We floated the river today because we could. It was mid 80's and there's more water than I've ever seen for this time of year. It wasn't actually that fun - slow, slow, slow with an upriver breeze that had us going backwards at times. The yellow jackets were swarming us and I got stung once. But what the heck, how often can you go rafting this late in the year?
I mowed the lower yard on Thursday and after spending a good 2 hours cleaning up dog poop, branches, toys, bones, and various chewed up garbage, I finally mowed the upper yard. It looks nice. We have some serious sprinkler repair to get on and I need to get water to the Z5 garden soon. I've been working on cleaning that out and have made some headway. I want to put bark down for mulch after I've gotten it cleaned out and fertilized. Alas, there is none at the pipe store.
I've planted most of what Deb gave me and we planted a blueberry in the veg garden yesterday. Put lots of peat moss in, hoping to raise the acidity and water retention. We'll see. We're going to plant raspberries by the grapes on the other side. It's too hard to till there because the space is so small with the grape in the corner. Spuds and onions are in and Greg fixed all the places where the deer blew through the fence last winter. I'm having the worst luck ever with seed germination this year. I'm on my second seeding of tomatoes and so far none have come up. I have 4 early girls from the first go around and that's it. The melons came up, but not much else. It's not just me; I talked to Tess yesterday and she had to plant her tomatoes twice also. She was pretty bummed that she lost all the heirloom seed she had gotten from a friend who passed away.
I don't really have much compost this year because I never turned the pile last year. I used Larry's tractor to mix it up this weekend, but it doesn't look usable yet. I'm in need of some soil for various things. Dang.
We made a trip to Home Depot last week and picked up a new push mower and garden wagon. I exercised great restraint and only bought one grass. Ruby promptly chewed it to shreds. Sigh.
It's been going back and forth between really nice warm days with bright blue skies, and chillin' back down to the teens. Today is kind of gray and mild. It's very icy to walk anywhere with the constant thaw and freezing going on. We have about 14" or so on the ground. I'm ordering seeds and such today.
We had 16º this morning, up from -7º for about a week straight. It's hard to try to house train the pup when you don't feel like standing out in sub-zero temps waiting for her to do her business. We had a trace of snow last night.
We let the fire go out last night before we went to bed and woke up to a 58º house. I think we need to get the furnace looked at, but hate to put money into it when they told us it would need replacing soon. The stupid smoke alarm went off this morning at 3 am, 5 am, and 7 am for no apparent reason. The first time scares the bejesus out of you and after that, it just pisses you off! I knew we couldn't possibly have a chimney fire because we let the fire go out.
I'm so sick of winter.
We got dumped on Saturday - a good 15 inches, bringing our total up to about 23. It's been a few years since we had a real snow year, it looks like this might be one. Spent several hours yesterday shoveling and blowing. The plow dude came by about 7 pm and cleaned things up. Larry's tractor is broken again so he was out today blowing his entire driveway. Yikes. No new today and still unseasonably warm - mid 30s when I got up this morning.
