Happy birthday, Ross!  I hope you have a very good day. 

In honor of the 400th anniversary of the King James bible, I treated my myself to a copy of this.

http://www.christianbook.com/kjv-bible-400th-anniversary-edition-hardcover/9781565638082/pd/631609?product_redirect=1&Ntt=MW631609&item_code=MW&Ntk=keywords&event=ESRCN#CURR

It ought to show up sometimes around the middle of the month.

On Monday, half a dozen of us met at church and worked for three hours.  I transplanted iris and pruned and raked.  This morning we met again.  Kathy and I filled her pickup with tree branches, drove to my house and unloaded them next to the burn pile.  Then we drove back to the church and loaded it up again, drove here and unloaded it again.  ( Read more... )

Something I did not know is that The North American Electric Reliability Corporation runs the nation's interlocking web of transmission lines and power lines.  (I give you my word.  I've never heard of this corporation.)  One of the things it does is to keep the frequency of the current as precise as possible.  Which keeps clocks running accurately ( Read more... )

My garden has reached the point where I need to thin the little plants.  This morning I transplanted some of the beets to another section of the garden.  The remaining thinnings won't go to waste.   I'll put them in a salad.  Besides making a start on thinning the veggies, I planted a climbing rose by the front gate and moved another one to a place ( Read more... )

A while back, my cousin Paula game me a rose labeled as "mystery rambler."  I planted it with three others that are climbing up the north wall of my kitchen garden.  The rambler bloomed this year.  It has small red roses just a couple of inches across.  In keeping with the named varieties it's growing with - Ash Wednesday, Jude the Obscure and The ( Read more... )

Some kind person at church leaves magazines in my treasurer's mail slot downstairs.  This last Sunday there were a couple of issues of Food and Wine.  They were interesting in a totally foreign lifestyle kind of way.  For months on end, the only wine I taste is at the communion rail.  I do eat every day so the recipes were better although many of ( Read more... )

Somewhere around three o"clock in the morning Meggie and Milo and Purrl began playing chase games that included bounding across my bed.  It woke me up enough that I began thinking about what I wanted to do when I got up.  That finished waking me up.  I got up just shy of four o'clock.  I'm on my third load of laundry and have been taking things ( Read more... )

We had a week or so of rain with no possibility of mowing.  Of course the grass grew like crazy.  Friday was the first day without rain.  I filled the lawn tractor with gas and started in.  I mowed inside the fence around the house first.  Then mowed the north meadow.  That was three hours or so of mowing.  I feel as if my body is kind of humming ( Read more... )

Neil and I bought vermiculite and peat moss and sand.  We emptied it all out into the back of his pickup and added ashes, compost, rock phosphate and dove litter.  All of this following the ratios listed in Square Foot Gardening.  The dove litter was a substitute for the organic fertilizer it called for.  I think we figured it made 24 cubic feet.  ( Read more... )