Early on, I knocked a bunch off the tree as even when they were grape-sized I could see there were too many.

I didn’t take near enough.

The extremely heavy crop, combined with some wind from a storm last week, smashed two of the big limbs on our peach tree.

I trimmed it up…there’s still enough peaches to fill a pick-up.

Poor tree. Pics later. It should recover…it’s an amazing producer…and freestone too!

Mmmmm…peaches. They should be about ready this coming weekend…

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

Yeah, it’s summer.

Maintenance stuff more than rennovating stuff this weekend…I got all the tree limbs we cut a couple weeks ago (a metric sh!t-ton) and some more I trimmed Saturday all chopped up and burned.

I also cleaned up an old burn barrel site (glass, and tons of bailing wire for some reason) by shoveling it into feed-sacks and throwing it away…

Mowing got done…weedeating got done…

Oh, and we cleaned a bunch of trash out of our building on the square just for good measure.

A hot weekend for that kind of work…

I also fiddled more with the paint-sprayer…which I thought I had fixed but it is still not working right…this is a problem…I really need to spray some of these jobs to do it right…and the budget says I can’t buy a better rig at the moment…but this one is not cooperating. A date with a shotgun may be in its future…

There was a bicycle event in Clarksville this weekend…so there was live music on the square Saturday night…the square is very pleasant once the shade shows up…balmy, breezy. Texas summer night magic…

The band was Native Pride, a rock Band featuring Clarksville Native Wendell Davis. They are quite good and did a couple sets of great music.

Me and the wife spent a nice evening, arm in arm, sitting on a park bench on the square enjoying the breeze and listening to the music…

Music…a nice Italian dinner, a bottle of wine…

Yeah, Texas summer night magic.

Working hard and living well.

Hope y’all are doing the same!

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

Several things conspired. Lots of work at…well…work, not enough sleep (due to same), and also we got the wife’s car back from the body shop. All the extra running around simply added up to the fact that we weren’t ready to go Friday night or Saturday morning.

Then, as we were getting ready to go I got the call…one of the newspapers I help support had lost power. Work again.

Oh, and then there was the 100+ degree forecast for the weekend…

All this said, “Take the weekend off! Sleep late!”

Sleep late…a luxury I seldom indulge. Sounded really good to me.

To sleep, perchance to dream, ay…there’s the rub.

That’s Shakespeare, in case you didn’t recognize it.

So what did I dream of? Scraping paint. Broken paint sprayers, a yard I need to mow, and a mammoth pile of tree limbs I need to cut up. I haven’t worked that hard in months!

Sleeping late is exhausting work. I think I woke up sore!

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

They are back again this year. Roses are blooming with wild abandon all over town!

Here’s a couple of ours!

It’s been a really nice spring!

Hmmmm…the month of May now, is it? Texas? About time for the temps to be set to “deep fat fry”.

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

In our surburban “blah” house in Garland, Halloween had faded away. The number of kids sliding each year and the effort they put into the costumes fading into nothing.

Even so, in our new small town, we figured (and it turns out, rightly so) that it would be a good holiday.

I wove a spider web out of 150′ of rope light, and then had to have a spider suitable to go with it.

A few pumpkins that we somehow never got around to converting to jack-o-laterns added some fall festiveness, and a bunch of red lightbulbs cast an appropriately eerie glow over the entire thing.

I was a pirate, and the wife was a cat-lady (Rowr!). Sorry, no pics of us (we forgot). Maybe next year!

We figure we’ll add one major decoration each year. This was it for this year, as time was limited for setting things up. In future years we’ll light the tower as well.

We had LOTS of kids. Well over 100. Probably closer to 200. Most had great costumes and showed that they had made some effort. All were polite and behaved. Many “knew” the house was haunted.

Some were “eyes on the prize” and didn’t notice the giant spider till after they had scampered up the porch and gotten their treat. Others would talk to it…one adorable little girl dressed as a witch noticed the broom and witches’ hat trapped in the spider web and got right up in the spider’s face and scolded it, “You aren’t eating THIS witch!”

One little boy (toddler) in dragon pajamas grabbed it by the pincers and said, “No! Bad spider!”

All in all, a good time. We probably gave out 50 pounds of candy, insuring dentists everywhere will have work in the coming year.

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

At least one of them is an alien.

See this thing?

There was no sign of it when we bought the house…well, maybe a little sign…a small dead space on the ground around the rose bush…

Then this thing exploded…during the summer it took over the rosebush (presumably still alive and dormant deep in the digestive tract of the invader), then it ripped down the trellis and threw it across the yard. Then it cascaded across the yard. As best as I can tell it is still growing and unless the winter slows it down, it will take over all of east Texas by Thursday. I even crashed into it with the lawnmower and it hasn’t phased it.

It has nuclear blooms, ya see.

It seems to bloom in the evening and at night…

And as you can see, the radiation is causing the camera problems (don’t you people *WATCH* science fiction?) Nuclear blooms is undoubtably a bad thing.

Run for the hills! Save yourselves! You only have a short amount of tim……

(endtrans)

The most productive tree…it’s about a 25 footer. It had TONS of large peaches.

This tree is weighed down with them, but they are all very small (very tasty though!)

The bigger tree again…this limb is strained to the breaking point. There are already hundreds on the ground.

YUM!

About 12 pounds or so…

Twenty minutes work racked up about 50 pounds or so, all off the big tree. It still looked like I hadn’t touched it.

We gave away most of those to friends and neighbors…and picked that many yet again to bring home and freeze. There are still hundreds on the tree…and had we been at the house over the last couple weeks continiously (instead of just the weekend) we could have gotten many that fell to the ground (before they fell).

Oh, and none of this counts the dozen or more I ate during my various labors this weekend!

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer

There are three peach trees in our backyard at the Old Vic. It’s a bumper crop. They are are bowed to the ground with peaches.

They were not quite ripe last weekend, but many were falling anyway…making it quite interesting when I was weed-eating under the trees…

Bzzzzzzzzzz splat splut splatter SPLUT SPLATTER SPLAT! Gack!

(from the wife): “You smell like peaches!”

(me licking my lips): “I taste like peaches too!”

Anyway, we expect this weekend they will be ready.

Not sure what we’re going to do with them all. I suppose I’ll work on making myself sick on peaches this weekend!

CUAgain,
Daniel Meyer