Progress in Paradise...

Progress in Paradise...  You may recall the Mormon horde that swept through our property two weeks ago, making massive brush piles from cleaned-up deadwood and brush, and ripping out almost a half mile of five-strand barbed wire fence.  In the interim Debbie and I cleaned up and burned all the smaller brush, but a good-sized stack of larger wood remained.  In between rainstorms last week, I sawed up about half of these logs.  This morning, I sawed up the rest of them.  The result is roughly a half cord of 18" logs.  Some of these need splitting, but otherwise it's all good firewood.

About three-quarters of the logs were black willow.  That wood burns hot and clean, but it's relatively soft.  The rest is box elder (a kind of maple), and that wood is hard – so hard that cutting it up made the chainsaw blade smokin' hot, and required quite a bit of physical effort to get the blade to “bite” into the wood.  There was one particular box elder log, about 20' long, that looks like it has been drying out for many years.  I'm going to save the pieces of that one for turning on my lathe.

Now I'm back in the house, recovering from the (substantial) physical exertion of all that sawing.  Plus, it's actually warm outside (about 80°), and that added to the physical impact.  I'm about to help my recovery along by eating some beef stew that my lovely bride just finished cooking.  As soon as she gets the gravy made, it's time to eat!  After I recover from eating that meal, we'll go load up all that wood in my pickup, and then stack it in the shed.  That's the last step to finishing up the work done two weeks ago by the Mormon horde...

Update (4:30 pm)...  All the wood has been moved and stacked.   It turned out to be more like 2/3 of a cord.  With that plus the additional half cord or so that my neighbor is giving me, I should be nice and toasty in my office all winter!

The beef stew was delicious, by the way.  You should have been here!  There are some leftovers, but they'll be gone long before any of you can get here :)

After all the hard work today, we decided that we felt like ice cream floats.  We just got back from a jaunt to Ridley's, where we got some Americana sodas and some Tillamook ice cream.  They're in the deep freeze now, and in an hour or so we're gonna have us a good old fashioned ice cream float!

Update (6:30 pm)...  Those ice cream floats (I had vanilla bean ice cream in black cherry soda) were every bit as good as we were hoping.  Yum!  Now for a walkie with  the doggies, and we're off to bed.  I suspect I'll sleep well tonight...

Robins in Paradise...

Robins in Paradise...  While we were sipping our tea and coffee on our balcony this morning, we noticed a pair of robins were frequently flying into a mostly-dead tree in our front yard.  This tree is on our project list to be replaced, but we won't be doing that for a while – there's a busy robin's nest there!  The photo at left below shows the nest, which is just over 6 feet off the ground.  That photo includes nearly the entire still-living tree.  The right photo shows the four chicks in the nest...

Paradisical Perambulations...

Paradisical Perambulations...  Debbie and I and the three dogs took a most pleasant walk up the road to our east this morning.  The day could hardly have been nicer: blue sky with a few puffy clouds, 68°, 30% humidity, and a light breeze from the south.  Lush green fields and pastures completely surrounded us.  The dogs bounded through an alfalfa field that's nearly ready to cut.  A few photos and a bounding video:

If Bernie Sanders didn't actually exist...

If Bernie Sanders didn't actually exist ... then right-wing comedians would have to invent him.  But ... he does exist!

An interesting failure...

An interesting failure...  Are we alone in the universe?

Progress in Paradise...

Progress in Paradise...  Yesterday was the first day that the lawn was dry enough to even think about mowing – and the grass was nearly 6" high on average.  The rains over the past 10 days really pushed the growth.  So I mowed the whole yard, which worked better than I was expecting – the mower never sank into the soil, and the blades never clogged up with wet grass (though I did eject a few truly magnificent grass blobs!).

After I finished mowing, we headed up to WalMart to buy fertilizer.  My brother Scott (aka Mr. Green Thumb) recommended Ironite, but the price of that (for our 3 acres of lawn) stopped me.  We went for this stuff instead, for a small fraction of the cost.  Strictly by the numbers, it should be good stuff, with nitrogen, potassium, and iron.  We'll see.  I spread 300 pounds of it yesterday afternoon in less than an hour, thanks to the tow-behind-the-mower fertilizer spreader I bought last year.  That thing works great!

While I was doing all that, Debbie went to work getting our balcony ready for use this season.  You can see the result in the photo at right, which I took just a few minutes ago (just after sunrise this morning).  The view is to the southwest, over the Little Bear River's bottom and into the Wellsville Mountains.  The little red cafe table you can just barely see comes with a couple of matching chairs, and there are four pots with roses and some other flowers.  This is a very pleasant spot to sit and enjoy our morning caffeinated beverage, or a glass of wine in the evening.  This morning we were visited by a hummingbird checking out the roses – and that immediately prompted us to order some hooks to hang hummingbird feeders off the balcony rail.  If we're lucky, we'll attract some orioles too.  We've seen a pair of Bullock's orioles along the irrigation canal on the south side of our property.  If we keep food out, maybe we'll attract some more, like we did in Jamul!