A LITTLE MORE RAIN

I woke up to a little more rain in my gauge. About a half inch. And my deer feeder worked so my rigging worked last night. This morning I got to the Methodist Men's meeting five minutes early and was the last one there.

I thought I had solved my Quicken problem. I found that I could download the 2009 version that I had bought to three computers so I downloaded to the desk top. But I still couldn't get the online backup file to load. I am paying good money for that online backup and it ought to work. I will keep working on it.

Tonight I will take Ike to the American Legion meeting. He is a member. Then I will spend the night with him tonight, Friday and Saturday while Sue goes to her annual Mary Kay meeting in Dallas with all of the pink Cadillacs. She says this is her last meeting, but that is what she said last year.

COMPUTER FRUSTRATION

I spent a couple of hours posting my checkbook to Quicken on my desk top and realized that I didn't have the latest data that I had saved online from the laptop computer. I had used the laptop to prepare my tax return when I was working downstairs with Lou and updated to Quicken 2009. I have 2008 on the desktop. When I tried to download my MC I couldn't and realized that I had a problem. I lost the work I did this morning and hope that I can upgrade the desk top to 2009 and recover the online data then. So this day was shot.

It was sprinkling this morning and my fancy dancy rain gauge said I got .16 for the day and .26 for two days. That helps but the heavier rain was over in Eastland County. We still have more in the forecast for tomorrow.

I put the other rechargeable battery in the deer feeder and it works when I test it. It didn't work at the time set. When I looked at it the clips came off the battery connections. I figured that when the feeder works it jars the clips loose. So I took some sticks and put them in the case to hold the battery in one place. Maybe this will work when the raccoon shakes it at night.

THREE DAY RECAP

Sunday Mark helped me teach SS and MK came in for church. I gave them a tour of our Library so they could see all the new furniture and Children's Discovery Center. They hadn't been in the Library for years. Then MK prepared spaghetti chicken and fed Sue and Ike with us. They drove back thru a heavy rainstorm in Eastland and I watched it go east of me. I got .02" that day. Yesterday it sprinkled sometime during the night. When I got the mail about 9:30 it started sprinkling on me and I even tried to jog uphill. Didn't do well on that. I went to Abilene and got raindrops on my windshield but not enough to run the wipers. I had to buy ink cartridges to complete printing the Flame for the church. I also opted to buy a larger Uninterruptable Power System so that I can have the computer, monitor and satellite so that a short power outage will not take me out. I have tried it out and it helps. With the rain storms going by every day we get one second outages often. I also had the car serviced, ate at Chinese Kitchen for the $4.55 lunch. With tea it was less than six dollars. I tip well there. It is good food at the lowest price for a sit-down luncheon. I recycled and bought groceries at HEB. When I got home I printed up six more Flames.

This morning my new rain gauge said it recorded .04" last night. It must have been early in the morning because there was no rain puddles when I went to get the mail. I worked on my computer and emailed the FUMC Administrative Council minutes after I waited for corrections. I went to town and took a copy of the Flame to Carl Edington and went to Kiwanis. The speaker didn't show due to illness and it was a good thing because most of the Kiwanis were off visiting grandchildren and doctors. But Harris Worcester, our new preacher came just to make me happy. He told me he drove by here yesterday coming from visiting patients in Abilene, but didn't stop. At least he knows where I live.

Our Sunday School lesson covered Genesis 20-24 and we decided that we didn't have the faith of Abraham and would have a lot of trouble sacrificing our only child born when we were 100. And not all of the women were sure that they would have had the courage of Rebecca to leave her family and go with some stranger who gave her a large nose ring. When she saw Isaac she put her veil on. An old middle east custom.

BEEHIVE HUMS

Tonight Mark and Mary Kathryn took me to eat at the Beehive in Abilene. We had eaten at their restaurant in Albany several times but this was the first time in Abilene. The Lebanese brothers who own it were there tonight. We enjoyed great food. Coming home Mark opted to drive north of I-20 where we could see the wind turbine farm. We went up 110 and up a ranch road to get out right under the turbines to see how noisy they are. They were fairly quiet until just before we left when the one we were closest to started a grinding noise and seemed to be turning a little different direction from the others as if the wind was coming from another direction.

Mark and I filled the deer feeders and hammered the lids back on. The raccoons had taken the lid off of the self feeder. I spent the entire morning getting the Flame edition out and with some feedback revised and reissued it. I ran out of black ink and only got 6 copies to take to church. I have to go to Abilene to buy ink.

TWO DIFFERENT DAYS

I have to get a mouse and disable the pad on this laptop. I just typed a paragraph and my hand apparently activated the pad so that it deleted everything I had written and it hadn't been saved.

I will try again. Yesterday I got up early and drove to town in a drizzle to meet with the Methodist Men. Someone mentioned the moon landing 40 years ago so I had to tell some of my working for NASA on the Apollo project. My assignment was to protect the astronauts from being killed by meteorite strikes and I guess I was successful because none have been. But I know that we have just been lucky. The threat is still there and magnified by all of the space junk we have added since then. I told them about the tests run by Ling Temco Vought that fried rats in lab simulations of meteoroid hits. They were breathing 100% oxygen and when the simulated micrometeoroid penetrated their container the flame went down inside of them. So we worried about the astronauts who were breathing low pressure pure oxygen.

After the meeting I decided that I needed to get out of the house so I turned the car south and drove to Fredricksburg to ask Kathy Shearer about her son Travis. I just missed her. She spent the night in San Antonio and caught a plane to go to North Carolina to attend the wedding of Travis' wife's sister. Travis is coming in from Iraq so they were having a family reunion. I ran into Cheryl ? from Hamlin who has been a president of West Texas Historical Association. She was buying books to sell at her store in Hamlin. She has a unique last name I can never remember. I walked around the streets of Fredricksburg to get the exercise I was missing at home.

Not getting my nap yesterday meant that I slept late this morning and got up at 8. I fed the wildlife and saw the fox kits again. The battery died in the deer feeder so I recharged it all day. I read the papers from yesterday, wrote my newspaper column, wrote the Kiwanis my email reminding them of the next meeting. (My computer just erased another line, grrr). I will get back to work. The Rangers are ahead in the seventh, but the game ain't over.

KITS ARE GROWING UP

The whole fox family was out this morning. The kits are growing up. I caught a mouse in the house and put it out but they didn't find it so I moved it to their feeding place. The kits were just following momma around and eating sunflower seeds with her. Papa also took care of them. Any motion in the house scares them. The deer were also out this morning and two of them acted like they were kissing. I had never seen that before. Wonder if it is mother and daughter or what. With the deer feeder working better more deer are showing up.

I mowed the back terrace where I had watered the cottonwoods and the front yard, but the rain hasn't greened it up much. I was hoping the prediction of more rain would help. I went to town to get a haircut this afternoon and got a report on all of the cancer victims in town. The barber's wife is back on chemo as are a lot of other men and women. I visited with Carl Edington because I had missed seeing him Tuesday but hurried home before the storms came thru. That was a bummer. Here I am and the rain played out in Abilene and I haven't seen a drop. They are saying a second wave will come thru later.

Got to get up early in the morning to make the Methodist Men's meeting.

VAL VISITS

Granddaughter Valerie came yesterday and left today. She was the focus of attention at Kiwanis because the speaker told about their Camp Courage that counsels troubled kids and she said teachers like Val were the ones who saw how troubled kids react first. And Val is leaving Thursday to fly to Maryland to work for the first time as a counselor for a camp for inner city Baltimore kids at a camp on Chesapeake Bay. She will be there for a week paying for her airfare and expenses. A friend of hers runs the camp. She thinks it is sponsored by the Methodists. She brought me a memory stick with all of Lou's computer files from her computer and from all of the floppy discs that she preferred to store her files. It will be a challenge to any researcher to retrieve all of the files. One set is AOL files that I wasn't able to open using AOL. Of course most were created with WordPerfect but she has files from others in Word and I don't know what else. There are a lot of letters and manuscripts in the archive and I appreciate her doing all of the hard work to copy every disk.

Yesterday I had my annual physical more than a year from the last one with Lou. We don't see the doctor but a very efficient PA takes care of us. A very nice looking young lady and last year I was too embarrassed to let her do the digital prostate exam, but this time I cancelled going to Lubbock to my urologist because it is 210 miles and many hours for a quick digital exam, so I let her do it and she was very good. I now have no secrets. After my EKG exam she gave me a form and a baggie with a plastic container. I asked what that was and she said a fecal sample that she took earlier. I told her she was sneaky but good. I will get the lab and X-ray results in a couple of weeks. The main thing we did was change my blood pressure medicine. She said she was limited by low cost and I said I could afford the best so she said there were a lot of options then. She gave me two months of samples of Diovan which Mark says is the one he is taking. It is supposed to have fewer side effects like this small cough I have. After probing, punching and listening to me she said I was in good shape. I then ate breakfast at Town Crier, bought groceries at HEB and picked up my cleaning. I forgot to take the recycle stuff.

My new deer feeder quit working. The control went blank. So Val helped me replace it with the old one that Roy returned to me Sunday. It is working great with a good battery in it.
I think I finally got the raccoon video to post. Show him working hard to remove the deer feeder lid, unsuccessfully.

NEW TECHNOLOGY WORKS

I mounted my new radio transmission rain gauge last night and it rained early this morning. I woke due to a call of nature and saw lightning and heard thunder at 3:40. I put the rain gauge main unit on the book case near the bed and about went back to sleep when the alarm beeped and I knew it was measuring rain. When I got up this morning it read 0.50". That is a lot more than I have had for a while and wondered if the gauge was right. I fed the birds and my large gauge in the back yard. It read exactly one half inch so I am happy with my new technology. I don't have to go out in the rain to see how much has fallen anymore.

This morning my Sunday School class really didn't want to hear the stories in Genesis 16-19. It started with a woman 90 years old getting pregnant by a 99 year old husband. That beat the woman in England who had children at age 66. Then we found out that Abraham and his son Ishmael were both circumcised on the same day. I had supplemented with a little internet research and found that the Muslims who relate to Ishmael still practice circumcision along with the Jews and my SS class all had their sons circumcised as a matter of practice. Then we found that Abraham "jewed" God down on how many righteous people it would take in Sodom to prevent destruction of that sinful city. He got him down to ten from fifty, but when the angels who looked like common men visited Lot in Sodom, there were not ten and God wiped it out after Lot left. The class didn't want to hear Lot offer his virgin daughters to the men who were demanding that the angels come out so that they could have sex with them. So we learned what God thinks of sodomy. We still don't know why Lot's wife looked back and became a pillar of salt. But what really was unacceptable to the class was Lot going to live in a cave and his daughters deciding to get him drunk and becoming empregnated by their father. I told them that the Bible tells the unvarnished story and shows the weakness of even the patriarchs that we can relate to.

I won night before last but last night the raccoons won another one after I filled the feeder and didn't get the lid back on apparently. Here is a video of how hard he worked night before last. Well I tried unsuccessfully three times to load a video. I will do it later as an edit.

RACCOON WAR CONTINUES

I looked out this morning and the automatic deer feeder was in good shape. Then when I walked to the mailbox I found the lid had been taken off of the self deer feeder. That raccoon was going to show me who is boss. I don't know how he held on to the wire holding the feeder while he took the lid off. The feeder was empty, so I filled both feeders. I added a second to the automatic feeder so that it throws out more four seconds of corn. Maybe that will help the coon find enough feed. I then found a board to mount the radio rain gauge that came yesterday. I worry that the coon will tear it up. Now I have to wait for rain. This morning I looked out and there was a small puddle on the rock walk. But there was very little in the rain gauge. We still have small chance of rain in the forecast for several days.

My daughter went to Tomball to the funeral of her friend's mother that Kathy had spent a lot of time with. But yesterday she told me that I am going to have a great granddaughter to go with my two great grandsons. And this weekend Jim and Mandi moved into the house that they inherited from her parents and are remodeling. Jon-Marc helped them move. Kathy will fly to Albuquerque tomorrow for a meeting all day Monday and fly back Tuesday. I remember Ma Halsell flying to Albuquerque for a week of math training when she was teaching and it was the highlight of her life. The first time she had been on an airplane. She loved it and I hope Kathy will enjoy her trip.

I BEAT THE RACCOON LAST NIGHT

This morning the lid was on the deer feeder and I finally put enough duct tape to keep the bottom on. I will post a video of the raccoon trying to remove the lid. FEDEX delivered a brand new radio rain guage. I called them after changing batteries on the original one and they told me to throw it away, that they would send a new model. The new model is completely different. It has a large bowl to collect rain and it works as far as the radio connection goes. I haven't put it outside because I see that I need to fasten it to a big block of wood to keep the raccoons from messing with it. I am afraid they will still tear it up. I didn't need it until last night when we got a trace of rain sometime. No puddles when I got up but it was enough to remove tracks on the road when I walked to the mailbox. I stopped and put some of the mountain pink seeds around to see if I can see more next year.
Yesterday as I was posting the day to my Daytimer about 10:15 I noticed that I had a Chamber of Commerce dinner at 6:30 that I had missed. I had been concentrating on trying to get a Word document for the July Flame and have a problem with the new docx formats not being converted by Word Perfect. I have got to start looking at the Daytimer in the morning and plan my day better.

RECYCLING PAYS OFF IN CASH

I recycled paper, cans, glass and plastic. My first trip to the container resulted in a one dollar bill being blown on the pavement. Then when I went to the plastic container there was a five dollar bill moving along the ground. Both had obviously been folded into a wad. The car that was there when I drove up had driven off so I had no one to return the money to so it went into my pocket.

I needed it because I had just come from the hearing aid office where I had signed up for a pair of new digital hearing aids at $4600 which was a lot more than I wanted to pay, but the beautiful doctor was very persuasive. I finally gave in when she said I could get 18 month zero interest financing. I can afford that, although looking at the European river trips that came in the Vantage catalog, I need about that amount of money to make a trip that Elmer and Ann Kelton said was a great adventure. They did it a few years ago. We enjoyed our Alaska cruise with Vantage so much that I am looking at their trips when I can afford it.

I ate at my favorite chinese restaurant Chinese Kitchen that is still trying to find a buyer but they continue to be the best bargain in food in Abilene as far as I am concerned and they all know me and speak to me. They bring me chop sticks without asking.

Speaking of food, yesterday morning I made French toast and remembered to add a little cinnamon that made it really good. And tonight I thought I needed fish so I found an old can of sardines in the pantry that tasted pretty good with crackers. I had my ususal half glass of red wine, handful of mixed nuts, grapes, few pieces of dark chocolate and the apple. I almost have my weight back down from the splurge in Oklahoma City.

This morning the lid was off the deer feeder, but the video only shows him working on it. I will post two 15 second videos five minutes apart.

RACCOONS WIN ANOTHER ROUND

This morning the lid and bottom were off of the deer feeder. So I pounded the tabs on the lid down and that should hold it. But the bottom round cup that clips on the feeder is a problem. Today I decided to duct tape it on. I put a couple of pieces on but after it rattled the feed out at 6 it fell off again. I then took the duct tape out and wrapped three pieces around and up to the feeder. When I looked out about dark there were two deer and the cup was on the ground. This is really a bad design and I haven't figured out a solution for it. I reloaded the camera to see whether I have the lid on tight enough to foil Mr. Coon tonight.

Kiwanis had Keith Lawrence talk about his business and his current interest in the use of fire for controlling brush and preventing destructive fires like the one that wiped out Cross Plains in 2005. He has taken the fire training and is helping form a Callahan fire group to do controlled burns for ranchers to improve their pastures by burning off the cedar and mesquite.

Tomorrow I go in for hearing tests. I haven't had my hearing checked for ten years or so. My old hearing aids worked fine yesterday at Library board and today at Kiwanis so if they keep working I will keep them for a while.

RACCOON LOSES ONE FIGHT

Monday morning I changed bed clothes, started the laundry and checked the front yard deer feeder. The lid that I had crimped stayed on. I got the video and will post the raccoon trying unsuccessfully to take the lid off. Apparently every time the feeder goes off it vibrates the bottom round cover off. So tonight when I added corn to the feeder, I duct taped the bottom on. We will see what it looks like tomorrow, but I haven't put the camera back on.

This morning I attended our monthly Library board meeting and learned of another tribute to Lou. Seems that Rusty Burke, from Washington, D.C. who started the REH day gave two lantana plants to the Library for placing on Lou and Joan McCowan's graves. Ginny suggested planting them in our park next to the Library where they will receive attention and he thought that was a great idea, so they are deciding just where to plant them.

RACCOONS WIN AGAIN

This morning I looked out and the lid was off the deer feeder and the bottom cover was on the ground. I said I should have this on video so I will try to post a couple of the clips.



This is the last clip of the nightly raids.


and this is me repairing the damage.

HOT LAZY FRIDAY

I got up late and collected batteries from camera and deer feeder and placed them on chargers. Yesterday and this morning the lid had been taken off the deer feeder. I bent the edges down a little to hold it on. After feeding me and the birds I walked to get the mail. Still haven't seen any fish in the pond. I went upstairs to work on the computer when Mark called to ask me to get information on the Halsell tombstone. He wanted to know the dimensions and mounting of the Methodist Circuit Rider medallion on Pa's side. I drove to Admiral Cemetery to take photos and measurements to email to them. Mark said Mary Kathryn has talked to TWU. They don't have any existing medallions but gave MK the name of a company that makes trophies and medallions and she is working on that part of the project. They want something appropriate for a Regent.

After my afternoon nap I did my ironing. A shirt and two pants. I then put the batteries and chip in the camera and set it to take videos on a 2 sec. notice. I put the recharged battery in the deer feeder and tested it. It was set on 15 seconds and I have a lot of corn on the ground. That may keep the raccoons on the ground tonight instead of taking the lid off. It was hot and I didn't spend much time outside.

THURSDAY WITH WALLACE BENNETT

I started the morning early going to the Methodist Men's prayer meeting. I got there exactly at 6:30, but was too late for the devotional. I am setting my alarm clock earlier next time.

Then this afternoon I picked up Wallace Bennett, who was the editor of the Methodist Reporter for about 30 years to hear Doug Williamson, a 33 year veteran reported on the Abilene Reporter-News who told about the changes in the newspaper business. We had an interesting discussion with one older gray haired fellow telling about a grandson who is in school to become a doctor who never reads a newspaper and gets all his news from his cell phone. We had some young people in the room who were on their texting phones during the meeting who helped us understand the problems of getting news to young people. Another problem was the overload of too much news from computers and internet, Facebook and twitters. I ran into the physics prof who wrote the Oped supporting the Cap and Trade bill. I told him I had written a response but the ARN didn't print it. He said we could discuss it and I made my point that carbon dioxide has no correlation to global warming and he disagreed with me. I didn't argue with him because he is one giant of a man who looked down at me.

Wallace and I then went to Texas Star where Carol Walt was signing her latest book, UNIDENTIFIED TEXAS OBJECTS: Tales from the Weird, Wild West. Wallace bought one for each of us while I was parking the car. Carol said she had a book signing next week at Denton at NTSU. I told her she would probably get a couple of people from Dallas coming over. Her husband was a Police Captain for years in Dallas before they bought a ranch at Pioneer. They go to our church.

Coming home we drove back on Hiway 18, the old Bankhead Highway. Wallace wanted me to see the new granite monument on the Callahan County courthouse lawn that he got there through the Callahan County Historical Commission. Coming back down FM 2228 he showed me the old signature tree where Callahan county was organized back in 1884, I think. The tree is looking bad on the bark. We came by old Callahan City site and Wally pointed out the old well that supplied the city with water. When the railroad built north thru Baird the county seat was moved and Callahan City disappeared except for an old cemetery.

I then stopped and showed Wally the art work on the Springgap Ranch gate that has all of the plants, birds and animals in the metal art work, except we couldn't find a mountain lion that they have seen on the ranch and on my place. I didn't see it, but Ken Craig said he saw it just on my side of the fence one day. I got Wally home before 9 so he could see his wife that he hasn't seen in so long he wondered if he would know her. She had a new hairdo and looked great but is leaving him tomorrow to go to a funeral in FW.

QUIET WEDNESDAY

Today was prayer and fasting. I did well on the fasting but I wouldn't make a prayer warrior. I spent a couple of hours working on the oral history of Zora Mae.

I found a letter to the editor in the July 6 Aviation Week that agreed with my suspicions about the Air France Flight 447. He said the finding the vertical fin reminded him of the AA Flight 587 that crashed in New York Nov.12, 2001. Both planes had a composite fin that is attached to the fuselage by brackets without a spar that is anchored to the fuselage structure.
It seemed that turbulence stripped the fin off of both aircraft and that a bad design was not corrected after the 2001 crash. He stated that the system reeks of poor design and instructions to not use the rudder in turbulence is not the answer.
He also was concerned about considering this design for competition for the USAF tanker program.

This is the reason that a lot of people won't fly on Airbus 330s.

BIRDS ARE SINGING

How do I know the birds are singing? When I went to the mailbox, my old hearing aids were returned from Abilene and when I got to the pond, while I was running some water I put them on and immediately heard a song bird that I didn't know could sing. It was the goldfinch that was drinking at the pond. And all day I could understand women's voices. I went to town to help clean up the old shelves coming out of storage for the Library. We will use what we can in the storage room and sell the rest, but we had to clean up the mold and droppings from storage.

I worked till time to go to Kiwanis where we had more visitors than members. Harris Worcester, my new Methodist preacher came as my guest. He got to meet all of the Baptists. The Church of Christ was absent today. We had four or five guests from Kiwanis in Abilene plus a couple of motorcycle riders who stopped to eat and agreed to eat with us. It was a business meeting and the big news was that the board had agreed to give $250 to support the Library children's programs. We used to give twice that but for the past several years support for the Library has been both non-existant and sporadic.

I also found out that Cottonwood and Cross Plains got over one inch of rain while I got a whole two tenths. Lydia came today and cleaned up three weeks of dust but said it didn't look too bad. I was watching the senate committee on energy chaired by Senator Boxer looking at the bill that was passed by the house and can't believe the rhetoric that is being used by the administration to pass this bill. If we don't we are going to make our children die of disease caused by global warming. I thought the global temperatures are coming down. One Republican read the editorial from the WSJ telling how a 38 year veteran of the EPA who called for a reconsideration of the global warming was told to shut up and go work on something else because the administration didn't want to hear his comments.

I am also upset the Secretary Clinton is backing the Honduran President who was deposed by the Supreme Court of Honduras because he was trying to hold a referendum that could only b e called by the Congress in order to change their constitution to let him remain in office like Hugo Chavez is doing. Why we don't condemn dictators and support democratic countries who are deposing them, I don't understand. Unless we want to have a communist dictator running this country. OK I shouldn't get into politics, but this is my blog.

This afternoon I had three deer under the feeders. I am going to have to increase the throw time on the automatic feeder.

A LITTLE RAIN

It sprinkled several times over the last three days recording a total of 0.2" in my gauge. My new electronic gauge doesn't work. I tested it today by pouring water in with the recorder in my pocket real close. It didn't record. I took it apart to see if there was another way the rocker that measures could be installed. It can be put in the opposite way but doesn't rock because the little magnet is in a groove. I put new batteries in each unit. I am technically deficient in making my outdoors gadgets work.

I haven't read any good books lately to comment on, but for Sunday School I did a little research on the computer. We were working on the sons of Noah in Genesis 9, 10, and 11. The student book remarked that people had used the story of Canaan, the son of Ham who was punished by Noah saying he would be the servants of Shem, to insinuate that Canaan became the black race that served as slaves down through history. To try to find something I went to Crosswalk.com that lets you look at a number of commentaries. I started with John Wesley's commentary who commented on every verse in the Bible. He had no comments on how the descendants became the different nations although he placed England in the list of Isles that were mentioned. No racial comments. I then checked Gill's commentary and it sounded a lot like Wesley. Don't know who wrote the first comment. I looked at other commentaries and the only one that had more was Schofield who traced the descendants to Syria, Russia, Greece, etc. But no racial comments. During SS class Jane Bonner said she had been taught that the story of Ham seeing Noah naked was a homosexual story. I told her that was how many stories get started. The Bible has no indication of that but never backs off in other places about homosexual stories. We also focused on Peleg because in his day the earth was divided. Is that when the continental drift occurred?

DC ENGINEERING REVIEW EDUCATION

Today I solved the deer feeder problem. When I woke up this morning about 6:15 I got to thinking about the deer feeder battery. I brought it in and hooked it back up to the charger. I had been mistaken thinking that when the charger flashed that the battery was charged. When Mark checked it with his volt meter I realized that it wasn't fully charged. We charged it for about an hour and got it up to over 4 volts and heard it try to spin the feeder. So today I left it charging until 5 tonight. I got my voltmeter out and it was up to 6 volts. When I put it back in and tried the test it through out a lot of corn and I realized I needed to limit it to 5 seconds or less or will empty the feeder in a hurry. It worked on the next cycle so I am now in good shape and realize that the old feeder may not have been bad. Rechargeable batteries need a lot of charging.

Today I celebrated the Fourth at the annual Cottonwood celebration put together by Wallace Bennett. He started the program with the posting of the flag by his granddaughter, Kelli, to the Star Spangled Banner sang by the crowd. After Bob Childress read the Declaration of Independence we had a puppet singing I Am Glad To Be an American. Then Jacque Childress led us in a bunch of patriotic songs. The last event was the drawing for the quilt won by someone with a Mississippi address. Wallace closed the program singing God Bless America and we all enjoyed sandwichs and dessert. I contributed my pull apart cake I bought in town yesterday and half of it was eaten. I was back home by 11:15.

It got to 104 but I stayed in except for working with the feeder.

TWO DAY DEER FEEDER INSTALLATION

Yesterday I got up early and got to the Methodist Men's meeting exactly on time. Everyone else gets there early. We had a devotional but haven't gotten back to the prayer session. I ate one biscuit with gravy and sausage. That one biscuit was as large as my small plate. I gave the new preacher an email from Mary Ann Chaffin to give to Carl Edington when he calls on him. I needed to cash my LW check but the bank isn't open early so I waited around shopping Lawrence Farm and Ranch Supply and ended up with an outback straw hat and a small sprinkler head. When I got home I put the sprinkler on my cottonwoods. I just couldn't watch them turn yellow and drop their leaves, although I waited a little too long. I found out the drive thru window was open at 8 so I got my business finished and got home in time to walk back to the mailbox.

At Meth Mens Roy Hunter offered to come help my put my deer feeder together. He had the nut runner that I didn't have for the self-tapping screws. He came at 10 and put it together. I had set the controls but when we got it in the tree the test didn't work. We decided that the battery needed charging. I brought it in and let it charge for a few hours and put it back. It still didn't work on test or during the set times.

This morning I took my flag to the front gate when I went for the mail. Mark and Mary Kathryn came to town to open a checking account with the local bank to take advantage of the 4.5% interest for accounts up to $25000. Mark said it was a lot better than any other investment so he was going to take advantage of it. MK called Sue and she and Ike met us at Subway for lunch. After Mark brought his electric test tool out. We checked the battery and it was low voltage. We charged it some more and got it where we could hear it trying to spin the feeder but decided I needed to get a new battery. I have one lone deer that I think is a buck that comes to look for corn. We spilled enough on the ground putting up the new feeder that I can wait to get a better battery.

Today the WSJ posted several responses to a science religion op-ed that I sent an email in response, but they didn't choose to use mine. I posted it on my creation blog.

While in town, I bought a cake at a sale by the cheer leaders in the bank to use for my contribution to the potluck lunch tomorrow at the Fourth of July celebration in Cottonwood. They always do a great job with their patriotic celebration reading the Declaration of Independence, a puppet show, pledging allegiance and having a fellowship lunch. They hang red, white and blue bunting and celebrate properly. I will have my flag flying at the front gate.

KITS CAN CLIMB TREES

The two fox kits are growing like weeds. They are twice the size when I first saw them last Sunday morning. Here is a photo of Momma Fox with one of her kits.

I have added a video, but tried twice to load the video showing them climbing the cottonwood tree behind Momma lying on the ground.

I have added the latest photo of the mountain pink completely open. They make a beautiful bouquet.