…like kids. I catch grief from most of my extended family for not wearing a shirt during the hottest part of the summer. Note the kids’ attire:
Kudos to Susan
for my funny and clever Father’s Day breakfast. Even more amusing was that she first sent Brady in with a tray decked out with all the kids’ toy foods from their kitchen play set.
We’ll have a bountiful apple crop this year
I have 22 productive apple trees on my property. Most of them are definitely bearing fruit this year, sticking with the pattern of great crops every other year. Figure on us having a big cider making party around October when the majority of the fruit is ripe enough. Here’s a good sample of what’s to come:
I picked four colanders of strawberries today
Here’s two of them:
I could have easily picked at least two more. Our strawberries are ridiculously productive this year!
Got goats?
We do, 7 of them, including this 3 month old. We rented them from a local business, The Goat Girls, to clear poison ivy from the front of the property. The young one needs a bottle every morning to supplement, and the kids have been having a blast feeding it.
This weekend’s main project
a hoop house to hold bird netting to protect our blueberries. $30 or so in parts, and really not that hard to put together:
My son’s first comprehensible picture
look carefully and you can see what he was going for here. This is the first time I have really seen this in his art:
Sadly, this is my son’s most significant 4th birthday present
His third febrile seizure and a day on the couch with an also sick and feverish Dad. Susan’s sick too, worse than me, but had to go to work because so many other people are sick and she has to cover shifts on the reference desk at the library. Brady’s taking it in stride, mostly:
Anyone else see the problem here?
That’s my driveway. It’s a bit of an optical illusion – those trees are not as immediate a threat to my power line as they appear, but how they got to this state suggests they may soon be. Several years ago we had a freakish 10+” snowstorm in October when trees still had most of their leaves. It damaged and killed tons of trees in our area, and we had no power for almost 7 days as a result. It also took me 2 years to clean up my own property. One of the leaning trees in this photo was killed during that storm, and has slowly, ever so slowly been toppling over, grabbing other trees on the way down. A recent windstorm changed the angle by at least 15 degrees or so, and a collapse now seems imminent. If they fell on their own they are unlikely to hit our power line despite how it appears in the photo, but our worry is they will pull trees on the other side of the driveway down with them, and those will reach the power line.
Long story short we called a tree guy, who is going to take those down and also remove all limbs anywhere near our power line so we don’t confront this problem any more. Meanwhile here’s hoping no storms bring them down before he can get the work done.
Dual birthday party a rousing success
Here’s the family sans me shortly before the festivities commenced:
Since their birthdays are so close together we decided to hold a joint birthday party this year, once again at the Holyoke Children’s Museum. The kids love the place and had a blast. We had a about 20 children attend along with roughly as many parents, and everything went off without a hitch. Afterwords we visited the adjacent Holyoke Merry go round for a ride and both kids met Santa Clause for the first time, which they also loved. Hopefully Susan or I will get more photos up of the festivities – if we find time to do that I’ll post the link here.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 