Lots Faster!

Today was trial mowing day at the Tower House. My tractor came with an old four foot bushhog, so although someday I would like to get a 5 foot finish mower I just used what I had. Surprisingly, the bushhog did a pretty good job. The finished product is nothing you'd want Tiger Woods putting on, but it wasn't too tufty and I only dug furrows in the ground with the bushhog box where I had to turn on a slope.

I wanted a tractor mostly to speed up the mowing of my four acres and, sure enough, I now can cut the wide-open spaces about three times faster than with my riding mower. Also, having my own tractor is really, really cool.

Grand Opening

Lee Ann and I were both off today so we took a drive south to Brown County, our old stomping grounds. Our plan was to head straight for the river town of Ripley, but on the way we stopped in Georgetown. By coincidence, we discovered that the folks who rented our commercial building there were having their grand opening. They have fixed up the store area and have a nice selection of Carhartt workwear, RedWing boots and other stuff. It looked great.

While we were in Georgetown we also attended the Brown County fair. There's nothing like fair food for lunch - yum! The weather was super pleasant - sunny and 70 degrees, perfect for fall in the Ohio Valley.

Luck Of The Draw

This week I am in Tampa, Florida taking the "four scrapyards in five days" tour you hear so much about. Instead of my usual econocompact, I am driving this pretty cool Volkswagen Beetle. Getting a rental car is pot luck, and occasionally I end up with some big SUV or gimmick vehicle. Once I got a Prius, which was fun. The worst ever was a Ford Mustang, which was uncomfortable, got awful gas mileage and had blind spots the size of Nebraska. The Beetle is a pretty good ride, and if someone offered me one I wouldn't turn it down.

Bonus info: My company took away my old phone and forced a Blackberry gizmo on me that is a veritable Swiss Army Knife of electronica. One gadgety feature that I initially pooh-poohed is a built-in camera - but as you can see by the attached car photo, I now am appreciating this capability a bit.

Sad - Lost A Cat Today

I had been at the Tower House this morning, clearing a spot to park the tractor in the old barn there, Annie was at work and Lee Ann at a horse show. When I returned to Lebanon about 15 past noon I saw our cat Maya (or CC - we never did agree on her name) laying in the street behind our house. I parked and went right over to her, but she had been dead for a while. It appears that she was hit by a car.

Maya was the white-haired poofball cat with the feathery tail that Lee Ann and Annie rescued a year or so ago. We would see her on our walks, living in a truck trailer parking lot and crying piteously when we came by. Lee Ann started dropping off food and water and eventually brought her home, nearly starved to death and so dirty we did not know what color she was. Once installed at our house Maya stabilized and for the past year has lived a pretty pleasant existence here with us.

I buried her in our backyard, next to the fence she used to like walking on top of. RIP, poofball kitty.

New McAlpine Family Addition!

A very large stork will be headed north from Louisiana soon to drop off our little bundle of joy!

This is my new (used) Ford 1320 tractor. It is a lot like the Ford 1310 that I owned for seven years and used at my Moon Hollow farm. It is the same size class, has the same 3-cylinder diesel engine, but was built in 1992 as opposed to the older-model 1310, which was built in about 1977. It also has a few added features such as that protective roll bar that you see in the photo.

I have known for a while that I needed something bigger than my dinky riding mower to keep the four acre lawn at the Tower House under control. Three weeks ago Lee Ann and I stopped and looked at a Ford 1520 that a guy had for sale on his front lawn near Caesar's Creek Lake. It was beautiful, the cleanest used tractor that I ever saw, but just a bit too big - and too expensive. He sold the tractor that same day to someone else, preventing me from changing my mind, and I kicked myself for not buying it despite the fact that it wasn't the ideal tractor for me.

Since then I have been looking locally and online for a 1310, 1320 or something similar in a John Deere or Kubota. I didn't intend to get interested in something so far away as this one, but even with freight delivery charges it is a lot less expensive than the 1520, and exactly what I wanted. But I am buying it SIGHT UNSEEN - the quintessential eBay experience. Gee, I hope this works out. I should know in eight days max.

She's a STAR

Today Annie was accepted to Roanoke College, a Virginia liberal-arts school with a lovely campus nestled in the Alleghenies. Attagirl! It was just like in the movies - I fished the letter out of the mailbox, and it looked like it might be an acceptance, and I carried it upstairs to where Annie was studying in her room, and she opened it expectantly, and the first word on the letter was "Congratulations." I was not surprised, since her qualifications are very good, but it sure was satisfying.

It's not a lock that Annie will attend Roanoke, however. She plans to apply to about eight schools in all, Roanoke having been the first. With any luck, she will be able to choose among several schools that accept her and find at least one that offers both an ideal curriculum and great financial aid. This will all be unfolding slowly between now and May 1, which is the deadline for committing to a school for the fall of 2010. Wish her luck - and a couple more "Congratulations!"

The Big Score

Here in the hyperkinetic McAlpine household, a weeknight's family amusement might include a little ultimate kickboxing, the ever-popular juggling knives while riding unicycles, or (more commonly), a game of Scrabble. It is usually me versus Lee Ann, since Annie is afraid of damaging our delicate egos and participates sparingly.

Tonight's game stood out because I scored 516, which might be a personal best. I don't remember scoring five hundred plus since my childhood when we played by Grama Miller rules and kept counting the double/triple words and letters even if they had been covered in a previous play, which really jacked up our point totals.

Some words Lee Ann and I accept probably don't appear in a Scrabble dictionary and would never fly in tournament play, but our house rules are fairly relaxed. In any case, the big play of this game was legit - I used all seven of my tiles and covered two triple word spaces by playing "graphite" in the lower left corner of the board for 203 points. Lee Ann gets an assist for playing "bar" immediately beforehand to set me up. Thanks honey!!

Jack - Update

Our future Jack-O Lantern is now about 8 inches in diameter and is looking like a real pumpkin now. The vine still looks healthy, so I expect him to keep getting bigger.

Floor Project

Thirty or forty years ago someone put oak strip flooring in most of the rooms at the Tower House, over the original floorboards. The floors were finished, but then some time in the past they were stripped and left unfinished - I have no idea why. Now the wood is discolored and has paint splotches from the last awful interior paint job the house received, as the first photo of the upstairs back hall shows.

I am taking up the oak in the downstairs rooms but we decided to leave it upstairs. A couple of weeks ago I sanded the bedroom floors. Now I have stained and shellacked the front bedroom floor - second photo. This work is tedious but I sure like the result.

Dig This!

Things were humming at the Tower House on Wednesday. I had two skilled crews doing work that day that was beyond my humble skills (and horsepower). I like to do almost all the house renovating work myself, but sometimes it makes sense to call in experts.

One crew took out a tree that had plugged up the septic tank discharge, and will be back in a few weeks to lay in a new drainfield. The other replaced our well pump, which was fried by a lightning strike a few weeks back. While they worked outside, I was refinishing bedroom floors - but that's for another post.

Since I took these pictures I insulated the pump and buttoned up the well pit, and Lee Ann and I have already cut up a lot of the tree. With any luck, we won't have any "water in" or "water out" issues for many years.

One Egg - No Basket

All summer we have watched the pumpkin vines that sprang from last year's Halloween pumpkin snake all over the back yard. For weeks we have patiently waited for pumpkin fruit to begin forming. Now - success! We have ONE pumpkin on the vine. I had almost given up, thinking that we had an infertile hybrid or something.

This little guy is about the size of a baseball. Any size bigger than a muskmelon by the end of October will suit my purpose, but I'm not counting my Jack-o-lanterns yet. Typically our vine crops are polished off by boring insects just about the time whatever they are producing nears maturity (the downside of organic gardening!), so Jack may never make it to usable girth. But since optimism is just as cheap as pessimism, and more fun, I am dreaming of a BIG result.