Early morning temperatures have been just under 50°F – – I’ve set the thermostat for 68 degrees and about 2 AM the heat pump kicks on. Afternoon temps get up to near 80 when the sun is fully deployed. The next 2 weeks are forecast to be similar. Official fall in my area is Friday, September 22, 2023 at 11:50 pm PDT.
Wednesday morning I saw movement outside. 50 feet from the house several deer were trotting past just beyond Walnut trees. I took the camera and investigated.
In the image here there is a small “Y” buck with three others that, I think, are young without spots. The bright white spots of the young have been fading over the last month along with the minutes of daylight.
A fifth deer was leading this group. He is in the image below.
As I maneuvered to get the fencing out of the image, he kept watching me.
The others ambled through the grass to the left. I could not get all of them in one photo.
File this under “There is always something”
From the Wall Street Journal: It might be time to ditch expiration dates.
Expiration dates on food started as a system for manufacturers to communicate to retailers when to rotate stock and have morphed into what many consumers consider to be a food-safety deadline. In reality, the dates are mostly general indicators of when food is at its peak quality; there is no regulation and the dates do nothing to keep consumers safe. This misunderstanding is one reason Americans waste a colossal amount of perfectly good food.
. . . 84% of consumers threw out food at the package date “at least occasionally” while 37% did so always or usually, though that wasn’t what most labels recommended. Over half thought date labeling was federally regulated, or were unsure. An earlier study found that 54% of people thought eating food past a sell-by date was unsafe.
I had my 2023 flu shot on Thursday. When such shots first started, 
we had to line up outside the clinic, slowly move inside to different folks in a long hallway, answer questions, fill out a form, – mostly I’ve forgotten. We had a half hour drive and then an hour processing.
On Thursday, I went to the grocery store where a flu-shot-table was sitting in the lobby. A pharmacist sat at a table doing the jabbing. I was delayed behind an elderly lady that regaled us with 10 minutes of personal (unrelated) monologues. Otherwise, my time would have been about 90 seconds.
A herder of sheep brought the flock to a field about one mile south of me.
In the early part of the 1900s, sheep and cattle were raised in this area and then herded across the Cascade Mountains into the Puget Sound region. That changed as roads and refrigerated trucks appeared. Still, one of our early experiences in Kittitas County was encountering cattle and sheep drives as we explored the hills north of our Naneum Road location.
Here is a photo from this week of new temporary neighbors.
I didn’t get out of the truck, but think this view encompasses about 1/3 of the flock.
I stopped by the CWU surplus sale building/yard and acquired 4 chairs for the deck. They were priced at 50¢ each. The best use of $2 I parted with in a long time. 
The chair on the left is arm-less, thus called a side chair. Why a set of four chairs has three with arm rests and one doesn’t is a mystery. I found a photo of a stylish wood dining table set with 6 chairs with one having arms. I guess that’s for grandma so she can push on the arms and not the table when she wants to get up.
Keeping Track
on the Naneum Fan
John