Today was our 43rd wedding anniversary, and it was a beautiful day for it with blue skies, few if any clouds, nice temperatures, and a faint breeze. While we were eating breakfast Linda spotted what she thought was a female wild turkey in the back yard. Binoculars revealed it to be a male Mongolian Ring-Necked Pheasant, the first one we have seen here. A pair of robins have a nest under our deck and we have been watching them come and go. We had a rabbit on our front porch this evening that was intent on picking something out of the sisal fiber door mat. It kept the cats transfixed for a very long time as they sat stone still and watched it from less than three feet away through a window next to the door, never revealing their presence. The hunting instincts of domestic cats are still very powerful.
We took it easy yesterday and the day before as were both still recovering from being ill. We were both finally feeling enough better, however, to get a decent night’s sleep and spend enough time at our desks during the day and get some things done. I also had a nice chat with my sister and filled her in on our plans to visit St. Louis in late June.
Keith came over and cut our neighbor’s grass (5 acre lot) and then cut ours (another 5 acre lot). The boundary line between our two lots is a long low swale that drains towards the pond to our east, sort of. It has marsh grass in some low spots and Keith managed to get his zero-turn mower stuck in the soft ground near one of them. Neither of us had a tow rope, strap, cable, or chain but I found some scrap 10-3 + ground electrical cable. I added some “fresh” gasoline to our lawn tractor tank (it had been in a full, air-tight can with fuel stabilizer for the last year), checked the oil, put a battery charger on the tractor battery, and managed to get it started. The electrical cable was long enough (20+ feet) that I was able to keep my lawn tractor out of the really soft soil. A little bit to my surprise the lawn tractor and electrical cable were up to the task and able to pull the zero-turn free. I was thinking of getting rid of the lawn tractor but perhaps I will keep it. Not to cut grass, but to haul around a small utility/garden trailer for moving mulch and other garden and small landscaping materials. I may just remove the mower deck as it does not work well anyway.
Yesterday I spent a good part of the afternoon and some of the evening writing an article for our FMCA GLCC newsletter on the recent Escapade rally. After Linda proof-read it I selected 10 photos I had used in blog posts about the event, inserted them at the end of the article, provided captions, packaged everything in a Dropbox folder, and got an e-mail off to the newsletter editors with the Dropbox link and editorial instructions.
Butch (and Fonda) called yesterday evening to wish us a happy anniversary because they thought our anniversary was the same day as theirs. It’s not; they have been married one day longer than we have.
Gary was scheduled to come over yesterday morning to discuss our pole barn project but it was raining heavily at the time, and was forecast to rain most of the day, so we rescheduled for Friday afternoon. Village Landscape was tentatively scheduled to start work today on our front entrance sidewalk/stairs and rear retaining walls. I knew that wasn’t guaranteed as they were still finishing up projects that fell behind because of how wet May has been. Once it started raining hard I knew I would not see them today and probably not this week. If they cannot start soon we may have to put them off until next month after GLAMARAMA.
Mike (W8XH) came over this morning to help us with some Windows 8/8.1 issues. We had a problem this winter in the bus where Linda was not able to connect her Windows 8 Samsung to our NAS device via a WiFi connection to our network. She has had the same problem when connecting wirelessly to our network at home. Mike suspected that it had to do with the workgroup name settings and/or the Win 8/8.1 “home group” settings. He took care of Linda’s Samsung laptop first and that turned out to be the case. She left to get her hair cut and we turned our attention to my new ASUS laptop. By the time we finished we had all of the issues on my list resolved and some good thoughts about how to approach a few other things. We discussed the SLAARC WP website development and made a few decisions about when/how we want to unveil it and what functionality needs to be in place by that time.
In the past we would normally go out for dinner on our anniversary but decided to dine in tonight. Linda made amazing pasta and lentils dish with salsa and walnuts. I know, it sounds crazy, but it was soooo good. It was one of the top 10 recipes for 2011 from the OhSheGlows website. She also made a refrigerated vegan double-chocolate torte dessert thingy. It was almost too good to eat, but we managed to each have a piece. 🙂