Bits

Fog has filled the valleys every morning this week.  It's thick and lasts until 1000 or so.  Today, like magic, the leaves burst into color on the hillsides.   At sunrise this morning I saw a golden fire in the leaves of the forest.
Our clematis vines are browning on the bottom, maybe too much rain or too much chicken attention, but the white one has a nice blossom.
I mowed the meadow on Friday and Saturday down to about 4 inches in height.  The bed of the bush hog collected the cut grass from the previous pass so I had hay mounds across the meadow.  Since the hens really like fresh grass for their nesting boxes, I filled the RTV  and put several handfuls of grass in the chicken coop.  The rest of the cut grass I dumped in the compost pile.

In preparation for additional raised planting beds in the garden, I cut the weeds with the tractor and then used the blade of the bucket to scrape an area for the beds.  I spread a load of compost over the planting bed site.  I'll have to get some more boards to build the raised beds.

The new log splitter continues to work well.  I sawed the logs into wood stove sized pieces so that I'd be ready for the splitter.  For the past 3 mornings I have split wood for about 2 hours each day.  It's very noisy, even when idling so I have my shooting ear protectors on. I finished the pile of cut logs today. We have about 2 cords drying. The new pallets where I stack the split firewood took some additional engineering to keep the sides standing upright, but they now seem to be holding up well.  Time to retrieve more logs from the forest. The chipmunk hiding spots that the dogs check out are dwindling.

Reading Innocent Monster ***Coleman Sashi Bluntstone, the 11-year-old Next New Thing on the New York art scene, has been abducted, and Moe Prager—former NYPD cop and former PI—is asked by his estranged daughter, Sarah, to join the search. He expects only tragedy; Sashi has already been missing for three weeks, and Moe hasn’t been a PI for seven years. Now a well-to-do wine merchant, Moe agrees, primarily to attempt to restore his relationship with Sarah. He quickly learns that nothing increases the value of paintings faster than the death of the painter. Suspects abound: wealthy, self-important collectors; greedy gallery owners; odious rival artists; even the victim’s parents. But Moe abides. This sixth Moe Prager novel is pretty much note-perfect. Coleman’s take on the art world as a den of iniquity is priceless, as is Moe himself—intelligent, street smart, and tough, especially for a sixty-something. He’s also sophisticated, despite seeing himself as a “poor schmuck from Brooklyn.”  Booklist