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| A sunflower in my garden. |
I guess my attitude toward August is a bit ambivalent. I often state that I do not like the month, but then I find myself reveling in the unique glory of it– the warmth, the late summer feel of the air, the look of the light. These August mornings and evenings have been exquisite. They are cool and luscious. We often have morning low fog now that softens the dawn light.
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| Squash blossom. |
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| The snapdragons are beautiful right now. |
The flower garden is past its prime now, but there are still some beautiful flowers. The vegetable garden is maturing and we are enjoying its bounty. We’re eating beets, carrots, cabbages, cucumbers, raspberries, and zucchini regularly. I love fresh food straight from the garden to the table.
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| Morning glories. |
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| Raspberries. |
We’ve been taking a lot of walks, enjoying the fine weather and getting some exercise. Some of us have FitBits that urge us to take at least 10,000 steps a day and that means walks up the road, to the woods, even to places we’ve never walked to before.
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| Scenes from our walks: Burrell's barn. |
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| Scenes from our walks: Road through the woods. |
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| Scenes from our walks: Towards the woods. |
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| Scenes from our walks: Along the edge of the forest. |
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| Scenes from our walks: The top of the hill looking towards Raymond. |
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| Scenes from our walks: Headed towards home. |
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| Scenes from our walks: Gold in the distance. |
We’ve been on our Elimination Diet for a week now and it has gone well – for the most part. There has been a little bit of sighing and groaning over things we can’t eat right now, but no one has abandoned the diet so far. Knowing that it’s all temporary helps.
We worked on projects last week. The new toilet arrived and is now installed and we have checked the bathroom off the projects list. We laid out the window pieces for the greenhouse and realized several things. First, when you lay panes of glass on the lawn and leave them there for two hours on a sunny day, enough heat builds up under them to kill the grass underneath. My poor lawn looks terrible now. It will recover – eventually. The second thing we realized was that our greenhouse plans were far too ambitious. We lack the skills necessary for building it. It would have required very precise measuring and framing. The slightest mistake would have made it impossible to erect. So we have downsized the plan and will make glass boxes, like miniature greenhouses, instead. I used to have glass boxes like that but their wooden frames rotted and I got rid of them. These new boxes will be sturdy and will last a very long time. We’ll work on building them this week.
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| The greenhouse pieces all laid out on the lawn. |
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| The damaged lawn. |
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| The new toilet - at last. |
We also started working on cleaning out the barn. I say started, but it was a very roundabout start. The manure and straw will be deposited in a new raised bed out in the vegetable garden, so we had to build the raised bed first. We finished that yesterday and never did get to the shoveling manure part. That’s another job we’ll do this week.
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| The new raised bed awaiting the manure. |
I’m taking advantage of having Daniel here to help me. I won’t have him much longer. He is headed out on a big adventure at the end of the month. He will be traveling to Europe where he will meet up with his cousin Emma (Stacey’s older sister’s youngest daughter) to work in a refugee camp in Greece and then on an organic farm in Italy. He won’t be home again until November.
It is a fine day today. We’re home from church and lunch is in the works. From all the singing and laughing coming from the kitchen, it sounds like it will be a good meal. With another day of fine weather, we’ll have to take a walk this afternoon. And there are chores and a nap somewhere in all that too. Tomorrow is the solar eclipse. We thought for a second (and only a second) of driving down to the Thayn’s house in Nashville to see it, but that is a long trip and there is too much craziness going on to make it feasible. I’ve read that many areas are expecting gridlock traffic as people flock to the full eclipse areas. We’ll see a partial eclipse here and that’s good enough for me. I’ve read that some people are predicting all sorts of natural disasters caused by the eclipse. To me that sounds like something right out of the Middle Ages. I think any associated disasters will be manmade. I think most of us will still be here on Tuesday. If we’re not, it’s been fun.
