October 5 Hot and dry, it is. Last month I only recorded .79 inches of rain for a month that averages 1.4 something so we were already dry before this month started. I’ll have to start watering trees pretty soon unless we get rain.

Underneath the Japanese black pine in the front among the rocks was a seedling from that tree. I’ve been watching it all year and it has been doing well, but it wasn’t in a suitable place for continued growth. The JBP I planted there, I don’t know, maybe 20 years ago has grown taller than the chimney. Therefore I decided to see if I could transplant the seedling. It rooted down through the landscaping cloth and it was not easy to dig up even though the seedling was only six to eight inches tall and the roots were minimal. I put it in a plastic pot and we’ll just have to wait and see if it prospers. If it does, I’ll transplant it somewhere suitable. Maybe I’ll experiment with making it a bonsai tree.

September 7 As it turned out, Saturday evening was not bad at all; pleasant in fact. Thursday had been gosh awful hot. My thermometer registered 97. Then a front cooled things down Friday and Saturday morning was downright chilly. But, by Saturday evening we enjoyed mostly clear skies and light wind when we were out at the ballpark for a symphony concert. There was a fly over by World War II-vintage airplanes, four of them in a tight formation coming right out of center field and over our seats behind home plate as the orchestra played the Spangled Banner. Later, a full moon rose just outside the right field base line and the evening was capped off by some marshal music and fireworks.

It was Kari, Chris and me, Abigail and Rebecca unable to join us due to scheduling conflicts. The orchestra performed film music by John Williams; Star Wars, ET, Superman; that sort of thing. I knew that he had written a lot film music, but I learned that I don’t really care for his music. At least his film music. To me it all sounds the same: screechy and overstated. Maybe he has written music in other genres I might like but I think I’ll avoid him in future.

August 3 We got a shower during the night, but I haven’t checked the gauge. A quarter of an inch fell Thursday night. The grounds crew had plans to make a brush run Friday morning and we determined the rain wasn’t enough to prevent it, so we loaded up the pickup and headed for the brush site. It was two weeks before that we got stuck in the mud there, but we were hoping it had dried out sufficiently to allow us to dump our load. T’wasn’t. Again, we weren’t given any advice about mud when we weighed in, but we saw puddles here and there and when we got to dumping area, we could see it was going to be too muddy, so we turned around and went back home. At the naturalist meeting Monday evening, some of the members from Canyon said they had recently gotten four inches of rain. The brush site must have caught some of that downpour. It is only a few miles west of SA and I think we got a half inch or so. Just shows how spotty rain can be here on the High Plains.

July 6 The rain that fell on SA while we were in Red River really got the grass and forbs going again. Abigail had the place nicely mowed before we left but worked all this week mowing the south end. She will work on the north end this coming week.

Since we celebrated the 4th last Saturday because the Wylies were here, we didn’t do any additional celebrating this week on the 4th. I had hopes of making progress around my house inside and outside, but it didn’t seem like I got any more done than basic maintenance.

June 8 Apparently we have been working under a false sense of security. We believed the chickens were safe enough from predators during daylight hours that they could be allowed to free range. They took full advantage and roamed over the whole place to the point of sometimes straying away from the watchful eye of King Julian the rooster. In the last couple of weeks several hens have gone missing leaving behind only scatterings of feathers. It had been the consensus that a chicken was too big for a fox of the variety we see around SA to handle, and that may be true. It seems, though, that there may be more foxes around and less food, so that the foxes have learned to work together and that two or more can in fact overwhelm and consume a chicken. The chickens are no longer allowed to free-range, which is not popular with the chickens or the humans that care for them. It remains to be seen if that is a permanent solution.