Picked Tuesday afternoon

June 24, 2014 – Tuesday

61 degrees/rainy/calm

Pentoga Road

Normally I do all my writing in the early morning, but just as I was grading assignments a bit ago, the internet decided to go away. Since the computer was already on my lap, I decided to go ahead and write. Sargie works early tomorrow and I’ll be making my initial test hike on my “new feet” in the morning. Keep your fingers crossed.

Monday saw me going to the podiatrist in Iron Mountain. I’ll admit, I was nervous. The last time I had a shot inserted into the top of my foot, I about went through the roof. When injecting cortisone, the doctor isn’t in a hurry and moves the needle around the area, leaving it inserted for an hour or two… or maybe twenty or thirty seconds, depositing a bit here and there.

I’ve never known a real foot doctor, but mine is a sweetheart. Somewhere in her 30’s, I wondered what would cause a spunky little lady to dedicate her life to feet.

She told me I had several options, the easiest being cortisone shots. I screwed up my face, asked her if she had a piece of leather on which to bite down, and told her to go ahead.

She laughed and pulled out a can of spray anesthetic then asked if I wanted to watch. My feet are ugly enough without me having to look at them in her office.

She sprayed and I looked away. After a minute, she said “There!” I told her to go ahead and give me the shot. She replied that she already had.

I watched the second shot, but didn’t feel a thing. The person who invented topical spray anesthetic should automatically go to Heaven.

I arrived home on Monday afternoon and mowed the rest of the lawn and under the big trees out front. I’m averaging mowing at least once a week. Just like last year, it’s green and lush on Pentoga Road.

I next tried to figure out how much lumber and what dimensions would be needed to complete the storage building, but finally gave up. There’s just a lot of marks on that tape measure and after putting down some numbers, I came in the house, started entering them into the calculator and discovered that I’d measured wrong. After a few more attempts, I finally gave up. Yooper Brother Mark is going to come out sometime in the next few days and help me measure and figure what needs to be purchased.

I ended the day outside working with the backhoe and covered over one huge boulder-filled hole. I'll use the leftover dirt to fill in the low places in the future.

No matter where I dig or work, Brutus wants to lay there. There was a six foot hole under where he is lying and I wanted to make it smooth and plant grass seed. Though I'd shoo him away, he'd return and roll around every time I'd turn my back.

 Sargie was home fairly early Monday night and we had a quiet evening watching television and talking.

 Yooper Brother Mark called early Tuesday morning saying the truck was full of wood and I could pick it up any time. Sargie hurried to get ready for work and took me in so I could get the truck, drive it home, and still make my 10 AM appointment with my money man in Iron Mountain. It all went like clock work.

Everyone wants a Man truck like mine. 

I’m VERY conservative when it comes to my IRA and my financial advisor has done well. It appears I can stay off the welfare rolls for the foreseeable future.

I stopped at the Vision Center and saw Sargie for a few minutes, then went on to Tractor Supply and purchased several steel T-posts to use in and around the garden.

Sargie bought me several packages of bean seed a couple of months ago. I assumed (as did she) that they were bush beans, but all turned out to be of the pole variety. I used the posts purchased today to make more trellises for them to climb. We should have plenty of green beans, they’ll just be two or three weeks later than the bush type we usually plant.

I made the first large picking of strawberries on Tuesday afternoon. The early berries are ever bearing and hopefully, will give us another crop later this summer. With the cool temperatures and plentiful rain, we ought to have berries for the next month, then with the ever bearing variety, again towards fall. Many of these early ones, we’ll eat fresh, but I’d like to put twenty-five to thirty bags of strawberries in the freezer for eating this next winter.

Strawberry season has officially started.

I picked the last of the honeyberries. They taste almost identical to a blueberry, are very hardy and plentiful, grow on bushes that get up to six feet tall, and are high in antioxidants. I had a handful on my year old bushes and am looking forward to gallons and gallons of honeyberries in the years to come.

The wild gooseberries seem to be plentiful this year and I want to pick as many of those as possible. We’ll also have tame black raspberries and should enjoy gallons of wild red raspberries later in the summer. My tame blueberries are loaded, the most ever, and we’ll begin to eat and freeze those in the later part of July. It’s shaping up to be a good berry year.

I see the internet is back on so I think I’ll get this uploaded then head outside and start to work up the truckload of wood. We burn about twelve truckloads per winter. This one puts me at about half of that, perhaps a bit more. I still have my own hardwood to cut on the property and the brown shed to fill. It’s a never-ending process, but then as we all know, a man’s work is never done.

The peonies Jared gave us from his yard two years ago are in full bloom.

So are the tales from Pentoga Road…