Chores ran late…

I slept till 6:30 this morning! That’s freakishly late this close to solstice, but nights have been unusually cool and sometime in the wee hours instead of shivering half-asleep under a sheet I roused myself enough to pull a wool blanket off the shelf and spread it out. Then I had the oddest dream – it involved, in small part, frying a pound of hamburger on an asphalt road, then getting mad at myself for wasting meat and dodging traffic in an attempt to spatula it off the road…weird dream.

By the time I got coffeed up it was nearly 7:30 and I was late to get outdoors stuff done before it got hot. Aside from the usual was a tour of irrigation pipes. Ian and Landlady laid down a bunch of black flexible pipe to water their trees, and it’s supposed to be UV resistant but it doesn’t resist anything else, so the irrigation lines as a whole were in sad shape. It was a quick and easy solution to the problem of watering distant trees, but not a very durable one.

Ian’s in particular had at least two rat-gnawed holes that I knew of, so I’d asked him to send me a bag of couplers. He sent them with Landlady this past weekend, so I ran the water for a few minutes to mark the holes and then walked the line from end to end with a hacksaw and the couplers. Shortened the system to acknowledge the sad fact that most of the trees are dead, then turned the whole thing on and went around to find out which tricklers are actually trickling. You make a tricker by capping each hose end and then drilling a hole in the cap, but our well water is so hard that such a small hole will quickly heal itself with calcium. So I ended up dousing myself a few times unscrewing the caps and prying off the calcium deposits. But it’s all working now. His trees were looking pretty sad.

I know Landlady’s been turning her waterer on when she’s here, but if anything hers was in worse shape. She gets a lot more cattle traffic, but I reconnected the places where trampling had separated the hoses at the couplers, and made sure the tricklers were trickling. I’ll go back later and turn them off. LB won’t want an afternoon walky that long, but he definitely won’t say no to a quick Jeep ride.

New Full-Time Neighbor L has been after me to take advantage of her washing machine. I’m a strong proponent of the principle that you make your foot rare at the house of a friend so I’ve been reluctant to take her up on that but she’s been insistent. So I brought over a bag of flannel sheets that are easy to hand-wash but hard to properly hand-rinse. Had to go get those this morning, plus there was the usual stuff; LB and chickens and mousetraps and what few plants I have that need watering. Didn’t finish up till like quarter to ten, and it was getting hot.

So, late with the blog. Sorry.