At any rate, I'll be at A-Kon over the weekend, helping to launch Ladies of Trade Town, edited and published (due to some difficulties with its originally scheduled publisher) by a friend of mine. Meanwhile, R- will continue to work on the new rain barn (Cloud Pavilion) in the hopes of finishing it before surgery is actually scheduled. Mac-horse appears to be in fine fettle, drama-queen personality and all. (We had company yesterday. He came shouldering in as if to bully the company. I corrected him, and he gave everyone a look of wounded innocence. "Me? Invade personal space? How can you even think that of a noble steed like me?")
Company last night helped us with garden produce (that is, we ate sun-ripened, still sun-warm tomatoes and home-grown potatoes. Every year I forget how much better potatoes are right out of the ground. The variety of potato that grows best here is a red one; the yield is not high because of the limited growing season (potatoes not being fond of 100F plus days and very warm nights) But wow, the difference between our red potatoes and store-bought red potatoes. Boiled, with butter, salt, and pepper, they're amazing. We'll have one or two more meals of them, and then we're done: we don't have the space or the climate to grow a lot of potatoes and store them. The tomatoes are also responding to the heat, dry winds, and warmer nights with a drop-off in flowering. But again, the flavor of home-grown tomatoes...yum. I use tomatoes a lot in cooking (canned tomatoes) but rarely eat a "fresh' tomato unless it comes out of our garden. The peas are over, of course, and the beans are slowly coming on. Corn this year was a bust: only two stalks came up. That's not enough to fertilize any ears they make: we'll have to hand-fertilize and hope for one or two ears. Onions we've got by the bunch, and the chard is now full-grown.
Meanwhile again, Bombadil the tractor is being contrary--rancherfriend thinks it's the override clutch slipping--and sometimes it mows and sometimes the power doesn't get from the drive shaft to the blades and it sort of thrashes the grass without cutting it. Since I have about 5-8 acres that needs to be taken down before it's another fire hazard, this is inconvenient to say the least. We're looking for a better fix than sending Bombadil back to the shop, which will keep it for weeks before returning it.