Not Winter, just yet, but it is swinging the bat in the on-deck circle. We’re getting regular overnight lows in the teens (°F), and the smaller ponds and lakes are starting to ice over as the colder temps take hold. The bulk of the leaves are cleared or mulched in – I have one more round of that work to do, probably over the holiday weekend.
We didn’t miss out on the fall color, though it has come and gone…
Fall Color
We had a smattering of snow three weeks back, and perhaps a quarter inch fallen on the ninth, some of which stuck. Not enough to write home about, though. Yet.
Georgia is cherishing time laying in the sun, indoors:
Hunting season is long past, but Georgia Aileen and I stay in orange, me to make us easier for drivers to spot and avoid when we’re walking along the road to our trails, and Georgia so that I can find her when she’s more than twenty feet away in the snow and shadows…
Without her orange vest, Georgia is a fully camo winter dog.
When it’s TV time in the late afternoon and early evenings, Georgia continues to watch TV with us. So much more than any other dog we’ve had.
Georgia watching television.
A normal weekend day
Well, normal-ish – it’s also production patch Sunday. So I was up with Georgia at 0630. Got the coffee started, then took the dog outside for her morning ablutions, then she got a treat. By quarter to seven, I was at my desk, signed in and doing prep for production Linux patching (remote). All that, and documenting the first phase of the work was about an hour.
Then Georgia and I went in to wake Marcia. Everyone had breakfast. Then I started in on the next round of patching activities. That took about another hour. Thereafter, Georgia and I went on our usual morning walk: about two miles up to the brush piles, around the trail and up to the local reservoir, then back home – about 45 minutes.
I sat and did the email and news online routine for a short while, then on to house chores. I turned off the pellet stove, so it could cool. In the basement, I did the periodic (every 5-6 weeks) coffee roaster cleaning, and ran water in the fixtures that don’t see much use (keeps the traps full of water and the sewer/septic gas out of the house).
Next chore, split and stack another couple of weeks of firewood for the downstairs wood stove. That was about an hour and a half. Final big chore of the weekend was cleaning/vacuuming the main floor pellet stove. We have a dedicated vacuum for that (steel canister, steel hose, etc, in case of live embers). 45 minutes put paid to that task. At which point my energy was … drained.
That’s not an unusual list – sometimes it’s cleaning, sometimes (in warmer months) it’s mowing, etc. But I’m glad to be able to be here and doing the things to maintain our home and our comfort.
More garden surprises, but first, our front walk botanical garden:
Georgia looking down the front walk…
Right now, all the fun is happening at the end of the walk, where lilies and black-eyed susans are in full bloom, the lilies especially right now:
Lilies and black-eyed susans
Over at the far corner of the front yard, by the road, there are masses of saponaria:
Saponaria flowering in bulk…
Meantime, Marcia has been busily doing preservation work against a bushel of pickling cucumbers – this is the result of two days of work, more to come, I’m told…
Marcia vs. pickling cucumbers (the winner ISN’T in a jar!)
So, Summer arrived this week, and we can tell. Just for context, Sunday night a week ago, it dropped into the low 40’s (F) overnight, cold enough that the pellet stove fired itself up. Seriously. Yesterday and today, however, we touched 90F, which made it pretty warm. Between the sun/heat, and weekend boaters, we did not go out this weekend on the boat, but we did make it out on last Monday (Juneteenth observed Federal holiday) and I took most of the day off on Thursday and we got out again. So, all in, three fishing days out of the last 8 days. Not too shabby. Some fish were caught:
My 2#9oz largemouth bass from Saturday 6/18/2022Marcia’s 2#7oz largemouth bass, also caught on 6/18/2022
Yesterday the 25th, as I noted, a warm day… we went over to Nancy’s to hang out for a while, let the dogs play off leash outside, and after a bit, I went over to the boat to re-rig a couple of poles. Of course, instead, the first thing I did was sink a treble hook deep into the pad of my right pointer finger. Sigh. After some faffing about, we fetched some good diagonal cutters from the house, and I snipped the one offending hook off as close to the treble as I could. Then I could get a good grip on the external remnant of the hook with some needle nose pliars and … yanked my hand/finger straight down, allowing the hook/barb to exit my finger along precisely the path it went in. It was too small a hook to rotate around and spin it out of the finger point first. I cleaned it out with some peroxide, put a bandaid on it, and kept working. Still, no fun.
Georgia, on the other hand, was having great fun. Raven (Nancy’s black lab) and a friend’s dog Wheezey (a doodle of some kind) were all over the yard, playing, jumping into the lake after the tennis ball, etc. Well, Georgia won’t go in after the ball… yet. She’s also doing much better meeting dogs on leash, on our daily two mile walks. So much progress!
Not much else to report. Today was a cleaning/chore day. I replaced another ceiling mount fluorescent tube fixture with a better, brighter LED fixture, and got the upper garage blown clean, to boot.
Tomorrow, work and rain. Maybe fishing on Tuesday? Ciao.
Last night we had a good line of thunderstorms roll through. In several different directions, folks had rain plus the light/sound show. But we got hail, too… Here’s the front walk as that phase of the storm was winding down:
Hail on our front walk
Not a huge deal, but we only had two small tomato plants in the ground … now we’re down to two “3/4 scale” smaller tomato plants. We’ll see if they survive.
Georgia’s Wonderful Day
Most of Georgia’s days follow a specific pattern:
Wake
First toilet of the day, out front
Breakfast
Nap & Chase sunbeams
Morning walk ~ two miles or so
Nap / Supervise me working
Watch us eat lunch
Nap / Supervise me working
Afternoon toilet
Nap
Dinner
Nap
Sleep
Here’s one of the instances of resting in the house, chasing sunbeams
Georgia, our rescue mutt, nap-chasing sunbeams
Today was special, though. The morning walk up to the nearby reservoir found the parking lots full, and stacks of people celebrating something up in the picnic area by the lake – too many people and dogs for her to cope with. But some of our regulars were off in a field to the side – these were dogs that in the past Georgia has run into down near the road, on leash, and freaked out about. But all the dogs were just running around their people and playing while the people talks. So I dropped Georgia’s leash and … she was great. She just went to play with all the dogs and was a slightly bossy sweetie. So nice.
Then, after some errands and chores, Marcia and I took Georgia over to my sister-in-law’s camp on a nearby lake. I had boat whips to install on Nancy’s dock, so that our boat could live there, across from Nancy’s party barge. We got there, and Georgia got to play all afternoon with Raven the black lab, and some kids and some friends of Nancy’s. So while I toiled in the Sun, Georgia had a lovely play date.
Best. Day. Ever. (So far).
Tomorrow, I’ll take the day off work, and we’ll haul the boat back down to the lake, figure out the docking setup, and get some fishing in. Should be fun.
Snow days are … different up here. It snowed 20″ or so in our immediate vicinity on Saturday. The roads seem to have been plowed and treated by 7 AM on Sunday (and the plows were keeping things clear enough on Saturday). No schools are closed or delayed this brightly chilly Monday morning that I can find.
I was up at 7 AM on Sunday morning. I got the coffee started on brew, and geared up. I moved the car back, shoveled out the front porch and a couple of feet in front of the garage doors by hand. Then I fired up the Cub Cadet snow thrower. It took a little under an hour to clear all the snow from our driveway and side parking pad.
Driveway cleared after 20″ blizzard on 01/29/2022
Then it was back to the shovel. I went around to the back and cleared the drifted snow from the two basement access slider doors, then cleared the stairs and the back upper deck, which had about 3 feet of snow drifted against the double slider there. All in, just under two hours to get all the snow I needed cleared. Then I took the [[SPOILER ALERT]] and chatted with our neighbor Myra, she had a plow coming so I didn’t need to help her out.
Things I noted – people tend to appropriately stay off the road, for the most part, up here when there’s an active snow event. And people mostly seem to know how to handle the snow and ice when they do drive. We went out and spent some time [[REDACTED]] yesterday. If I’d been out and about 12 hours after a major snow storm in Maryland, there’d have been cars off the road and in the ditches everywhere. I didn’t see a one, yesterday.
Spoiler Reveal
So, we actually got Georgia Aileen, our newest rescue pupper, on Jan 23, 2022.
Meet Georgia Aileen
She got on a transport in a crate with a bunch of other dogs in South Carolina on the Saturday. We picked her up at a meeting point a few miles south of Portland, ME. She’s a sweetie with an intermittent habit of chewing things. She’s smart, acclimated quickly, and already hates winter up here. Grin.
Georgia vs snow…
There will be much more about this new addition to our family as we get to know each other. I think she’d going to need some socialization trainings sooner than later.
The spoiler alert redaction above: Walking Georgia over to say hello to Myra.
The redaction above: Taking Georgia over to an enclosed mall area to spend some time walking about in a neutral space getting acclimated to her cousin (Nancy’s black lab, Raven).
