Good grief!
A wet and windy week, finishing with snow Saturday A. M.
Sunday, Apr 7 Yesterday afternoon, John finished planting the five Ponderosa pine trees and rerouted ditch water (irrigation) for our neighbors’ pastures (south of ours). He set orange plastic tarps at strategic locations to change the direction of flow. Today we are staying home to work on projects, me in the house, and John in the yard. Well, I guess we have to get back to work on the research proposals. That’s happened but still in progress, because he had to create a template for the evaluations, as we are sending our evaluations electronically. I suppose we could write into the printed evaluation forms, but then we’d have to photograph each page of 3 because our scanner is not working. He’s going to help me enter my data into the template for my share of the research proposals. Several hours later the evaluations have been sent to Toronto via digital delivery. We old farts recognize how amazing that is. But how about this: did you realize that Toronto is not only a lot east of us but also a bit south. Then dinner — salmon, fried onions & potatoes, and peaches.
Monday, Apr 8 Will be a sleep-in-a-little-longer day, because John doesn’t have to leave early to prune. That’s over until next year. I continued working on taxes, bills, and stacks of things. He is working on his garden, including trimming the wicked blackberry bushes, the ones with incredibly destructive thorns, called Illini Hardy, described and pictured on the site from where ours came, Indiana Berry Company. Move down the page to find the description. We also have some thornless Blackberries but they are not especially hardy and were killed back to the ground a few years ago. They re-grew and provided a nice crop last summer and look good, so far, this spring.
Tuesday, Apr 9 Going to be a very long day. We leave before 9:00 for a meeting in town with the Emeriti Geography profs, and then on to Yakima for lunch and a Costco run, after which, John’s Subaru gets a work-over, oil change & lube and washed. On home, only for me to turn around and go back to play music at Hearthstone. Well, it’s night, and we made it. I may be in bed within an hour (earlier than usual).
Wednesday, Apr 10 I play music at the Soup Kitchen/Food Bank, and go to exercise. Heard back from a friend whose hubby ended up in ER and then to a Yakima hospital, anemic. He’s doing better now. Let’s end the day on a nice note–our daffodils are blooming.
These are always the first flowers because of the protected location.
Thursday, Apr 11 In the afternoon I played music at the Rehab center. John went for the horse club meeting (evening), to hear a talk on a first aid kit for horses, while I loaded more tax receipts and the dishwasher. Now I am in charge of watching for the ferals to eat their dinner. Need to keep our cat in with the doggie window closed, and open later. So far only Tre’, the extra third orange feral (not fixed), has eaten. Our neighbors quit feeding all but one of their barn cats, (how they know only one is eating is beyond us), and we have seen more of this orange one chowing down on our offerings.
Friday, Apr 12 I awoke at 3:00 a.m. and had trouble getting back to sleep, so I slept in this morning after getting up early. I stayed home all day working on computer tax things. Our scanner is broken, so I spent a bunch of time taking close up macro photos of our mileage log for John’s Subaru. Now I have to do my own car’s log. The term “log” is of nautical origin, and apparently began as a chunk of a tree, that is, a log. Then the information was recorded and that recording became the log.
The failed scanner situation necessitates the photos and the information is necessary to get the volunteer (charitable) mileage and the medical mileage to put into the tax form for itemized deductions. It is worth the effort for the tax write-off allowed (only because my time is now only worth pennies per hour). Some advice: get rich and hire someone to do these things. Now I have to enter the figures in my Excel spreadsheet to get the totals to put into Turbo Tax. I did submit my tax extension notice (form 4868) yesterday and sent it certified mail to the IRS in Fresno. I did all sorts of things, including loading TurboTax on John’s computer (from where I print the final copies of the forms), and then backed up my last year’s on that computer from where I had been working on it on my laptop. The new version is now installed on my laptop, also.
For lunch, John fixed a grilled cheese sandwich with Rosemary/Olive bread, venison sausage (gift from a neighbor) sliced thinly, and cheddar cheese. We had a Honeycrisp apple sliced to go along with it and Low Salt potato chips. Late afternoon, after taking care of diverting the irrigation water for our neighbors to the south, he put a pork roast in the oven for dinner. Was able to take the photos from the camera and print them from John’s computer directly to the printer. [Printing works, just not the scanner. We have several months supply of ink so until that runs out the purchase of a new unit with a scanner seems a bad idea – unless the same inks are required. Something else to look into.] Now I have to enter those data and a few more months’ worth into Excel before I can summarize and put into TurboTax, but I’m catching up.
All the ferals said hello to John today as he worked in the yard. One thing he did before it sprinkled was to spray Glyphosate (generic “Round-up”) on some places. He thinks it was on for at least 3 hours before the sprinkles, but the temperatures never got above 53. Best for spraying is sunny and higher than 60 degrees. Our meal this evening was a pork loin roast, succotash, and baked potato. I mentioned succotash to someone here recently, and they didn’t know what I was talking about. John and I were both raised with the variety made with mixed little green lima beans and corn. There are many more varieties, as explained in the site linked to.
We made “turtle” brownies from a box mix (sale item; otherwise expensive; otherwise create your own) including walnuts with package of caramel. Below the picture on the left is what ours looked like, but I think next time we will add chocolate chips and pecans to the top, more like the one on the right (but adding nuts). Our pan was a bit too big so the result was thin – note to self and others, in future fit recipe to pan.
We had a piece with the last of butter pecan ice cream and mutilated (broken down) blueberries from the freezer of our old refrigerator in our unheated outside shed. It cannot control proper freezing over very cold temperatures (needs to be in a non-freezing location). Going to bed later tonight than originally planned.
Saturday, Apr 13 Much noisy wind all night, with highest gusts to 45, but in the high 30s all night and this morning still at 36 mph. More interestingly was awaking to snow on the ground; in the Cascade Pass, requirements are chains for big rigs. It’s a mess of snow still on the Pass (and snowing hard); I’m happy I’m not returning from the Association of American Geographers (AAG) meetings in L.A., as several of my colleagues are. They always fly out of Seattle, and I never do in the winter or spring of the year. We will not travel the pass at all for any reason. One year I was in Denver, for the “spring” meetings, and the airport was snow-closed. I stayed on the airport floor or in a chair for 3 days trying to return to classes from that AAG meeting. Bad memories! John is still in the house, not wishing to get out and work in this cold wind chill; mid-afternoon and the wind is 20 mph and temp is 49 degrees. He’s going to work on getting this text and photos into WordPress and I need to get back to various paper-work and kitchen clean-up.
Hope your week was great.
Nancy and John
Still on the Naneum Fan