Mid-June With Summer Racing By.......

Here it is. My irregular catch up on what is going on in our world. In our last episode, you remember that Beverly had gone to help Sarah have a baby. That worked out and now Sarah is coming to visit this week. In fact, Beverly's brother, Mons and his sons are also coming to visit along with Rebecca and Sarah's husband, Chris. If you hadn't guessed, Beverly has engineered a Family Vacation/Reunion in Katchemak Bay out of Homer. Including the outsiders and those that live here, we will have about 24 souls to haul to Homer, get across the bay to Right Beach where we will camp and kayak and hike and fish and whatever else we feel like for about 5 days. We hope to get in a little clamming as well as general sight-seeing. We are feverishly working on all the details including getting the gear in shape for the trip.
Carolyn and Curtis had a birthday party here for Cayden that was described by the mothers as "brilliant". They had me dump a couple of loader buckets of dirt in a pile and then invited the boys to a Tonka Truck Birthday Party. The kids brought their own Tonkas and dug in the dirt pile for hidden Hot Wheels. I was recruited to give loader rides to the kids, and afterwards they had cake and ice cream served from a dump truck in the garage. The perfect no-mess party.

Besides partying, there is still the gardening, earth moving, manure collection and compost building, working, vehicle repairing, and today camera repairing. We have most everything planted in the garden now. In fact, it was planted in mid-May but it gets off to a slow start here. Beverly has been working on her flower garden and it looks beautiful. My neighbor has horses and I inquired about their poop, because as you might imagine, horse manure makes good fertilizer a year or so later. They told me I could have all I wanted so I took the equipment down there and brought home 3 dump truck loads and should have brought more. And it is good poop, too. Well composted and ready to use. I thought I would be able to mix it with the leaves and grass my friend Jeff brings me from his lawn service, but I was too greedy and started to put it right on the garden. The leaf and grass pile has grown huge. About 12 feet tall and 18 feet in diameter. Our strawberry beds have greened up nicely and I got the rest of the culverts in the side of the hill for apple trees. Unfortunately, mice invaded the apple trees I had grafted over the past three years and stripped the bark off of all of them, so this week I plan to buy some from some friends that have some extras to sell.

My old faithful Fuji Finepix 602 Zoom camera was injured a while back and quit working, but I found a website with great pictures and explanations for disassembly, so I have taken it apart into little pieces, repaired the defect, and now am ready to put it back together. Wish me luck.