Good Evening/Morning Book junkies, I have not been around for a few days...thought I would check in on the book swap and happenings. Speaking of "Goodwill" and books.....I chuckle (just a little) when I think of a lovely, classy lady who had many books....many, many books. She kept them in boxes around her home. She always said that one day she would donate them. But for the time being they would stay put as she often would read them again. I offered to take them to Goodwill and she would always say no. In fact, she did not want anyone even looking through the boxes of books. Her husband got to the point that he could not stand it anymore....boxes of books everywhere. While his wife was gone one day, he took several of the large boxes of books to Goodwill for donation (yes, without telling her). When his wife returned home, she noticed that many of her beloved boxes of books were no longer "home". She became very upset and I mean very upset!!! She screamed and yelled and ranted and raved and called her husband every name in the book....I know because I was their. She was one pissed off woman. I did not blame her, especially after I heard why she was really so ticked off. Yes, she loved her romantic novels, mysteries, best sellers and biographies. But in her beloved books in so many boxes, she had hidden money to the sweet tune of $15,000. One book had $100, another book had $300, and so on. After she told her husband of the money that HE GAVE AWAY, I think he nearly died. He never touched one of her books again. To this day when I pick up a used book at a garage sale or donation facility, I page though it. You just never know what you might find in a book...a good mystery, lots of tears, laughter, romance and escape or.....a few bucks!!! Let me fetch the closest book. Page 56, sentence 5....... "Many pieces require highly intricate finishing touches and their tiniest details must be treated almost microscopiclly". Off to watch the news! Happy Wednesday! Annie previous 313 + 18 = 331 books

Update #1 I know I haven't technically gotten into the "lawn care" part of my backyard makeover, but I figured I'd give y'all an update anyway. My attack plan is to build our paver patio first, then work on reseeding the lawn when it gets cooler in a month or so. Here's where things stand after my first weekend working on the yard. See my original post for a 'before' pic of the yard. My goal for the weekend was a little too ambitious (especially considering it was 100 degrees here in Richmond this weekend): Take out the garden fence; cut down the garden plants; move the wood pile; remove the deck. The garden fence was waaaaay overbuilt with each post buried 3-4 feet down with two feet of concrete at the bottom. I had planned on pulling them out but I ended up just cutting the posts off about 8 inches below grade. The deck was similarly over built, with joists about every 10 inches. The guy used nails to build it instead of screws, which meant I have to cut on either side of each joist with a circular saw or else pry each board up. I'm about 2/3 done with the deck. The wood pile was a beast. About 200 cu ft of wood. I built a new rack for it and stored it against the back fence. This was the most time consuming job of the weekend and the hottest. That stretch between the old location of the wood pile and the new is only in the shade at dawn and after 6pm. We also got the two stumps ground on either side of the yard. They were ground to 8 inches below grade. This week I'll be spraying RoundUp against the fence on the left for the new raised beds and building those beds. I'll be filling them with the soil I excavate for the patio where the deck used to be. One quick question that didn't get answered above: Would this power rake rental from Home Depot do the trick for getting an inch into my soil to loosen everything up? It looks like the tines are loose and pivot on the central axel. Seems like I might need something with fixed tines. Any advice is appreciated.

Jennifer, My 7-day forecast has been fluctuating back and forth so much that I don't know which one to believe. Currently they have us in the lower 90s for highs, which sounds good...but that was sort of our forecast for yesterday and we went hotter and had a heat index of 108, so I don't know if I can trust even the lower 90s. It is aggravating. Today, though, was the bomb! They raised our chance of rain for today to 40% but the 7-Day QPF still showed us in the 0.01-0.10" category, so I wasn't really expecting much. Then, the cold front came through, the skies broke open, it got as dark as night in the middle of the day (I couldn't even see the rain or the hummingbird feeders hanging 6' from my front window) and poured and poured down rain----2.7" of it. Best of all, we dropped from the mid-70s to 68 degrees when the front came through and stayed there until the sun finally came out around 5 pm. Any day that we can stay in the 60s most of the day in August is a really good day. Now, I know we'll probably pay a price for all this rainfall, and likely it will be in the form of really high heat indices but it is hard to be unhappy about the kind of rain we received today. Unfortunately, it brought strong winds and lots of my plants are flattened and lying on the ground. I'll look at them tomorrow to see if they are going to stand back up on their own. Our county had the usual weather complications---some trees down, some power outages, internet and satellite TV knocked out for a few hours, some flash flooding, etc., but who cares.....we got rain! Of course, Tim's plans to mow all weekend long are dead in the water because our property is heavily waterlogged with huge puddles everywhere. There's no sense in wearing anything but water shoes, flip flops or boots outside because your feet are going to be soaked up to your ankles in 3 seconds. The chickens got tired of wet feet and sat on the porch steps for a long time after the rain ended, and the cats and dogs weren't any happier about the rain than the chickens were. I'm pretty sure there will be no mowing of lawn tomorrow because I think the riding mower, or even the push mower, would sink into wet clay and get stuck. We'll see how much it dries out by Sunday or Monday. Since I was totally stuck indoors all day, all I could do once the darkness passed was watch the hummingbirds fighting over the feeders. I think a lot of that nonsense they were engaging in designed was just to stay under the porch roof and out of the rain, which is fine. Oh,and I read the Cat 6 blog and watched TWC to see what's going on with Hurricane Dorian since Tim has cousins and one aunt and uncle in Florida. I think your bed will be fine by March if you go ahead and dump the chicken poo on it now so it has all winter to break down. Pumpkins and the vining types of winter squash/Korean summer squash go wherever they want and I mostly just let them because fighting them is too hard. Nancy, I'm glad the internet issues our resolved. When ours goes out, it almost always is weather-related, and it rarely goes out like it used to back when we had line-of-sight internet because the trees would interfere in that line-of-sight transmission. Now that the new transmission tower near us doesn't require line of sight all we have to do is roughly aim the received towards the tower (no precision needed any more) and we have service. When the roofers re-roofed our house a few weeks ago, they took down the receiver, shingled that area, put the receiver back and we hardly had any interruption in service at all. I'm not ready for football season to start and, yet, here it is! If only the weather, not counting tonight's weather, were feeling more like football weather. Amy, Public clothes! Ha! I thought I was the only one who has public clothing and private clothing. It takes a lot these days to get me to change out of my comfy private clothes and put on public clothes and go anywhere. I'm perfectly content to stay home and be more comfortable most of the time. Okmulgeeboy, That is a long commute. My husband makes a long commute from here (Love County) to Dallas to work and has been doing it since we moved here in 1999. For a few years, he carpooled with one of his coworkers who also lived here then, and that made it somewhat less tedious. He's used to it, though, and says he can get from DFW Airport to our house almost as quickly nowadays as he could get from DFW AIrport to the west side of Ft Worth when we lived there because the traffic down there in Fort Worth is so bad, and once he hits I-35 headed north, he never really has to stop so he makes good time. I understand about starting seedlings. They are very time-consuming. Jennifer, I hope y'all got enough rain today but not too much. I discussed our rain above so won't repeat it. It is so good to get rain, and it came in the nick of time. Believe it or not, yesterday I saw new cracks in the clay ground down near the gate, just days after the big old cracks had closed up. Surely today's rain took care of those new tiny cracks. I left the walk-in garage door open so mama feral cat could move her babies inside out of the rain, and she did. They look like they are about 3 weeks old at the most and they are extremely skittish---they act like they'll die if Tim or I lay eyes on them, so they hide the instant they hear us, see us or smell us. The difference between now and a few days ago is that this time she decided that she and the babies would stay indoors and not go back out this evening when the sun came back out. Maybe this is the first step to being able to see them, pet them and start to tame them. We don't have any grandchildren here this weekend. I think I'll be able to sleep in tomorrow morning! Woo hoo. I never sleep in. Dawn

I mowed the lawn yesterday. I did not get started until the lawn was in the shade, the mountain west of me, along with the trees gives me late evening shade. I mowed till around 9 PM. The mower has lights on it, but they are very low, plus not very bright, but fine for mowing in normal conditions. I quite when I got down to mowing along the electrical cords, air hose, and water hoses. I leave then out all the time when I use them often. The grass conceals them, and I dont want to chance cutting them with the mower. I have been keeping the grass higher this year trying to choke out the burrs. I have been trying to do more work at night because it is cooler. I am just not man enough to handle the heat like I use to. Madge does not like me being out at night. She like to be able to sorta keep an eye on me. She does not say a lot about me mowing because she can her the mower running, and it has safety switched on it to cut it off if I fall out of the seat. I have to carry my phone with me so she can call me if I am working out away from the house, which she does often, telling me it is time for bed, meaning she is ready to go to bed, and is uneasy if I am not in the house. I always try to comply with her wishes because she is only thinking of me. I could fall, or have a heart attack just as easy in the house, but still, I want her to be at ease. My cow peas are through and need to be cut down or pulled, this will give me room to have lettuce and other fall crops close to the house. I plan on planting more in the wildlife garden. I am hoping that some of my growing food will rub off on the kids and grand kids. I expect some will, but not a lot. When I was in my 20's, I had a lot of things I had rather be doing that I thought was more fun than being in the garden. The deer, or something, have eaten my pumpkins back so many times that I wont have pumpkins by Halloween. I was hoping that the little girls that were helping me plant them would have some pumpkins to sell, but they lost interest very quickly, I think the main thing they were interested in was driving grand pa's utv. The Old Timey Cornfield pumpkin should make some mature pumpkins, they have been planted longer than the Halloween pumpkins. We timed the Halloween pumpkins to mature early to mid Oct. We did not allow deer recovery time. I got a hand full of PEPH peas from the wildlife garden, the deer had picked them pretty clean. I hope to have a better set-up next year. I am hoping to have a lot of hot wires running through and around the area that I want to grow food. I dont think it will be as easy as in the past, I think that the deer will just figure out that all they have to do is jump the wire. When that happened a few years ago, I just ran extra wires, so they would jump one, only to land on another one. It has also worked well when I string a hot wire along the rows where they will get their head in the wire when they try to eat the produce. I am so tired of this heat. At this time I cant complain about the lack of water, we have had good rain for the past week, or more. My neighbor that broke his hip is in the rehab hosp, and I suppose he is doing well, I cant go see him, but he calls when he needs something and I take it and drop it off.. My other neighbor is needing help also, but I am not able to do some of the things he needs done, plus he has a son about 10 miles away that is in much better shape than I am. I hate not to help, but the thing he needed done would have to be done by a younger man anyway. I had better get up and get some of my projects done, I dont have a Handy Man to help me. I thought I was on week three when I posted this, maybe I am still asleep.