Senior Citizens?

Bonnie eating ribbon fries at the Pioneer Festival

at Hier's Park in Huntington.

Kathy finally got everything taken care of re. repairs to the Honda Pilot. The estimate is over $1700 and does not include a rental car or damage not seen under the door panel. We are waiting for the check to arrive from the insurance company of the lady who ran into it, and will get it in quickly for repairs.

Bonnie received a B on her first exam which she was happy with considering she had missed a class. She is busy now planning her paper which must be 5 pages long and follow the MLA style sheet.

We ordered the storm doors last week and they will be here a week from Wed. Mike will be back this week and will pour the slab for the pole building.

Denny and Barbara took off in their new camper which they are pulling with their new truck. Shortly after they return they should have the materials for the new building Denny will put up to house the new camper.

Kathy needed a new cellphone so off we went to the AT&T store. They no longer offer the Motorola Razr and Kathy was quite dismayed. She found another flip phone she liked and the young man waiting on her said, "That is a very popular phone with seniors." So Kathy calls to Bonnie, "Bonnie, come look at the new senior phone I like."

Like it or not we do have silver hair and could easily be mistaken for senior citizens. But we are only senior citizens on the outside.

Yesterday we went to an apple orchard in Huntington where Bonnie picked up some apples to make into applesauce. We stopped at Evergreen Park where Kathy collected a cache. Then it was off to The Forks of the Wabash to tour the museum and Richardville house which was followed by a stop at the Pioneer Festival at Hier's Park where we walked around and ate. Kathy tackled a huge pork tenderloin while Bonnie ate some pork barbeque. We shared some ribbon fries.

It is a beautiful day so we really should get outside. Kathy, for sure, needs to work in the vineyard.

Builder Mike is back!

Driveway was extended to back of cottage on NW side

between N side of cottage and veggie garden.

Location of pole building N and W of cottage.

View from where pole building will be of walk-out.
More back-filling was done and gravel spread at walk-out.

Gravel pit west of Huntington on US 24.

Waterfall

Builder Mike has returned to the farm for our next project...a 24x32 pole building to house our vehicles, lawn equipment, bikes, etc., and a winemaking shop for Bonnie. Kathy is also going to have him put up some storm doors, and who knows what else we will ask him to do?

The drive has been cut and graveled to where the building will go, and gravel has been spread between the retaining walls at the walk-out. The grading has been done and the extra dirt was put up against the outside of the retaining walls. We will try to include some photos before we upload this post.

Bonnie got her car back from the repair shop today and it looks great. But the Pilot got smacked into on Tuesday when Kathy was trying to turn into the Scott's parking lot near the library. We will be getting estimates and scheduling repairs for it. Not cool. Kathy LOVES the Pilot and Bonnie had just paid it off!

Barbara and Denny now have a brand new 5th wheel to go along with their new Toyota Tundra. They had to have a 5th wheel hitch put in the bed of the Tundra. They may take off for Michigan to test things out this fall and expect to head south for a month or so in January. And, of course, they now have to have a new enclosed carport for the camper. Anyway, the camper is gorgeous, and we are excited for them. Kathy has volunteered to help with the carport if help is needed.

This weekend there is much to do. The grapes need to be sprayed with GreenCure, an organic fungicide formulated by a professor at Cornell that Kathy spent a lot of time researching. We want to spray a couple of times before winter. The staking and tying of the vines is all done and we put up two more rows of hi-tensile wire on the native grapes. We still need to screw in the earth anchors and there are more catch wires to run. We hope to get the earth anchors in yet this fall, and the catch wires can wait until spring.

There is mowing and trimming to be done this weekend and Kathy would like to finish what she hopes will be the last hoeing of the season. Between the Sea Magic foliar fertilizer, the GreenCure, and the nematodes, we are hoping to have some organic controls in place for next year. A routine spraying schedule will need to be implemented next year.

Our new tree is still alive. We haven't killed this one. We have faithfully watered it, but we just don't understand why it has been red all year. It is supposed to have green leaves that turn a beautiful red in the fall, but it has been red all summer. It will be interesting to see what color the leaves are in the spring.

Bonnie had her first exam this week and thinks she did okay. She will be busy "supervising" Mike and his young men when they get back out here and start pouring concrete and raising the barn. It is a good thing we all get along!

Bonnie has been busy brainstorming how to replace Kathy's income when she finally fully retires (which she is not considering at this time). Once again the possibility of becoming a boutique winery is being considered.

Kathy has begun geocaching again (as time and gas money allow) and the two scenic photos above are from her travels the past two weeks.

A trip to Jupiter

Jupiter

Jupiter, it's red spot, and the Galilean moons

(from top) Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

Last night Kathy managed to stay awake after dark and headed on down to Denny's observatory for the first time to take a look at Jupiter. We have been watching Jupiter for quite a while now and Denny offered to let us take a peek through his telescope. Kathy was able to make out four of Jupiter's moons and assumed they were the same four that Galileo discovered long about 1610. They are shown above in composite next to Jupiter. Kathy was also able to see two of Jupiter's rings.

Jupiter has a large red spot that is the size of 2-3 Earths and is a storm that has been raging over the planet for hundreds of years and will continue for the foreseeable future.

We also took a look at the moon with some close-ups of some of its craters. It was a very unexciting gray color.

Thanks, Denny, for the tour!

EVERY day is a day of labor!

Our first monthly climatological summary!

(Click on chart to enlarge.)

What we wish all of our vines looked like!

It is Labor Day weekend and Kathy is on vacation for 12 days. She has been busy working in the vineyard, setting new bamboo poles for the vines and doing some tying and trimming. We have a variety of 1-, 2-, and 3-year-old vines and could have been doing a better job of training them. They should all look like the vine in the photo, but instead, they are various shapes and sizes, and we haven't been good at establishing the roots in the first year, trunks in the second and cordons in the third. So we have probably lost another year with some of the vines. We should have been doing some trimming to allow the vines to concentrate their growth on their trunks and, in some cases, cordons, but they have been allowed to grow unkempt and send out much too much new growth instead of thickening the older growth.

The good news is that the Japanese Beetles did a minimum of damage this year and we still have lots of leaves on the vines and aren't rushing around trying to fertilize. In fact, we are done fertilizing because we want the growth to stop now so that the vines can begin to prepare themselves for winter.

We had some powdery mildew and some other vine issues this growing season, but again, this has been minimal. Kathy sprayed for the mildew and it seems to be under control. She has been researching a new product to use next season.

Bonnie's garden looks like end-of-the-summer. She was not happy with her tomatoes this year. The cantaloupes were very good and she actually has a couple of small watermelons that will ripen. The charentais are plentiful and Kathy is hoping they will be good. We still have some green beans, and there will be lots of butternut squash.

Bonnie purchased some new tires for the Jetta and will soon be taking it into the shop for the repair work from her fender-bender.

June and Liz from down the road stopped by earlier this week and we had a nice visit. Liz is an anthropologist, so she and Bonnie had much to talk about since Bonnie is taking a cultural anthropology class.

Mike will be building us a pole building to house our cars and a shop for Bonnie to make her wines in. He will be out next week to stake it out. More details and photos as they become available.

We walked a check over to Jonathan last night and had a pleasant chat with LeeAnn and Rex who were minding the store in Jonathan's and Olivia's absence.

Kathy trimmed along the road for the second time last week and got poison something-or-other. Denny was over not long afterward to help get rid of some of the smaller stumps that we keep tripping over and that the trimmer-mower gets hung up on.

Bonnie purchased a compost bin from the Solid Waste District, so all of our waste except for meat and protein items is going out in it. We may have some compost in the spring.

Kathy has been fighting a cold for over a week now while Bonnie has been adjusting to her new diabetes medication, so things are not going at full speed here.

Don continues to do a great job mowing for us. All Kathy has to do is trim around the house, garden and vineyard...and she loves to run the trimmer mower. No kidding!

A Slice of Heaven

Mystic Pizza of movie fame

Julia Roberts put this place on the map

A veggie pizza as good as any you will ever eat

Today's photos are from a trip East we took over three years ago that included a stop at Mystic Pizza in Mystic CT. It was the 4th of July and we still were able to get a table with no wait. We enjoyed our stay in this seaport town. If you haven't seen the Julia Roberts' movie, rent a copy. This movie put Mystic Pizza on the map and Julia Roberts too! The pizza parlor is full of movie/Roberts memorabilia.

We went to the BMV Wednesday to have our legal address changed to Huntington County and to plate both the Jetta and the Pilot. The lady helping Kathy asked if her height and weight were still correct (they were), and then left her hair coloring as brown when, if you have seen photos of her in this blog, you know is quite grey. Go figure.

We have had some strong storms lately. While Kathy was in Logansport having a sleepover with her mother, Bonnie, the dogs, and the bird were in the basement, hunkering down in the face of a tornado warning. I wonder who was having the most fun?

This morning it is quite cool. The weather here at Blossom Ridge Farm is just delightful.

The Japanese beetles have been increasing in number, and Kathy may have to spray some Sevin. Hopefully this would be the last spraying for them.

Bonnie's cold is just about history. She still hacks some, but seems much improved. She managed to keep her dental appointment yesterday and took Kathy to lunch. She is busy with her finances and trying to figure out whether to purchase a carport and shed or a large pole building. Right now the pole building has the edge.

The rain has kept outside work to a minimum and Don hasn't made an appearance to mow yet. Hopefully in the next few days since it is now difficult to walk across the field for both human and dog.

Last weekend we ended up in Fort Wayne looking for blinds for the front porch and also to purchase fruit at a fruit stand. Bonnie remembered seeing a small vineyard behind a house in a housing addition north of Sam's Club on Lima Road. She was able to find it and turned into the addition so we could look at what appeared to be two homes with backyard vineyards. We pulled into one, and when no one answered the door, we wrote a note to leave behind. Bonnie walked into the back yard and found the owner, Jeff Snyder, who gave us a tour of his vineyard and his neighbor's. His neighbor was actually the one who got Jeff growing grapes and making wine, and the neighbor's vines were much older than Jeff's.

Jeff took us into an outbuilding on his property where we assumed he made his wine. Once inside he opened a door to a spiral staircase that led to his wine cellar. It was really quite remarkable though, according to Jeff, it is nothing compared to the cellars of some of the people in the wine club to which he belongs. He let us sample some of his wines and gave us a red and white to take home with us. Thank you, Jeff, for the tour, the hospitality, and the sharing of information. (Jeff's cellar has flooded 2 or 3 times, so he is currently going through a stage where he is discouraged and has turned his enterprise over to friends.)

Another hot one on The Ridge!

WBRV receiver

Summer has been on and off this year and is currently back for a brief period, presenting us with a heat index one day of 102 degrees. What we really need is rain. This is surely going to go on record as one of the coolest summers in recorded history in Indiana.

The Japanese Beetles have also made an appearance. So far they can be handled just by picking them off.

Not much going on with us. Bonnie has been ill with flu/cold symptoms and Kathy postponed her sleepover with her mother twice to stay home and care for the pets so that Bonnie would not have to bother with them when she wasn't feeling well. The sickness has, of course, interfered with Bonnie's intention of building a small deck in the front of the cottage as well as other projects she may have wanted to accomplish before her classes begin on the 25th.

The grass is getting high again and we must get Don over to mow before we lose the dogs in the weeds again. Kathy hates to mow if there is a chance that Don will be over and all she would need to do is trim. Along the road is bad again also, and Kathy doesn't even want to think about trimming it up.

No other news here. We have just been lying low and hoping Bonnie will get to feeling better quickly.

MADIS gives WBRV two thumbs up!

NOAA logo

WBRV received it's MADIS rating this week and we are pleased to say that we received two thumbs up for our data. Lots of criteria are used to determine a station's accuracy, including comparing it's data to the data of other nearby stations. For us that includes, in addition to the other Huntington County weather stations, the weather station at Baer Field International Airport where they have more sophisticated weather equipment. So we are very excited that our data is considered to be accurate.

Here is some information on the MADIS Program:

The Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS) is dedicated toward making value-added data available from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) Global Systems Division (GSD) for the purpose of improving weather forecasting, by providing support for data assimilation, numerical weather prediction, and other hydrometeorological applications.

Quality Control (QC) of MADIS observations is also provided, since considerable evidence exists that the retention of erroneous data, or the rejection of too many good data, can substantially distort forecast products. Observations in the ESRL/GSD database are stored with a series of flags indicating the quality of the observation from a variety of perspectives (e.g. temporal consistency and spatial consistency), or more precisely, a series of flags indicating the results of various QC checks. Users of MADIS can then inspect the flags and decide whether or not to ingest the observation.

One WBRV page can be found at http://weather.gladstonefamily.net/site/search?site=D3241 and another at http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/wxpage.cgi?&call=DW3241&last=24

The first page reports on the quality control checks performed by MADIS. The MADIS rating reports on the percentage of observations that pass the MADIS checks. We are told to aim for two thumbs up.

And speaking of weather...today's weather is oppressive. The outside temperature is currently 89 degrees, but the heat index is a suffocating 98 degrees. The wind is currently averaging about 9 mph, and we have had some gusts of up to 23 mph.

Bonnie worked in her garden today but the heat got to her and she had to come in. Kathy decided to mow because the crabgrass around the cottage was so high we could not find our dogs in it. So she mowed around the cottage for about two hours before coming in to take a shower and cool down. A nap and a good book sound really good to her. The new mower worked great, even in the tall grass.

Bonnie purchased an Ossian ham yesterday and cooked up some new red potatoes and fresh green beans with it and made a delicious meal.

In her first week of retirement, in addition to signing up for a class at IPFW, Bonnie made a batch of Kosher dills and a batch of bread and butter pickles. We have tried the Kosher pickles and they are really good.

The pets are doing well. Most are napping. The basement stays at a very constant 72 degrees, making for a nice temp for Millie, Gizmo and Gennie.

We celebrated Bonnie's retirement Thursday at Cork 'n Cleaver with Judy, Diane, Lani and Andrea. The food and company were great. Bonnie seems to have taken very well to retirement!