Feeding before the storm

It’s been a vicious storm of a day for my great state. There were two things I absolutely had to get done: feed the girls, and get some grass knocked down back in the beeyard. Today, I’m pleased to say, I did both, ahead of the massive storm system that hammered down on us and knocked us offline twice (the latter is not especially difficult to do with our provider).

If you want a very quick glimpse at the beeyard, this is the video for you! As it was cloudy and nasty, most of the bees were at home, and some really did not appreciate the vibrations of the tractor as I mowed the yard (and even less so when I drove past their front doors).

Note: there is a fairly loud tractor noise here, so keep that in mind if you don’t want to make your eardrums explode from the sudden cacophony.

Until next time, peeps: be well.

Chores

One of the most time consuming chores I have is mowing the property. We’re sitting on a bit over four acres, and probably one acre of that is taken up by the house, the gardens, and the well area (the pump, the aeration tank.  We also have about a quarter acre at the rear of the property that we left as is: it’s filled with trees, wild muscadine grapes, blackberry bushes, a small depression someone dug out at one point for reasons known only to them, and so forth. There is a small circular path at the front edge of it that I try to mow, but generally, that area is flooded when it rains, so I have to wait for dry weather on that.

We broke our streak of 15 straight days of rain – thanks, Mother Nature! – and I was able to get some mowing in today. I managed to get everything done except the beeyard done on one tank. This is what I had left in the tank as I finished up the chicken yard and the area behind the rear garden.

I was cutting (ha!) it close, but got back to the shed. As I neared the end of the mowing, I felt the breeze pick up, which was good, because it was another sweltering day at the ranch. I also saw the clouds starting to build up.

Now, I don’t mind meteorologists. I don’t. But it seems to be the only job you can be so wrong at and still keep your job. Let’s take my area as an example. When I was getting breakfast down the tube, our forecast said 20% chance of rain. When I came in after three hours of mowing, it had changed to 40%. I mention these two because this is what I saw on the radar when I made it back inside.

See that 90 about center, a little right? That’s my weather station. See all that angry red, orange, and green? That’s a front, across the entire northern part of this state. It does not take a meteorologist to get the wind direction (ours from the NNW as that was captured) and understand this thing was going to roll over us, bringing us more rain. And that’s what it did: pushed right over the ranch, with not a ton of lightning and thunder, but certainly with rain.

That big green/yellow blob at the NW part of that image is now coming our way, as the wind has shifted.

Our forecast – as it was raining – changed to 90% chance of rain. It is now back at 60%. I’m wondering if, in meteorology classes, they had lessons on changing your forecasts to get in tune with what was actually happening at the location for which you were doing forecasts. Do they have a Revisionist History class for the meteorological degree folks?

I’m just kidding, of course. It’s a tough job to really, accurately predict what Mother Nature is going to do with us mere humans on a daily basis. But I could save them some time, and they could copy pasta this forecast for Florida, then hit the pool or beach with a tasty beverage in hand: “Becoming partly cloudy, with afternoon thunderstorms. Highs in the low to mid-90s, lows in the 70s.”

On that note, it’s time for me to get some work work done. The life of a person whose business is in tech: the weekends, at least parts of them, have to be given over to work to get stuff done.

Until next time, peeps: be well.

 

 

Chicken prep

It’s been years since we had chickens at the ranch. When we did, we only had layers (not meat) birds. My mom was quite fond of them, and rejected my suggestion of culling the layers who had passed their prime and were not giving much production as they aged.

We lost one to a hawk or other aerial hunter – all that was left was a pile of feathers. We had one killed by a raccoon – raccoons apparently love brains, just like zombies, and one had ripped the head off one of the chickens as they stuck their head through the fence. Did I mention chickens are not terribly bright?

Of the others, one was lost to a mystery ailment, and the rest to redneck neighbor guy’s dogs. I had to dispatch the ill one and one of the chickens that had been attacked by (but not killed) by said dogs. I buried all of them on the property. Since the last one died, we’ve not had chickens back.

Moving out of the past and to the now: we are going to have chickens once again! This time, however, we are going to have meat birds in addition to layers. I ordered 10 meat birds. Because members of my family are too squeamish to  participate in the actual butchering, that part of the process will be mine, alone. However, once the birds are dispatched, plucked, eviscerated, and washed, they’re perfectly willing to bag and weigh them before the dressed birds go into the freezer. That’s good enough for me.

I was making a list of all the things that need to be done, and there certainly are a lot of things on that list. But next week is clear of any appointments for me and the dogs, so we’ll be able to get it done, no doubt. And there will be pictures!

Until next time, peeps: be well.

The eyes are the window to the soul

Except when you’ve had something hit you in the eye. Then, the eye is a painful window to the soul – or should that be a “paneful” window? Yuk yuk.

Fortunately, it was just something that smacked me in the eye at some point that I don’t even remember. Went to the doc, and got some drops that cleared it right up. Protect your eyes, folks – wear your safety glasses when mowing or doing anything that has the potential to whack you in the eyes.

Until next time, peeps: be well.

 

Stung

I mentioned previously that I was working on editing a video of the last hive inspections I was doing. That still isn’t finished, but it is still in progress and not abandoned.

Until then, I present to you this: yes, you can and probably will get stung even if you’re in a bee suit. On the upside, once you’ve been stung x number of times, your body will likely be used to it and after the initial sting – which, to me, still hurts for a second – it might not even swell any longer, as with these I got while doing the inspections: four each on and around the knee, and four on the upper arm. The mosquito bite on my forearm I got the other day while weeding itches more than the stings did at all. Unlike [nerd alert!] some people, I lost none of my strength or abilities after taking the stings.

The knee – and if bee venom therapy really works, I should never have arthritis in this knee. Ever.

Three of four on the upper arm. I have to say the inside of the bicep tends to be the most painful, initially. And I say this after having taken about five over the years to that same area, mainly from accidentally crushing a bee that has landed there when I bring my arm back close to my body. The fourth sting is not visible; one of the girls got me on the tricep.

It’s a good thing the bees produce useful things.

Until next time, peeps: be well.

When editors retire

And can’t quite leave their job behind. At least that’s what I’m assuming based on the pages of David Drake’s Servant of the Dragon paperback that mom and the younger bro brought back when they went to drop stuff off at the thrift store as we declutter some things around the homestead.

Now, I will not be reading this book; I’ve read some of Drake’s military SF in the past – the Hammer’s Slammers series, if you know of them – but I couldn’t get into others, for whatever reason.

So why am I talking about this book?

This is why.

The entire book is marked up this way, with pointers to pages where the current POV (point of view) character’s tale picks up again, to underlines of “like”, to the “red” markings for past tense verbs.  From time to time, I’d find a notation of “M=x” at the top of a page. It wasn’t until I happened on the third one that I realized the Nameless Editor was counting the number of times Drake used the word “mumurred”. It just so happens that this word also counts as a “red”, ending as it does in “red”. The Nameless Editor also found instances of “red” backwards – appearing as “der” in a word – and alliterative sentences

the marking for one of which looked like something from The Lord of the Rings:

Nameless Editor also picked up continuity errors:

Nameless Editor also noted repeated word use on a single page. Fittingly, this one tied into the “red” obsession, being another color.

He – I’m assuming Nameless Editor is a he – made notes of other repeated usage, like a character’s quarterstaff being “seven feet long” and another “tall thing” being seven feet tall:

He also inserted some commentary about where young, giggling girls should be put in relation to the book.

I’ll comment here and note that page 613 isn’t a page: it’s the inside of the back cover. Nameless Editor has a sense of humor.

After going through the entire book, Nameless Editor had this to say:

I’m not wading through the verify that count, but based on the number of pages that have been marked in some fashion, I’m guessing it’s pretty accurate.

I have no idea who Nameless Editor is, but he surely amused me by doing this.

Until next time, peeps: be well.

 

 

 

Habit

I’ve tried a couple of times this year to post to the blog daily. It hasn’t always worked out, mainly because I didn’t put it too high on the priority list. That goes for my writing, too. That’s changing, though. This stuff needs to become a habit in the same way the other things I do are habits, and like some upcoming things (that I’ll details later) will be.

So here we are, trailing toward the end of the day, and here’s a post. Maybe it will just be a picture.  Maybe it will just be text. Maybe it will be a combination of the two.

I’m editing a video of part of the hive inspections I did Friday and Saturday, and hopefully I’ll get that done before I completely run out of gas here tonight.

For now, I’ll sign off with this bit of brilliance, courtesy of Mother Nature.

Rainbow over the ranch, July 1, 2018.

Until next time, peeps: be well.

 

 

Time

Where does the time go?

I’d like to think it takes itself off for a nice vacation, doing whatever it wants to do instead of being constrained by responsibility.

Whatever it does, it has the habit of leaving us – arbitrary timekeepers that we are – wondering how it could be almost x time since we last did y. Like almost three weeks since the last blog entry.

Truth be told, I hadn’t been feeling all that well since that sinus infection back in May. Feeling nauseated almost constantly is not conducive to doing a lot of the things you normally would do. Pain? Meh, you could work through that in some fashion. But nausea? Nope. I was also having hot flashes like crazy. Terribly annoying.

Which is a roundabout way of saying the gardens suffered tremendously: overrun with weeds, beaten down by both the heat and the rain. We got some tomatoes out, but none of the big guys, and we got some beans and peppers out, but not in the quantity we have had in years past.

Colorful tomatoes: sweet million, sungold, indigo drops.

The people who ate these tell me they tasted fantastic.

The rest: determinate and not, paste, slicing,and heirloom, gave us nothing. My sister has been helping me out while I figure out what the hell was wrong with me, and I had her go ahead and pull out all the first round tomatoes. I have some in the garden that were started after the big batch of transplants, and I have some more started in the barn – two more sets, actually, with one set ready to get hardened off and then transplanted.

We did get some good blueberry action this year.

I used them in my shakes, and everyone else just ate them like normal people do.

So how did I get back to myself? I realized I had stopped taking the gabapentin (neurontin) back in May during the sinus thing, along with some of my other meds, because the combination of the antibiotics and meds that already have some side effects (like nausea, and other gastro issues) was making everything worse. I added those back into my routine, and presto! The gabapentin was prescribed for the nerve issues from my left neck down through my hand (hey, fuck you, cancer!) but amazingly, it also takes care of hot flashes. Who knew? Not me, or I would have twigged on that sooner than the past couple of weeks. Derp.

With the meds situation back in order, I’m now able to once again do things I need to do, like turn this:

Into this:

And finally, into this:

That’s a good late afternoon’s work there.It has to be done later in the day, because it’s been hot like the sun here  for weeks now. In the afternoons, we get storms rolling through – even if they don’t touch us directly, we usually get some cloud cover, and sometimes even a cooler breeze, which is nice.

Tomorrow, it will be on to the next row that needs to be weeded – the one to the left of this final picture. I’ll also be starting new soil block flats for the broccoli, cauliflower, brussels (ew) and maybe a couple of other late-season items, so they can go in to the rows and get grown before the season ends. It’s a nice goal to have, anyway.

Until next time, peeps: be well.