Saturday, Sept 28
The National Weather Service folks in Seattle had reason to believe western Washington and the Cascade Mountains were in for a major weather event for this weekend. WTA, with John too, had committed to hold a work day at the Talapus Lake trail head which, using Google Earth, can be seen at
47.401082, -121.518184
They did get some rain all day but not as much as some other places west and north of them. Washington did not get winds as strong as expected but did get lots of precipitation. [That moist air continued eastward and showed up as snow in the upper mid-west later in the week.]
I had worked on the blog, with a bunch of pictures. It takes several minutes for John to process and store each photo for inclusion to the blog so he only put a couple in for the week. I have put the others, with text, in a page you can find here.
Sunday, Sept 29
A new season is here and we forgot to put in a photo of fall colors we took last week on the September Equinox. The Ash tree pomes (like an apple but often called berries) are orange on their way to red. They are exactly the same color of the squash we recently harvested. John held one up against the tree so here you see Mountain Ash and Golden Health squash against the green of the tree leaves.
We were pretty wiped out from yesterday, and spent all day trying to catch up. John cut a lot of weeds. We told you about cheese weed last week and he filled a garbage can twice today with the stuff. Weeds are the bane of a gardener, especially one using irrigation water with all its included weed seeds. These are from the dog yard that also has a constantly disturbed surface and the small seeds are easily moved about.
and a 30 gallon garbage can of them.
Monday, Sept 30
I stayed home today to work on music projects, receipts, records for our volunteer service, and other chores. John made a magnificent dinner after going to town today for cat food, and some other stuff, bought some nice chicken breasts (huge) which he cooked to very tender with our own onions, some of the mushrooms we bought for the Friday luncheon, and added some of the baked apples from the Friday dinner potluck, plus a baked potato we grew. What a “lovely” dinner.
Tuesday, Oct 1
My, my, we usually start our day at the computer with the local weather report and weather station figures recorded at the airport 5 miles south of us. Right before midnight last night, the temperature gauge there lost its brains, and was reporting 1 degree F. It is still broken many hours later. The National Weather Service site says “. . . because the information this site provides is necessary to protect life and property, it will be updated and maintained during the Federal Government shutdown.” Pendleton, OR is our local NWS location and about 3 hours drive away. So, we figure they will have to bring parts from there. [The next day they did.]
We left for town a little after 11:00 to meet our friends since 1971 from grad school days in Iowa. We arrived at the Mexican restaurant planned for the meeting place to find it closed. Drove on to my favorite Chinese place, the Golden Dragon, and had an excellent buffet of at least 15 different selections, including: Egg flower soup, chicken & pork in various modes, noodle dishes w/ veggies, rice, Lo Mein, Chow Mein, etc. Wonderful visit and catching up for the whole year. Ann & Fred live in Marquette, MI and once a year come to visit relatives in WA. They always detour toward us and we meet for a lunch and a much too infrequent visit.
Our waitress, Lisa, who knows me by name when I come into the restaurant, took the photo above. Over the past many years, I took my REM 515 GIS in Resource Management graduate seminar down for dinner following an evening class if a guest speaker, for the students to “network” and to thank the visitor. Since then for a few special occasions after I was sick, we returned for visits, with visitors through town. This lunch buffet is much better than the platter I used to always order for dinner. For future meetings, this will be my choice. All of us had the buffet. It is available several days (but not every).
Wednesday, Oct 2
Food bank music (4 people there!) with baked beef ribs, and when they ran out, they gave the last people steak. I got a choice, and my request was for the most tender– the cook decided ribs for me, and they were good. I didn’t particularly like the other side dishes today, but had a large helping of the green salad, and some cake for dessert with real whipped cream. Took my violin into exercise class because the temperatures outside were 54 and too cold for a wooden stringed instrument to sit alone in the rig. During the summer I had been carrying it in because of the heat in the parked car, which the violin does not like either. Fussy things.
While I was gone, John finished with the farrier and trimming 3 horses, and then got his mower started to do the grass (weeds) up by the road (300′ from the house). These are on the dog walking route and when wet or snow covered John minds even if the dogs don’t. Late afternoon, in the COLD, we picked for an hour, the last of the squash, tomatoes (many picked orange), and found the spider while cutting away plant parts to get to the fruit. Got her picture from above and the side.
On the way back to the house, I picked up some Carpathian walnuts from the ground that had popped from their green husks, and found 4 neatly eaten ones lined up on the ground by the Douglas squirrel. John has to fight him for our share. I did not position those nuts on the ground. They were just like that. I left one still in the green cover on the ground above.
Thursday, Oct 3
Early, John took off at 8:00 a.m. by himself for Yakima to have the lube/oil done on our 2009 Subaru, then to Costco for gasoline and check out the sale items. We didn’t need anything but he did get some sale priced prepared egg rolls and pot-stickers for when a meal seems to need something else. I stayed home to work on chores and finish a letter of recommendation for a former student for a job reference, and left right after 1:00 to go play music at a nursing home. Actually, John took me, dropped me off, and went on to the grocery store to get meds, my Almond Breeze, and take advantage of their sale on canned cat food, this week only signiicantly below the Costco price, and Brownie Mix for a great price. Tonight, we are going to a lecture at the university, and picking up our 100 pounds of onions. The lecture is, “A World of Ice: Alfred Wegener, Glaciers, and Continental Drift,” by Mott Greene, U of Puget Sound, Emeritus Professor of Science and Values.
Also, we had a phone call mid-day from the WA Trails Association (WTA) that John has been selected as an awardee of the 2013 WTA Carhartt Awards! The WTA says, “This honor is bestowed upon the most dedicated and generous trail work volunteers from the entire season.” They were calling to obtain his sizes for the Carhartt pants and jacket he will be presented, Nov 1, at the WTA Appreciation Dinner at the Seattle Center. We do not look forward to the trip across the pass and hope for no winter storm. Film at a later date.
Friday, Oct 4
Skipped the potato bake potluck today at the SR center. John was going to go work on the PCT at Stevens Pass, but the trip was cancelled because the trail goes on US Forest Service land there. The government shutdown includes closing the gates and turning off the radios WTA uses in case of any fires or other evacuation needs. The WTA is not a government entity so they switched the volunteers over to a King County park southeast of Seattle.
Today we awoke to a water problem. If you missed the short blog yesterday scroll down on this page and look for the heading “Joys of rural home ownership”. We hoped it wasn’t’ the well pump gone bad. We checked all the faucets in the house and they were spittin’ dark water, as if air was in the pipes, but then in the kitchen and one bathroom, the water flow diminished to almost nothing. John went out to the barn faucet to run water (it comes from the well, but bypasses the filter and house water conditioner. Also, it hasn’t been used in about 3 months. He experienced muddy water but it also had some spurts of air in the flow. He thought, however, it was in much better shape than the house. For no good reason he decided to replace the 10 inch all-house filter, Big Blue (which he had just done in June). He replaced the filter (a 20-minute task that requires depressurizing the unit, getting wet, and a messy job). Meanwhile, he had a low flow in his cold-water bathroom faucet, so he cleaned out the filter there and found some pieces of oxidized stuff, just the size of a large pinhead. After he finished, all the lines are still full of iron-colored water, but at least the water is not spouting from the faucet like an interrupted geyser.
Then he went mowing in the back yard, the orchard, and above the ditch by the road.
Rascal cat just arrived; must go feed him. All four cats were there tonight for their vittles. I saw Lemon up close and personal (through binoculars), and determined he is an unneutered male. There must not be any other intact males in the vicinity, or he would be getting hurt fighting. Our other 3 males and 2 females are fixed.
John fixed a great dinner: seasoned pork ribs with our purple onions, our fried yellow straight-neck squash, and a toasted piece of buttered bread with parmesan cheese.
Saturday, Oct 5
We had planned to finish the blog early today because we are invited to the Food Bank Saturday at 5:00 p.m. for a Dutch Oven cooked dinner. However, just messing with our water, talking to our favorite plumber, and taking care of horses, dogs, and cats has limited our computer time. Thus the blog is delayed. I did take a few pictures of the Dutch Oven experience and the report is here.
Sunday, Oct. 6
The water issue is still waiting for attention. We have usable water so it seems not prudent to mess with the thing on a weekend and, maybe, going 100% without.
They say problems come in 3s. So, I sent an e-mail with a download of this blog to an account for John to download. He did and about 3 lines into working on it the Word Document crashed. What has happened a few times in recent weeks is he will strike a key, say an ‘e’, and that will start repeating. It will fill lines and pages and there is no way to stop it. He can switch the power off, losing all open tasks, and then reboot the machine and start over. Apparently there is something going on with the document created on my lap top (newer) and his MS Word 2003 running on Windows XP. Last week when this glitch happen he reopened the document and continued, eventually getting the blog done. Today, when he rebooted and tried to open the same file he got a warning message that he probably didn’t really want to do that. So I created a new document, sent it to him, and he opened it and immediately copied and pasted the text to a file already open on his machine. That seems to have worked. But that was only problem #2. For #3 – his keyboard quit. He was just typing a word and then nothing happened. This might have stopped us for the day except he has an old style PS/2 keyboard connected directly to the motherboard that isn’t dependent on software running for it to work. This old Logitech keyboard usually just leans against the tower and any key on it acts as an instant-on switch. Because it was already attached he just moved the malfunctioning one aside, brought the other out of its vertical position, and kept on typing. Problem #3 had a ready solution. Now he has gone to exercise the dogs and I will have another go at this.
Hope your week was fine.
Nancy and John
Still on the Naneum Fan