Set point


Tuesday evening we got to enjoy one of the best volleyball matches we’ve watched since Abigail started playing.  The opponent was Lubbock Coronado and the match was played in Tascosa’s Old Main (original) gym.  The Mustangs took the first game 25-16 and the Rebels had to work hard to get it that close.  The Mustangs didn’t play with a lot of power but it was difficult to get anything past them.  They just made fewer mistakes the first game.  The second game the two teams played neck and neck until Coronado started to pull away.  Chloe went on a run with her serve and the rest of the girls started backing her up.  Chloe, if she gets going, can dismantle a lot of teams but not this one.  She was hitting zingers but they were digging them out so it was a team effort to win the point.  The Rebels pulled back even and then away for a solid win.  It came down to the third game and neither team had any quit in it.  It went back and forth until the Rebels opened a lead and got to 24.  The Mustangs had a hitter of their own and she got her team to 22 before the Rebels put them away.  Fittingly it was an Abigail set for a Chloe smash that finally sealed the win.  They had been running that successfully throughout the match, in fact all season.  Abigail had several smashes of her own.  She’s learning to use her height to good effect.  Since one of their teammates was called up to the A team, Abigail doesn’t come out of the game and I think that is helping her to improve.  She’s getting pretty good in all phases of the game.

We got to see a rattlesnake Saturday.  My Texas Master Naturalist training class was on a guided ruins tour in the Alibates area.  The ruins were left by the Antelope Creek people.  The houses they built of stone are nothing but a few rocks scattered around now.  The big diamond back was in the area of some petroglyphs scratched into the caprock along the Canadian River valley rim.  He was a handsome fellow.  After the tour, we had an end-of -training celebration in McBride Canyon.  It was nice weather for it.

Joyce and I looked at the weather forecast for the week Sunday and decided we’d better get busy and take down the tomato patch. Joyce wanted to clear it out early to maybe reduce some of the pests next year. Also, she was tired of trying to keep up with it. It looked like rain starting Wednesday so we got busy Monday and by Tuesday we had removed all the vines, loaded them in the pickup and trucked them out to the dump. Good thing, too, because the forecast was right. It started raining Wednesday afternoon and by Friday we’d gotten over three inches. That’s over 35 inches for the year and counting.

Doc and I tackled some trees recently, dead ones that needed removal. The drought claimed three spruces, one a good-sized tree, probably as tall as a telephone pole. I had trimmed the limbs off the trunks so there wouldn’t be a constant rain of dead needles, etc. until I had time to remove the rest of the tree. We also trimmed the old cottonwood. It had two honkin’ trunk-like limbs sticking up, leftovers from its heyday. I didn’t want them to come down on their own and mash somebody or something but the tree still had life in it so I left the main trunk with the still-living limbs. It won’t surprise me if I have to go back and remove the rest of the tree someday, but in the current wet cycle it just might begin to prosper again. There were several dead elms along the southeast lane; not big trees and manageable by a couple of elderly gentlemen. The biggest of the three had more branches and it appears they offered enough wind resistance so that when the ground was really wet from some of the rain we’ve had this year and the wind got up it made the tree lean because it was semi-uprooted. Doc suggested we use the pickup to pull it down so we removed the limbs almost down to the main trunk and had a go. It required no effort at all for the pickup to pull it over, which meant no stump. We chopped it up into pieces and loaded them in the truck, then used that technique with success on the other two. Doc has done a lot of tree trimming and knows what he’s doing. I also know what I’m doing and between the two of us we were able to get more done in four or five hours than I would have been able to do by myself probably in several months. The parts of the trees that were of a size suitable for firewood we cut up and stacked in situ. Now all I have to do is split the bigger pieces into fireplace-sized chunks.

Saturday we went to another volleyball game. This time the opponent was Amarillo High, which had beaten our girls a couple of weeks ago in a match played at Tascosa. This game was played at Amarillo High and was a replay of the game described above. It was every bit as exciting, too, with the Sandies taking the first game and our Rebels winning the remaining two to claim the match.