9/9/07 Sunday
It is a beautiful morning from the standpoint of the atmosphere outside. It’s nice and cool with some clouds reducing the amount of direct sunlight. Keeps it cooler. The puppies pushed open the door this morning, thus escaping their “prison” of the puppy room, and also “thus” waking us up and demanding we get moving. They ran around full of energy, joyfully expressing how glad they were to see us and confirm we are still here after their nightlong seclusion.

It’s also a beautiful morning from the standpoint of my mental acuity not being slow. I’m running a seven on the bob scale, a level I consider to be average. I was going to bake four dozen cookies last night to take to the Sunday school class as a thank you for what they have done for us but Cherie said that it this might offend whomever was scheduled to bring in the snacks they always have. That upset me a bit. All I wanted to do was show appreciation but Cherie, knowing my lack of social skills decided it would be more politically correct to not do so. So the cookies didn’t get cooked. I had so wanted to make something with the pumpkins we grew.

Speaking of pumpkins, the garden is overrun with beetles. When I went to pick the last of the pumpkins I found many of them covered with hundreds of them. That is probably the reason the vines are all dying off. The squash is in the same condition. These beetles are evidently boring holes into the squash and pumpkins and laying eggs or something inside them. I broke open a pumpkin and found it trashed and yucky inside. There are another eighty to a hundred squash left but I’m not going to bother and harvest them. We can’t get rid of the ones I already picked and I am sure many of them still on the ground have been violated by the beetles. I’ll have to look up how to combat this organically for next year.

I’m going to gather what’s left and compost it. Wish I had the worm bin I plan on getting started. This would be great food for them. Can’t build that yet for the area I will put it is where some of the dead big mulberry limbs will fall when I cut them. I can’t do that till the October CRP check comes in. That money will enable us to buy a new chain for the chainsaw. The mulberry wood is so hard it dulls the chain in a matter of minutes but it’s the best firewood I’ve ever seen. Burns hot and long with almost no smoke and leaving very little ash behind.
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We had a big electrical storm roll over. Cap Rock Electric seems to have the area wired pretty good as the lightning knocked the lights off about five times and the power always returned in seconds. My main worry during these is the well. Lightning would fry the pump every two years or so when my grandmother lived here. Hopefully the installation Leroy put in will hold up better. I think it will but time tells all.

I baked the pumpkin cookies I wanted to cook yesterday. Mostly I’m anxious to see how good the pumpkins we grew are. I was disappointed. There wasn’t much pumpkin flavor at all. We will have to play with this to get the maximum flavor out. Maybe we need to cook it down more or just use more than the recipe called for. The recipe was for canned pumpkin, not fresh. I ended up making a lemon glaze to make the cookies worth eating. Not bad but not as good as I expected. It’s late and working over the kitchen counter is what kills my back so I’m gona call it a night. Perhaps I will work on the Balaam’s ass bible study.