Hot, Dry Summer

Hi All, Thank goodness summer is almost over. It has been hot, hot, hot and dry, dry, dry. This has not been a good year for growing anything. Our orchard produced one peach and a handful of blueberries. The vineyard gave us a handful of grapes. The garden didn't do much better, other than peppers. It's tough to grow anything without water. We pretty much gave up and worked to just keep the orchard and vineyard alive.

Fortunately our chickens and turkeys did better in the hot and dry. We figured it was time to bring on the next generation of chickens so we collected eleven eggs and put them in the incubator. Ten hatched, a much better result than we've had in the past. There really are ten chicks in there.

This was yesterday, six of them were being difficult about following along as we moved the chicken tractor.

We have not been as successful hatching turkeys so we let one of the hens sit on them until they hatched. She pretty much sat on eggs for the entire summer. Best we can tell, the ones that hatched weren't her's. "Pecker" kept sneaking in and laying eggs and "Red" kept sitting on them. That added four more turkeys to our clan.

Here are some of the old and some of the new...

This summer has also been a time for grandkids to visit. Addie came for a week. Tyson, Alexander and Brianna were here for two weeks, with my daughter Amy. All but Brianna (and Amy) got to go to science camp at the Tyler Discovery Science Place. Tyson and Alexander even got their picture in the Tyler paper.

A few other things we've done is visit friends and some of Susan's family in Atlanta. Drove all night from Atlanta to Cape Canaveral to see the Artemis launch, only to have it cancelled after issues with loading liquid hydrogen.

We've had our stone mason back to put some rock on the side of the house and put the flagstone down on the front porch. Of course Duncan had to be in the picture.

We spent a morning picking grapes at the Los Pinos Ranch vineyard. Those who follow this blog who work(ed) at HDS may have known Jeff Schrunk. He and his wife Heather are now part owners of Los Pinos Ranch.

Back in August we had had enough of the heat and escaped to the mountains of southeast New Mexico, around Riudoso. The last 65 miles to the campground took us one hour. The temperature went from 95 to 63 in that hour. Oh what a relief!

North of Riudoso, looking towards Nogal.

Last, but not least we have bought a new car. Since getting off the boat in 2015 (has it really been seven years?) we have been a one vehicle family. Though we're not big proponents of electric vehicles since we get almost all of our electricity from the sun it seemed like a reasonable choice. For trips to the grocery store and around town, it works out well.

Here's our new car and what powers it.

That's all for now. Take care. Brian