitchen countertop. He snarfed an occasional "oops" moment when an apple piece slipped off the counter and onto the floor...sometimes on purpose. He intensely studied the apple processing.
  • I started reading three books. One was Alexander Kent's 26th novel, Man of War. I read that his last books are not as good as earlier writings...predictable with similar themes as in earlier books. Hence, the reason to read something else at the same time. The other two books are The Finest Hours, by Michael J. Tougias, about a Coast Guard sea rescue in New England, and Where the Pools Are Bright and Deep, by Dana S. Lamb, featuring fly fishing essays.

   

• Sunday, 8/9: Ordered Trees & Pickup Parts
  • We are under a heat advisory until Wednesday, so we're staying inside as much as possible.
  • I balanced the checkbook after two months of neglect. It balanced to the penny.
  • We received word that Fedco now has Porter's Perfection apple trees, so I ordered two trees. We really like this variety, but unfortunately, our Porter's tree died this spring after winds snapped off the tap root. When we get the new trees next spring, we'll plant them in the south orchard, which is better protected from strong westerly winds. 
  • Mary watered gardens and picked worms and worm eggs. She found two small hornworms and three worm eggs.
  • I ordered a new blower motor and wiper blades for our pickup. We cannot turn the fan speed beyond setting two without it sounding like a howling banshee. I purchased a GM Genuine fan motor, even though it was twice the price of other motors. It's a part replaced in 2021 and has run poorly for over a year. The old fan motor was new when we bought the pickup in 2020. Obviously, cheap fan motors aren't lasting very long, hence the reason for the more expensive model.
  • Late at night, we tuned into Max Velocity on YouTube with live coverage of tornadoes touching down in Illinois, near where Mary once lived near Grand Ridge, north of Streator. One tornado moved in a 360-degree circle and then disappeared, which is an oddity.