Labor(less) Day
by rakeeter

Friday evening the neighbors had a weenie roast.   The guests were Abigail’s volleyball teammates and their parents, at least some of them.  The occasion was, well, there wasn’t one.  Kari said each family is supposed to host a “dinner”, which means there will be a lot of dinners since there are 12 players.  Kari drew the short straw, I guess, and had to go first.  It was really a nice evening.  There were some clouds in the west that kept the sun off early on and the evening was comfortable, just about right for an outdoor get-together.  Another mother organized the whole thing and people chipped in with drinks and dishes, so Kari didn’t have the whole thing on her shoulders.  Joyce and I showed up for hotdogs and left when it was smores time. Continue reading “Labor(less) Day” →

Winding down
by rakeeter

We’re winding down the summer here on SA.  Days are getting shorter, nights are getting cooler and school started this week for the neighbor kids.  Someone stuck a sign next to the 2005 driveway saying Home of Future Tascosa grad, or something along that line.  They must do that for the athletes.  I can’t think they would do it for everyone likely to graduate from THS.  Abigail seems to have survived her first week of high school, even having to be a VB practice at 6:30 each morning.  An Li’l r reported no problems managing her first week of third grade.  No report yet on how the Wylie girls fared, but no doubt they handled everything with their customary aplomb. Continue reading “Winding down” →

Living off the land
by rakeeter

It’s mid-August and the produce is abundant here on SA.  Joyce has been making a lot of delicious hot sauce lately, trying to consume the tomatoes from her 21 tomato vines.  So far, she’s only had to water the vines three times, which means the rain has kept them watered even to the extent that, with so much moisture, the tomatoes tend to split open.  The blemish is superficial and doesn’t harm the flavor, just the appearance.  Chopping up the tomatoes and using them in hot sauce solves that problem.  The table grapes have begun to ripen and taste better than any grape I’ve ever tasted.  The pair tree on the south end has lots of pears but no one but Tino seems interested in them.  Joyce picked eleven peaches the other day that were maybe not as ripe as she’d like but were attracting the attention of squirrels and other marauders.  The apple tree is loaded with small but delicious apples and there are a half dozen watermelons ripening in the front yard.  The wine grapes have only just begun to ripen and have a long way to go.  They seem to be behind where they were last year in the process. Continue reading “Living off the land” →

2 a.m. alert
by rakeeter

It was a small but noisy thunderstorm that cruised through town in the wee hours Sunday morning and I might have been able to sleep through it if the weather alert radio hadn’t gone off.  The alert was a warning of possible flooding.  The only people that would hear the alarm are those who are home sleeping in their beds and in no danger from high water in our part of the world.  The drunks out on the road at that time of night aren’t  going to hear the alarm and probably wouldn’t respond appropriately if they did.  If there is a tornado hovering overhead or on the ground at the edge of town, well, fine, go ahead and wake us up.  But don’t interrupt the sweet slumber of the righteous for the possibility of flash flooding.  As it turned out we only got three tenths of an inch of rain, hardly enough to threaten anyone with any sense.  Granted, even after the three or four days of dry weather since the two three inches accumulated over last weekend the ground isn’t going absorb water very fast, but that little squall wasn’t going to create enough runoff to shake a stick at, even if there was anybody out on the roads to shake a stick. Continue reading “2 a.m. alert” →

Sitka
by rakeeter

We were told that Sitka gets about 90 inches of rain a year but no snow.  In fact, it doesn’t storm there.  That is, they don’t get the thunder storms with high winds, hail, drenching downpours and worse that we’re used to, or so we’re told.  No, that 90 inches comes in the form of drizzle.  Apparently we were lucky the day we were there  was dry.  It was still cloudy but it didn’t drizzle.  Our guide/bus driver was Anna, a transplanted Texan married to a Tlingit fellow.  She took us to a bear preserve.  Brown bears are present on the island and there was the occasional sign reminding people of that fact.  Anna told about several encounters some member of her family had had with bears in town, none resulting in harm but exciting nonetheless.  It was the standard practice to shoot orphan cubs, orphaned because the mother had been shot usually, because there was no way to care for them.  A man and his wife decided a few years ago to do something about that.  They acquired a couple of wood pulp vats a paper company had stopped using and made them into bear sanctuaries.  The vats are made of masonry, have walls maybe 12 feet high and enclose about three fourths of an acre each.  Water was diverted from a nearby stream and voila, they had bear enclosures.  It took them years of jumping through hoops to get the state approval for their project but within weeks of getting that approval they rescued their first bear cubs.  They are huge adult bears now and I think there were five of them, or maybe six.  They are two groups of siblings, a group in each vat.  Recently they built a corridor between the two vats which are only twenty feet or so apart and they allow the bears to visit each other from time to time.  They opened the corridor while we were there and there is a definite protocol the bears observe in passing from one vat to the other.  As I said these guys are huge and some are huger than others.  Those got to cross first.   I don’t know how they get the bears to go back to their own vat after one of these visits. Continue reading “Sitka” →