long day and rummaging through more tubs

Monday I called two people and another on Tuesday for bids on cutting down, cutting up, and hauling away the hanging limbs on the two pecan trees. One Monday and the one on Tuesday came out the day I called. The second guy I called on Monday didn’t return my call until Wednesday afternoon after I had the work done Wednesday morning. He called again yesterday evening. Too late guy, should have returned my call on Monday.

The man I hired and his two helpers did an excellent job and very reasonable. The one limb hanging by a shred of bark came down quickly and was cut up in minutes. It probably took the about 30 minutes of discussion and moving the extension ladder around to finally decide how to approach the more dangerous dangling limbs on the other tree though Tuesday afternoon the two limbs that were detached but hung had fallen on their own.

When those two limbs came down with a whump I guess I jumped because John looked over at me and asked was I nervous; yup, little bit. This is what the trees look like now. I hope the one closest to the house will regenerate because I’d hate to lose it completely.

Wednesday was a long day. After the crew drove off with the trailer full of more than half my pecan tree 

I went ahead and emptied the truck onto the now really big burn pile (went wide instead of tall) and Marc went out to run some errands. I got a phone call later…car trouble, car wouldn’t start. After a series of phone calls between Marc, myself, Robin, and car mechanic grandson Mikey, Mikey’s domestic partner Audra showed up to jump the battery with the fancy little battery charger gizmo and then followed Marc home with Paisleigh and waited until Mikey got off work so I got a nice little visit with my great granddaughter. When Mikey got here he and Marc went off to get a new battery and he switched it out for us so, car fixed.

Earlier this week I was looking through more of the tubs in my sister’s shed and found more christmas ornaments, a fancy elf or fairy as the case may be, 

her antique plastic Mr. Snowman that you can put a light inside, 

a tub full of santas and nutcrackers, all of which will go to SHARE. I pulled out these crocheted and starched snowflakes that Pam made to see if anyone in blogland wants them.

Also found her soap making stuff and another tub full of her genealogy research…documents and pictures. Her younger daughter took all the binders of the family lines that were in the house right after Pam’s death and she’s coming to get the rest of the genealogy stuff today. The soap making stuff I’m going to post on the local chat page on FB free for the taking. 

Now that the weather has cooled off somewhat, key word here ‘somewhat’ since it’s still getting into low 90s during the day but the mornings are nice and cool, the shrimp plant, the white philippine lilies, the rangoon creeper, the morning glory bush, and the pink trumpet flower are all blooming but this post is already heavy on images so can wait until the next post.

dinner disaster, done all I can do, drawing dissatisfaction

Back to more pleasant topics, sort of. I fixed dinner Friday night, my night. I bought a little eggplant Tuesday and decided on the spot to make eggplant parmesan so Friday when I got out my recipe I had to go back and get another one and the mozzarella plus the tomato sauce since I lost all my homemade sauce when we lost power for three days during hurricane Beryl. The recipe I have is for baking the eggplant beforehand in stead of frying it and calls for chunky tomato sauce. Anyway, it’s a process and I started early. There’s no such thing as commercially available ‘chunky’ tomato sauce so I also bought a can of diced tomatoes to add in which turned out to be a big mistake because the end result at dinner was terrible. I should have use either stewed tomatoes or just plain spaghetti sauce. Anyway, I not only threw out the leftovers but also the recipe. I need a new recipe for eggplant parmesan.

Last Wednesday I got out the big boy chainsaw and worked on the pecan tree by the back of the barn cutting up the fallen big stuff and what I could reach that wasn’t weight bearing and made this neat stack of cut logs.

Then Saturday I went to work on the tree close to the house. There wasn’t nearly as much to deal with since none of the big stuff has fallen, still dangling, and made this not so neat pile. If I could carry it, I didn’t cut it up into smaller stackable pieces. 

Now I need to get someone who does tree work to get those big hanging limbs on both trees down, cut up, and hauled away.

Yesterday I mowed the little backyard and around the tree fingers holding up the limbs on the tree closest to the house, cut to the ground all the hackberry, and pecan trees that had sprouted up this summer in amongst other shrubbery some of which I swear I cut last spring and poisoned the stumps. I still come in hot and sweaty even though it’s not getting as hot. Now that I’ve done all I can do on the trees I can turn my attention to the overgrown flower beds.

Speaking of overgrown, this is the half acre next to me that belongs to the Wicked Bitch of the West. I think this lot has only been mowed twice this whole year. It’s easily thigh high.

A week or so ago the wind knocked the bird feeder off the platform which has happened several times but this time the bird feeder broke. I went to the feed store for a new one and the cheapest ones they had were $44 and not that attractive. So I went to Tractor Supply and got one for $15. 

I put four little nails around the perimeter into the platform to keep it from falling off. I like this one but the four slots that feed the seed into the little circular tray aren’t high enough to let the spanish peanuts and the bigger sunflower seeds easily pass through so I’m going to take my dremel tool and grind the openings a little larger.

I finished the butterfly and penciled in the scrappy leaves in the background. My original thought was to do the leaves in watercolor but the paper in my sketchbook is not very heavy so I decided watercolor wasn’t a good idea and went back to colored pencil but after I got one and a half leaves done, I very much didn’t like it and erased as much as I could so that now it’s faint which I like better but still not best pleased. Now I’m trying to decide how to proceed, I could probably get more of the colored pencil off if I continued to use the erasure. I’m going to sit with it a couple of days. I’ll have to finish the other half of the one leaf and maybe pick a third and then darken the pencil lines and maybe I’ll call it done.

the photo I’m working from

the finished butterfly

where it stands now