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Starry Night

/ Re-Farmer / 4 Comments

I went outside late last night, and ended up staying out longer to enjoy the incredible view!

Even with the yard light on (we can’t turn it off since the power company replaced the original), the stars were bright enough that I could see the Milky Way!

Then I went out again later, with my daughters, to ogle the sky.

My husband gave me his new phone not long ago, to replace mine with the cracked corner, and I had yet to try night shots with it. I put it on manual and basically guessed at the settings I was changing – I could barely see the numbers, never mind read them. After fiddling with the settings, I would lay the phone down on the ground, then use voice commands to take a picture.

Then I’d fuss with the settings a bit more, set it on the ground and try again. Eventually, I figured out how to do a long exposure shot – and recognize the sounds the phone made, so I wouldn’t accidentally pick it up again, before the exposure was complete. :-D

This is one of the results.

The only thing I’ve done to this image is resize it.

I’m really amazed at the shots I was able to get with just a cell phone!!!

The Re-Farmer

Which one is next?

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I managed a bit of work in the yard, during a break in the high winds we’ve been having for the past while.

There were so many tiny branches and twigs fallen from the Chinese elm in front of the house, I needed to use a rake to pick them up.

I also found this.

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Two more down

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Between the high winds and rain we’ve been having recently, it’s been a while since my rounds have included all the perimeter of the spruce grove.

The predicted storms have, once again, passed us by – this time to the south – but we have been getting rain almost constantly for the last while.

Which would have been wonderful in the spring. The farmers in the middle of harvesting their crops are now being hit with a triple whammy. A cold late spring followed by a hot dry summer, and now when hot and dry is what the crops need, it’s cold and wet.

That’s the reality of farming, though, and everyone just goes with it. What else can you do?

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Morning company

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In the last while, the kittens have become more interested in following me around as I do my morning rounds. Especially when I go to switch the memory card in the trail cam. Usually, it’s just one or two kittens, though.

This morning, my daughter came along, and that really got their attention, so we had 4 of them from the start. :-D

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Blustery

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The girls and I were able to get out for a wonderful visit with my older brother today. We had a fantastic time, and we got a tour of their yard, including the hundreds of new trees they planted!

Gotta love having a big enough yard to be able to do something like that. :-D

Blue Spruce tips

This picture is of one of their blue spruces that they planted years ago, looking nice and healthy, in spite of the dryness. What a difference it makes when something is planted with planning and care! At least some of the blue spruce I have found here would have been planted at about the same time, give or take a year or two, and should be looking more like this. Hopefully, with the clearing I’ve done, the surviving ones will recover.

Of course, the RCMP called me back after we left. I wasn’t expecting a follow up call so soon! The officer is going to call again this evening, so I’m staying near the phone now.

It’s been one heck of a day, outside. While there were high winds at my brother’s, the winds are even higher here at home. I’ve already done a check around the yard. There are lots of small branches on the ground but, so far at least, not a lot of larger ones. It’s getting winder even as I write this, though, so I’m not going to start picking them up until tomorrow, at the earliest. (Oh, wow, are the maple branches out my window ever being flung around as I write this!!!) The bird feeder was blown over when we got back and I put it back up again, only to have it blow over soon after. I’m leaving it for now, since there’s no point in putting it back up until things calm down.

Right now, we’re at 30C, with a “real feel” of 34C. We were supposed to get thunderstorms tonight, but now the predictions are for thunderstorms starting tomorrow afternoon. The weather system causing the winds right now has storms in it, too, but from the weather radar, they’re all going to pass to the north of us.

What a thing, to actually wish for storms to hit, just so we can get some rain!

The Re-Farmer

Clean up: the old wood pile – a bit of progress

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It’s been a while, but I managed to get a bit of progress on cleaning up the old wood pile.

This is almost how it looked when I left off last time.

I didn’t realize I’d neglected taking a picture after we shifted the doghouse aside and I took away the pallet it was on.

Today, I started digging and pulling up what I could of the rotted out pallets.

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It’s been a few days

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I haven’t made a solid post in a while, so it’s time to catch up on things.

The short version is pretty simple.

I’m tired.

So tired.

Which is actually one of the reasons I bit the bullet and saw the doctor a few days ago.

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Making mead, part 4: transferring for second fermentation

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We’re back to making Meeeeeead, Baby!

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

We are actually a bit late on this. After 10 days in the fermentation bucket, when we should have started sanitizing things and transferring the must to the carboy, we were instead dealing with hot water tank problems.

Pretty sure it’ll be fine. ;-)

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Unexpected Finds

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So… it’s been interesting lately.

While moving the chimney blocks from their stacks to where the retaining wall is going to be, we found an old aftershave bottle. My daughter did some research, and estimates that it’s from the 1980’s.

It turns out there are collectors for these out there! *L*

So she gave it a good washing, including trying to clean the inside.

See that stuff in the sink in the back ground?

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Some manual labour, and getting things started

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After dropping one daughter off at work, my other daughter and I did a whole bunch of manual labour around the yard.

The first thing we did was haul away the stuff I’d clean up in the old wood pile area, including moving the pile of debris to the back of the outhouse, and sorting through the pile of found objects and garbage.

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