Upcoming Holidays – August 30, 2021

I find it hard to believe that it’s only nine weeks until the best month of the year!

  • Next Monday is Labor Day πŸ‘¨β€πŸ­ – Sep 6
  • Four Mondays until More Night then Day 🌌 – Sep 27
  • Five Mondays until Last Sunset After 6:30 PM πŸŒ† – Oct 4
  • Nine Mondays until November πŸ₯§ – Nov 1
  • Nine Mondays until Average High is 55 πŸ‚ – Nov 1
  • 13 Mondays until Cyber Monday πŸ›οΈ – Nov 29
  • 14 Mondays until Saint Nicholas Day πŸŽ… – Dec 6
  • 14 Mondays until First Sunday of Advent ✝️ – Dec 6
  • Four months – Bacon Day πŸ₯“ – Thursday Dec 30

What can I say, hogs are a good thing as long as they are kept down wind of your homestead. A good note to end this list on.

North Up to Piseco-Powley

All along this area are designated campsite "pull-off" areas with little more then a stone fire rings cobbled together by previous users. Still, simple but beautiful. It's very flat around here.

Taken on Monday September 6, 2010 at Piseco-Powley Road.

Good Evening – August 30, 2021

Good evening! Monday’s done, tomorrow is the last day of August. πŸŒ‡

Partly clear and 70 degrees in Delmar, NY. There is a west breeze at 5 mph. πŸƒ. The dew point is 66 degrees. The muggy weather ends tomorrow around 9 pm. πŸ˜“

Truck has been washed and I cleaned out the interior. πŸ›’ Oil change and tire rotation tomorrow. I felt guilty about not doing my own oil change so I washed the truck by hand and unbolted the hub caps. Got groceries πŸ›’ at Wally World. Did my evening walk. 🚢Sat out back for a while.

I would do my own oil change but I hate having to get the filter off and screwing it up somehow. Small engines are easier. Plus all that waste oil – have to take it back. I’ve burned it before but it’s kind of smelly to say the least. πŸ”₯ Small engines without all the road grime are easier πŸ›’ and much less waste oil to deal with.

I do want to get some paint on the truck 🚚 after a bit of sanding but I still need to get the primer. Probably Advanced Auto has that. I just got to find the time.

Thinking about going to Spectulator and camping and working up there for the holiday weekend. β›Ί Friday is the last day of remote work and that seems pleasant by Lake Pleasant. Plus the weekend forecast right now looks cool but sunny 🌞 although I’m sure it will be pouring rain β˜” by the weekend.

SMART PEOPLE… described by Kristen Kimball in the DIRTY LIFE. Good summer read, life goals, etc.

SMART PEOPLE… described by Kristen Kimball in the DIRTY LIFE. Good summer read, life goals, etc.

“We were the only people in town who did not keep our lawn
neatly mowed. In Essex, even the scofflaws and the drunks,
the wife beaters and the serial unemployed mow their lawns.
On the outskirts, there might be cars up on blocks in the yard.
permanent fixtures, but the grass around them was cut on a
weekly basis. Our elderly neighbors, the Everharts, kept their
lawn both neatly trimmed and thoroughly decorated, with figu
rines, birdbaths encircled by pansies, and a kind of weather
proof slide projector set up to make a picture against the house
at night, a different image for every holiday, from a flag at the
Fourth of July to a snowman at Christmas.

Meanwhile, our lawn grew shaggy. I looked at it as I ran by
with my hands full of crates or tools or stakes, feeling a grow
ing self-loathing, knowing that it was a black mark against us
in the collective mind of our community, a civic failure. One
evening at the beginning of summer I’d grabbed the little elec
tric mower my parents had given us and made an attempt to
cut it, but by then the grass had grown so rank it was like trying
10
shear a sheep with nose hair clippers. I made one crushed,
chewed-up stripe of grass at the lawn’s periphery and was
defeated. By August the lawn was so overgrown it could swal
low dogs and small children. Our community has more than its
fair share of eccentrics, and it is tolerant of them, but I could
tell the lawn bothered our neighbors, because they didn’t tease
us about it. Others of our quirks-such as the pair of Highland
horns that Shane Sharpe helped Mark bolt onto the hood of
our Honda, making the car look like it’s sporting a handlebar
mustache-they would tease us about incessantly. About the
lawn, they were ominously silent.

Mark is immune to this kind of social pressure, and gener
ally contemptuous of lawns. In his mind, grass is for grazing.
And therein lay the solution. We might never find time to mow
the lawn, but if it looked fecund enough, and the cattle were
hungry, we could find the time to put up a fence. A few weeks
before our wedding, we ringed the lawn with electric fence and
moved the beef herd onto it. The dairy herd was recruited for
the smaller patch across the driveway.

For three days, the cattle mowed our lawn. We fell asleep
to Rupert calling to the dairy cows: a series of mournful, falling
bass notes, the sound of a monumental desire. Then a petu
lant trumpeting, the pitch rising to what passes for tenor in a
bull, the sound of desire thwarted by electric fence. We awoke
to the rip-rip sound of cows grazing right outside our window. “