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Rider on the Storm

by Richie

It’s been storming for a month now. Big, rolling storms that ride in from the southwest on fast moving fronts. These late summer storms can be dangerous, spawning tornadoes and fierce winds. Makes you keep a wary eye on the sky.

Usually by now the weather has dried out a bit and we can slow down our endless mowing chores. But this year has been exceptionally wet and steamy and the grass is still growing tall, practically overnight.

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Hoo boy – it’s been a month of mishaps. Is Mercury in retrograde or something?

A couple of weeks ago our much anticipated high-speed internet was finally installed. It lasted two whole days before we ripped the cable off the house with the RV.  

Mishap

Yeah, the cable guy hung the wire too low and it snagged on the roof of the RV the first time we passed underneath. 

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Dishing It Out

by Richie

We have very slow internet at the farm. When we moved out here there was only one option to connect to the world wide web and that was by Pony Express. Oops, I mean satellite dish.  

Not that I want to name names (Dish) but smoke signals would be faster than the internet service provided by this unnamed company (Dish). 

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A Mess to PEX

by Richie

Plumbing

I’ve been fooling around with pipes lately. Tobacco pipes? Bagpipes? Nope, plumbing pipes.

We built a log cabin at the farm some 20 years ago and the plumbing system has been a constant source of failure. Pipes leaked, faucets didn’t work, water lines froze. All these problems were the result of doing the plumbing ourselves. We’re really bad at it. No skill at all. Add that to the non-standard, we-made-it-up-as-we-went-along indoor plumbing system and you get two decades of failures.

Plumbing

 

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Smelly spot

Old Annie was a dog that lived on the farm some years ago. She was gentle and kind and pleased to have company on a long walk. We would follow Annie through the woods, down to the creek, and all around the farm. Inevitably she’d lead us to a spot and stop. It would be an old stump or groundhog hole. Her tail would wag happily and she’d look up as if to say, ”See? Isn’t this great!” 

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Photo Copy

by Richie

Every once in a while I go on a binge and read somebody’s blog from the beginning. Like Bumfuzzle, or Gone With The Wynns, or that dude that hiked from Mexico to Canada. These folks are daring adventurers and they inspire me to get off the couch and travel.

This month I’m following the trail of Mr. Quintin Lake on his blog The Perimeter. He’s walking the entire coastline of England. And as if that’s not ambitious enough, he’s photographing his journey along the way.

But what makes his blog so extraordinary is that Mr. Lake is a professional photographer. Award winning, even. And his work is absolutely stunning.

I’ve spent a lot of time studying his technique. He’s an architectural photographer and seems to concentrate on linear forms. Not only is his subject matter fascinating, but the framing of his shots are pure genius.

Now, I don’t have a $6,000 camera outfit like the professionals, but I do have a very respectable compact Nikon (P340) that has lots of manual controls. So I thought I’d wander around the farm and try to copy Mr. Lake’s style, including his square frame format.

Fence post

Fence post

 

Bluebird house

Bluebird house

 

Tractor implements

Tractor implements

 

Hay Wagon

Hay Wagon

 

Corn crib

Corn crib

 

Retired cattle gates

Retired cattle gates

 

Can’t say I’m ready for the pros yet, but I am pleased with how some of the photos turned out. And if I took the time to learn Lightroom editing, well, there’d be no stopping me!

 

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Two Thousand Seventeen

by Richie

sunset-2

Winter at the Farm

The sun sets low between the knobs this time of year. From the back deck I can mark the progress of the seasons as Old Sol marches southward from his summer resting place. At the peak of August, he lingers long behind the hill to the northwest, lively and showy with color, reluctant to allow Evening her turn. But by January, Sol seems weary and retires with a thin and hurried sunset far to the southwest, as if the effort is all too much.

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Steady Bee

by Richie

s2

The corn top’s ripe and the meadow’s in the bloom…

According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, this week marks the official end to the Dog Days of Summer. So there’s hope that these hot, hazy, humid afternoons that fog our windows and send us galloping indoors to the depths of central air-conditioning may be dwindling down to a temperature more in the range of what a human can reasonably tolerate, without risking heat stroke just by walking to the car.

 

hoverflyThis has been the summer of Steady Bees. The steady bee is a small insect with a yellow and black striped body that mimics a bumble bee. But unlike a bee, they have no stinger and only two wings, which technically makes them a fly. (Bees have four wings.) The peculiar talent of the steady bee is to hover about an inch off a flat surface, which is usually your arm, leg, phone, or any other object in your immediate vicinity. Occasionally the steady bee will land and take a momentary rest, again on your arm, leg, or coffee cup rim, but mostly they hover in place. In fact, the real name for these manifestly annoying insects is the Hover Fly. And we are full-up with them this year.

swarm lady 2

Steady bees hover around anywhere there is a slice of shade. Under the gazebo, beneath the steps, below the door handle, around the carport. These are all the places that we hover around too, and so we are persistently swarmed by steady bees.

 

s1

A quick flick of the hand will disperse a posse of steady bees long enough to make an escape and sprint into the house or hustle into a car. And since we are always doing these kind of things, entering the house for instance, or standing under the gazebo which is the only source of shade for a good part of the day, we are in a constant state of herky-jerky arm flailing. If we had flags in our hands we would be sending semaphore signals to the fleet.

help

As it is, the Great Steady Bee Battle is only a small part of our ongoing war with a vast and insidious onslaught of painful and loathsome rural insects. There are horseflies and wasps, hornets and yellow jackets, bumble bees and sweat bees, and the invisible evil twins chiggers and turkey mites, who launch themselves unseen from the tall grass and burrow under your skin, usually in places unmentionable and terribly tender. And then there’s the ticks. Big ticks and little ticks. Dog ticks and deer ticks. And teeny weeny micro-ticks that are so small they can easily masquerade as a freckle until you realize, often unhappily days later, that you’ve been a warm meal for the little bloodsucker since you walked across that unmown field last Tuesday.

Come to think of it, maybe I’ll just stay on the porch with the steady bees.

 

 

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