Category: SA Times

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April blew its way out Tuesday and Wednesday.  Can’t say as I’m sorry to see the month go, considering the sorry state of its weather.  It took me nearly an hour to sweep Kansas off our front porch Friday.  All over town there are speckled cars, the result of dust and a sprinkling of rain.  The car washes are doing a land office business, which makes sense since land is what everybody is washing off.   I don’t remember the wind blowing so persistently out of the north; from Monday through Saturday morning, the north wind blew, harder at times than others but it never relented completely until Saturday afternoon when it switched to the south.  Joyce was hampered in her planting but she kept after it.  Not much else one can do. Continue reading “Goodbye April” →

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Joyce pried me from my easy chair one evening recently to come see what looked like hummingbirds feasting on the apple blossoms. They were sphinx moths, lots of them, the adult version of the tomato horn worm. For some reason Chris’s bees haven’t been visiting the apple tree much. It has come back from the freeze with lots of blossoms, which aren’t going to waste apparently in spite of the lack of bee trade. Continue reading “Mottephobia” →

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The last couple of weeks Joyce and I have been working hard to get tomatoes planted.  The master gardeners said plant them the first of April to give them as much growing time as possible before it gets hot.  They don’t like the heat.  We reworked beds and constructed tomato cages and were ready to start planting tomatoes by the first.  We finally finished the main body of the tomato orchard this week but as of Saturday   Joyce was still planting a few more in the main garden area.  It is, after all, April and she feels the inner tug of the inveterate gardener and hears the siren song of April.  Who knows, maybe July will be kinder this year. Continue reading “Tomato business” →

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We spent Saturday in Lubbock watching Abigail’s last tournament of the season.  We’d had a longish break since the last one, what with spring break and all.  The Abster and her compadres acquitted themselves well though they didn’t come out on top in the end.  All season Kari has soldiered on attending games and tournaments, delivering Abigail to practice and so on.  She allowed as how she was tired of volleyball and not sorry to see the season end.  Since we hit the road about 5 .m., we felt entitled to a nice dinner at Jazz, the cajun-food joint across from the Tech campus before driving home. Continue reading “Last tournament” →

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We were at the Azure drop one day this week and just about finished picking up our loot when we chanced to glance off to the north and spy a dust storm coming our way.  It had been blowing out of the north all day without there being much dust so maybe it came all they way from Kansas.  It took 10 or 15 minutes to finally reach us and rolled in like a mist, one a couple hundred feet high.  As I said, it had been blowing all day and the wind didn’t really increase.  It was just laden with someone’s topsoil.  Visibility was about a quarter to half a mile.  It left a coating of on dust on things — cars, porches, grass, people — as fine as face powder, so fine in fact it was hard to sweep up.  A nice half-inch shower would be nice to wash it off.  Anything less would probably just turn it to mud. Continue reading “Dusty mist” →