My Week in Review

Life got busy around here and my blog was neglected in the meantime this week.  But that makes a new post all the more sweeter, right?  So here is my week in review...

Last Saturday Mom and I went out and re-planted part of the garden.  We had planted out the seeds for the pumpkins, squash, cucumbers, etc right before we left for the cabin.  When we came back I went over to look at the garden and all the markers indicating what we'd planted had been tossed and the dirt was dug up in areas.  While the wind can sometimes uproot a marker, it doesn't usually dig up the dirt to find the seeds.  I'm figuring the birds were watching us plant all those nice seeds and promptly went and helped themselves after we'd left.  So this time we covered the rows with some garden cloth and made sure there wasn't such easy access to our seeds!

All the corn plants had these beads of water at the top!

Somehow the dry shelling beans made it through the birds...

On Tuesday when we were headed out of work we saw a big cloud of smoke out over where we live. "Probably on the Training Center," we said to each other.  The military is notorious for starting fires on the big open land they have.  It's perfectly fine if a bunch of brush burns around here, it's good fire control for later in the summer when just the heat alone can seem to start one.  But as we drove closer and closer to our house it looked like it was almost on top of it.  "Umm, Ummmmm!" we kept repeating.  As I turned down our road I saw it was a hill a couple of hills away from our house that is part of a wildlife area.  And as I turned on to our road I saw a helicopter fly VERY close to the ground on further down the main road.  Mom and I grabbed the dogs and then drove backward down my old bus route seeing just how close this fire was getting to us.  It burned fairly close, but we were pretty safe.  They fought the fire on the side with the houses and let it burn off into the wildlife area.  When we got down to where we could see brush burning you could also see that there were 6 helicopters dropping water and two planes spotting overhead.  We watched for a while and then went home.  I read online that there was an evacuation order for people living very close, but nothing for us.  I didn't take my camera on our drive, but I have some pictures from our place of what we could see.

The hills are alive...with smoke...

To give some perspective of where it was...

See how low they were!  There's a second helicopter in the lower right --->

Spotter plane

As we were eating dinner we could hear the helicopters flying back and forth over our house going to the river to pick up water.  Then we heard one of the planes flying really low heading over our house. It got louder and louder until it sounded like it was landing on top of us.  We all bolted for the door to go see it and I couldn't get it unlocked fast enough!  We made it to the deck but we couldn't see it anywhere.  Darn!  It turns out the fire was started by shooting at an outdoor firing range that borders the brush land.  No houses were lost, only a couple of outbuildings burned, but it burned about 9,000 acres.  We were lucky that the strong winds were blowing away from the houses and that the firefighters did such an amazing job of keeping it back.

That evening we pitted two of four bags of cherries that we had picked on Monday.  I had taken pictures of my bag I picked earlier and these current cherries are quite a deeper red!  Here are some lovely pie cherry pictures to enjoy...

Then on Wednesday we pitted the last two bags.  And we are DONE.  There are cherries out there but they are for the birds because our fingers can't take much more!  All that acidity and fluid just make them wrinkly and tender.  We have probably 10 bags of 4 cup allotments of cherries.  That is plenty for us to eat cherry pie well into the winter!  There are bags of older cherries in there that I was thinking of getting rid of but not now.  You forget how much work they are and in our world of excess just toss out what is probably still good.  We can use the older cherries for making jelly if not for pies.  Besides, we only get crops like this every other year or so if we're lucky, so let's make the most of it!

Thursday we needed groceries desperately and we hadn't paid our bills yet, so that evening was given to the mundane life necessities.  But I took more pictures of the baby chickies!  Growing fast, getting more feathery and less downy, and more scrawny..

And here we are at Friday!  It was a pretty good hair-day, which always makes the rest of the day somehow better.  :)  My evening has been spent blogging and perusing other's blogs and Mom is working on making a grate for the top of the fence for the coop.  I'll probably be helping here soon.  Hope your week was full and that your weekend be relaxing!