Busy Summer Ending

Wow.  This summer has flown by and we have so much to be thankful for!

Let me begin with a little news about our four hens.  They are seven weeks old and they now live outside.

The redwood chicken coop is their "safe house" to protect them from foxes and other vermin.  There are bricks around the base that extend down eight inches and underneath of their coop is a buried mat of wire mesh to prevent anything from digging up and up.  Outside of their home, I have built a 12' by 8' chicken "run" which has been described as the chicken palace.  It's a lot like a jungle gym with a roost five feet up for the chicks to look down on the world.  The chicken run has a wire mesh roof to keep the hawk from attacking them.

I'm told by our chicken experts at The Mill in Hereford that we can expect them to start laying eggs when they reach five months of age. While some people say the chickens will lay eggs for only two years (one a day), others tell us that we may have eggs coming our way for four or five years.  Either way, having these chickens has been a lot of fun already and our neighbor, Art Wannlund, correctly observes that "it feels like a farm now".

The next thing that has been keeping me busy has been one of my favorite activities...videotaping and editing weddings.  The first wedding was two weeks ago at the beautiful Peabody Library.  They were a young couple...Noah and Jessica...that my sister Pegg knew and it was tremendous to videotape their wedding.  They gave me permission to invite others to see the video which is posted at https://vimeo.com/74142653 . It was a beautiful service...a beautiful bride...and a beautiful setting.

And as awesome as that was, I followed it up one week later with another sensational wedding in another fabulous setting.  This was a wedding for a young lady from our church that I knew when she was growing up (yes, she's all grown up now!) and they chose to have their service at Swan Harbor Farm in Harford County next to the Chesapeake Bay. Again, I am grateful to Zach and Nicole to allow me to videotape their wedding.  Nicole's aunt officiated at the wedding.  It was beautiful and family-oriented affair.

In between these weddings, we took a little vacation during the Labor Day week down in Ocean City and have made a discovery. That's the time to go to O.C.!  The crowds thin out, but the weather was excellent and the water was warm.  I'm an old Ocean City person from my childhood and I loved it.  One of the highlights was to visit Assateague Island and see the famous horses.  What surprised me was that DNA samples from the horses have determined that the old story about them coming from a Spanish shipwreck is not true.  They are from here.

One of my other highlights from Ocean City was to get up at 5:30 a.m. twice and go down to the beach to watch the sun rise above the water. Each time, I found fishermen who were already there and actually catching fish.  Never happened to me when I tried it.  I also found the remains of this sand castle that had been built the night before.  The tide was coming in at daybreak so it wasn't long until the castle became history.  We were traveling with our good friends, Wayne and Judy Sutter, and they just made the five-day vacation even more memorable.

Another project that has been keeping me busy these

 days has been helping Pegg and Sue clear the Christmas trees from the land where their future driveway is going to go.  They are selling three lots behind our house and the driveway cuts from my driveway to an access road owned by the Ruhl family that leads back to Pegg and Sue's property.  It was pretty hard to visualize how that was going to work, so Pegg hired a contractor to remove the trees and I've since been working on cleaning up the underbrush beneath the remaining trees and digging up many of the stumps that are not part of the driveway.   I plan to re-seed the area and get some grass growing there again.

Remember that tree top that fell on me and put me into Shock Trauma for five days a couple years ago?  Well, the other half of that tree top came down during a recent storm so I decided it was time for the entire tree to come down and become firewood.  I run a little firewood business on the side mostly for my very good friends, but this wood is extraordinary.  It is red oak and its clear of any knots and very straight.  Awesome wood.  But it is going to take a year or more for the wood to season (dry out) before it will be suitable as firewood.  I have a 27 ton gasoline log splitter and I'm putting it to very good use.

Finally, a word about my Mom and her situation.  As many of you know, Mom (90 years old) had to move to Symphony Manor in Roland Park a few months ago because of her memory loss and physical condition.  Barb and I spent the afternoon with her (red slacks) on a Symphony Manor "walk" through Roland Park and it was delightful.  The highlight of my day.  This was one of her very good days and she looked terrific.  I am really grateful to have this memory of her on a very good day.

Next time, I'll tell you about "Roy"....our new kitten.