I am who I am, there's plenty of data on this site to tell you more. Briefly, I'm a husband, computer geek, avid reader, gardener, and builder of furniture.
Fall color on the trees, mirror pondMoon over the ridge, after sunset
Going to go with pictures for the time being, since I’m too busy for most things.
We got out to California for a week last month, and got to see all the family that we haven’t since well before the covid struck. A really nice visit with everyone, bracketed by terrible long travel days with layovers longer than flight times.
Before traveling, we got the boat out of the water and put it in for the assorted minor warranty issues that surface during our first season with the watercraft. On our last weekend of fishing, Marcia and I both caught good-size bass:
Marcia with her 2# 9oz large mouth bassMe and my 3# 3oz small mouth bass
Once back in town, work and assorted Fall chores started lining up, so we’re leaving the boat out until next Spring.
And so it goes. The best intentions and all that, but in the split between life, work, chores, fun on the boat, etc … I’ve not posted here. Sorry-ish. So what’s been going on…
August was a fairly wet month up here, compared to the first couple of months of Summer. I know you Californians will hate us for this, but just this morning, we had 1.25 inches of rain, bringing the month’s total up close to a nearly normal 3″. The weather is about to turn, though. The first night below 50F should be this week… Down in MD, that would have been a mid- to late-October event.
Work has been okay, but seriously busy. Busy is far better than the alternative, but requires a bit of a balancing act to prevent sliding onto the burnout train.
We’ve been out on the boat once or twice a week all summer, doing lots of fishing and a wee bit of catching of bass and other species of fish. Good fun, that, but there are a couple of issues to be addressed when we put the boat in for first service, next month.
We put a couple of tomato plants into the front garden where they flourished until the ground squirrels discovered how much they like tomatoes. We also learned that you need to treat our particular variety of peach tree with an antifungal … far too late to do anything about most of the fruit this season. Marcia did put up a dozen jars of preserves, but not the many quarts of preserved peaches we’d been hoping for. She also “canned” pickles and beets this year, so she has plenty of those (neither are in my list of preferred foods).
Georgia Aileen, the american bully mix rescue dog, has continued on her slow, slow path to becoming a civilized mutt. She’s still a real handful on a leash around other dogs, but even there, her behavior is so much improved over the start of her life with us… we’re very proud of her.
Be well, take care of each other, and get the new booster for covid variants as soon as you can, which may be as early as next week!
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.
Georgia wants to play with chipmunksThe boat docked at the lake, with mooring whips.
And Flowers…
Our yard through spring so far has been a cornucopia of flowers, here’s some more of them…
Another of the flowering trees, a horse chestnutAsian bleeding heartLupinApparently, rosa xantina…A cherry varientThe peonies are just now coming into bloom…
So, yeah, plenty of pleasant surprises from the yard that Lorraine gifted to us when she sold us the house.
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.
A sad day for Texas. Another sad day for a world in which the right answer for anyone is to go shoot a bunch of kids. Breaks my heart.
Fishing
We got out on the boat on Saturday. Marcia caught the first fish, before she ran out of steam, on a warm day out on the water. I went back out and caught two more, the biggest being this 1lb 11oz monster small mouth bass. A purposeful catch, too – I saw a spawning bed, knew at this time of year a fish was likely right nearby. I cast a small worm past the bed and dragged it slowly across, tricking with wily fish. Brought it in quickly, weighed, picture, and right back in the water to finish the business of making more bass…
Captured a small mouth bass on Cobbosseecontee Lake …
It was a fun day out. Sunday was mostly chores around the house, and a bit of visiting with Nancy…
This weekend, we celebrated my birthday a few weeks late. Marcia had been unwell (no Covid, but no fun, either) and she’s now mostly much better, thanks for asking. The best part is that in the interval between birthday actual and birthday celebrated, we took delivery on our AlumaCraft 165S boat. We got it into the water on Friday, and took it out for some fishing both Saturday and Sunday. Note that I said fishing, and not catching – it’s pretty early in the season here yet, and we have lots to learn about fishing techniques/baits that vary with the seasons up here. I think that I had fish on the hook maybe three times, and boated approximately none of them. Marcia did a bit of fishing, but spent time re-rigging and getting gear setup for future trips. That’s time I should probably take, too… Here’s Marcia enjoying our new mode of transportation over the weekend:
Marcia at the helm of her one-boat fleet, our new Alumacraft 165s boat, setup for fishing.
It’s been asked, what will we name this boat. Not sure that I need to name a boat, if I’m going to be mocked for naming cars (which I totally didn’t do). But while “Bob” and “Baldrick”, and perhaps even “I have a cunning plan” are on the list, I’m voting for holding off on a naming ceremony for the first year, after which, if the fishing was good, we can name it nicely. If, however, a boat of our own that doesn’t improve our fishing capabilities is found to have been the result, then perhaps just “UPoS” on the transom will be sufficient (“Useless Piece of —-“).
Spring has (finally) sprung
The weather has finally reached the point where we can call is Spring. It’s been greening up for a while, and the daffodils have been up and out for a while. But the trees and shrubs are finally starting to leaf, the tulips are in bloom, and I’m going to have to mow the lawn for the first time this year, real soon now.
The front flower bed is in Spring bloom, daffodils and tulips in abundance.
The bit of lawn visible behind that flower bed doesn’t seem so bad, but other patches of the lawn have been unevenly fertilized by the dog over the last three months, such that the front yard now looks much like the result of an old man shaving: splotchy and uneven. My initial goal will be to make it flat.
I managed a few hours in the sub-garage yesterday, doing some more cleanup and getting the tablesaw re-assembled and leveled. That’s no mean feat, working solo.
Re-assembled my SawStop contractor saw with extension table
Next up is to either fabricate from materials on-hand (or purchase what I need) a decent 3′ or 4′ wide workbench that’ll hang out at the back of the tablesaw. It’ll be an outfeed table for the tablesaw, a miter saw stand, and a clamping and assembly resource. I’ll probably mock it up with materials on hand just to get a sense of positioning and whatnot … then decide how to actually build it.
Working Sunday
Today was mostly given over to non-business day work that needed doing – mostly service migrations of either virtual workloads, and a service migration from an old physical server to a new one. Not very exciting, but regular maintenance goes a long way towards preventing excessively exciting events further down the road.
