It's RAINING out!! Not supposed too!

August 19, 2006 (10:54am)
63º F, Light rain, N wind 7 mph.

Good morning,

The rain sure messed up our plans for today. A couple of hours ago, I was getting ready to head to church and clean up the remains of a tree I cut down yesterday and Margriet had just put a load of wash in the machine. Instead - it started to rain! Planned to work outside most of the day, but now that appears to be only a half day at best.

There was a dead medium sized tree, about 12" across the stump, toward the front of church which needed to come down. I told the Property Team leader several weeks ago I would take it down for the firewood. It was when the really hot weather set in, then we went bumming, and this past week I have been working on the water supply. So ... I finally got to it yesterday. Taking it down was the easy part. Cutting it up was a bit more stressful, especially for my left shoulder. I must have really messed something up in the shoulder when I was slapped around by a tree a couple of years ago. If I had to cut anything above my waist, there was some real pain in the front of the shoulder. Didn’t like that one bit. I did manage to buck it up into 4 foot lengths and drag the branches away, but I had it by then. Planned to go back this morning and rake up the little junk this morning. Probably get after it this afternoon instead. At least there is a few days supply of wood on the log pile to be cut and split now.

Margriet put a load of laundry in yesterday and wanted to do the heavy, jeans type, laundry today. Well, at the moment it is washed, but wet! Hope she will be able to hang it out this afternoon to dry. The load has most of my work clothes in it and I really had to do some scratching to find something to wear today.

I did manage to go along the driveway and cut off all the intruding brush and trees. I can say for certain, that we will have a lot of wild roses and wild grapes next year. At least the plants. The wild raspberries are also doing very well. The roses are the worst to work with as they have very sharp, long thorns on them that tend to break off after they have embedded themselves into my meat! They do irritate a lot. While I was out cruising the other day, I noticed there were a lot of deer beds in the weedy areas too. That is a good sign. Maybe we will have a good crop of young this coming year.

The water system seems to be holding rather well. No leaks - yet. Hope we don’t have any either. I have been rather dubious about it, especially since it went together rather easily, after getting it figured out and dug up. I will wait a few more days before closing all of my digging up again, then I will insulate it for the cooler part of the year. Probably will replace some of the vapor barrier too. I also have to do some repair on the skirting at the base of the house. When the original structure was installed, they didn’t use treated wood, so it is pretty rotten. I have some "leftover, used" treated lumber to use for the task.

We are pulling double duty at church tomorrow. Margriet and I are communion assistants and I also have to bring snacks for after the service. Margriet baked a batch of oatmeal raisin cookies, following a recipe from my Aunt Julia we found in a 1934 cookbook put together by the women of my Uncle Carl’s church in Avoca, Iowa when he was Pastor there. They taste rather good, but discovered that we should have used the "old-fashioned" oatmeal rather than the "quick-cooking" variety we had on had. Never gave that a thought - until all were baked. The cookie dough was more like batter. Oh well, they taste good.

The price of crude oil has been dropping on the world market and now I see it also is in Green Bay. Now down to $2899/gallon there. It still is $2.999/gallon the last time I saw in here. Hope it will follow suit and drop more - like maybe $2.00/gallon. Probably not in my lifetime! Oh for the good-old-days when you could get 5 gallons for a buck - and that was the normal price!

Time to get the day a-going.

In Christ My Saviour,

Chris <><