Journal: Squirrels & Fungus Amongus -- & a Trip to the Sandhills

Remember last week when I called those odd things on the cedar tree ‘pinecones’?  I had actually looked it up online to see if I could find out what they were called... found a similar photo, and saw that the person who’d posted it called it a ‘pinecone’.   

You know, I learned long ago that one cannot trust the Internet.  Furthermore, one should never trust a solitary source.

A few days later, I was looking at those odd growths on the tree, and I thought, Those are not pinecones.  About the time I came to this conclusion, I spotted the tree’s real pinecones.  They look quite pineconey, not strange at all.  

I delved into the matter a little deeper.

It took almost five whole minutes before I hit pay dirt.  Once I had the correct name, I found a small slew of articles on the phenomenon.

That stuff is cedar-apple rust fungus of the Eastern red cedar.  Just see how they look today!  (top of page)

These spores find any nearby apple or crabapple trees, and can spoil the fruit or even eventually kill the tree.  The apple trees have to be sprayed early in the season to prevent it.

One treats the apple trees, but not so much the cedars or junipers.  Spores can travel many miles, and the infected tree may be far from apple trees.  

Galls and witches’ brooms (from which the spores grow) on eastern red cedar or junipers do little harm to the tree or shrub and do not need to be managed.  They can be pruned off to improve the look of the tree or shrub – not so easy, when the tree is 50-75 feet tall!  Fungicides are not recommended to protect eastern red cedar or junipers from infection.

Some resistant varieties of juniper and eastern red cedar are available and should be used in areas where Gymnosporangium rusts are a known problem.

More info: https://burgerfarms.com/cedar-apple-rust-what-is-it-how-to-treat-it/ and https://extension.umn.edu/plant-diseases/cedar-apple-rust

Here’s what the ‘galls’ look like in the winter before the spores sprout:

Tuesday afternoon, one of my weather apps was telling me it was ‘mostly cloudy’ here.  But there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, except for a few wispy ones far away.  The weatherman on the radio predicted rain Wednesday night, as did WeatherBug; but the aforementioned weather app gave no mention of any chance of rain.

We have no underground sprinklers, so we use hoses and sprinklers.  I’m watching the weather, because I don’t want my hostas to burn this year like they did last year.  Once the leaves get burnt, they don’t recover, the entire season.

Here’s one of the cute little squirrels that keeps getting into the bird feeders.  Now, that’s a ‘Who, me?!’ face if I ever saw one!

I finally got enough boxes and bins hauled out of Loren’s basement that I could lift the bedspread on the bed and find out why it was so high, much too high for a person of normal height to climb into.  It was because there were two thick layers of eggcrate-gel foam atop an extra five-inch-thick mattress on it, along with a multitude of spare blankets.  I managed to roll up each of the pieces of foam, fold them once, and haul them out to the Jeep. 

When I got home, I cut a square from the better piece and tucked it into Tiger’s bed under the original foam, as his bed was all squished in the middle.  He seems to like his bed even better now.

The rest of the foam went into the trash, as it was so old it was starting to disintegrate.  If your fingers feel sandy when you touch it, it couldn’t possibly be good for you to lie on it and inhale those minute particles, could it?!

The mattress is too heavy and bulky for me; Larry will need to help me with it.

I worked in the yard Thursday morning.  We’d had a good rain during the night; that makes weed-pulling a lot easier (and makes them grow like crazy, too 🥴).  

I filled the bird feeders, and soon they were being visited by English sparrows, red-winged blackbirds, papa house finches with numerous fledglings, mourning doves, and little chipping sparrows.  A Baltimore oriole was at the suet feeder, and a cardinal was in the sugar maple singing like everything.

After I went in, I used a special scrub with essential oils that Lydia made.  It feels good, getting all the itchies off, and one doesn’t even have to use lotion afterwards.  One has to be careful, though; it makes the tub really slippery!  😲  Good thing I learned to ice skate when I was young.

Soon I had a piping cup of Chocolate Indulgence coffee and was heading upstairs to my little office to scan more photos.  At the moment, I’m going through a box of my late mother-in-law Norma’s very old family photos.  She asked Hannah to find them shortly before she passed away, calling them ‘precious pictures’.  We found only one small box of old photos, and wondered if there were more.  We displayed quite a few of those on photo boards at the funeral.

Recently, I found a box at Loren’s house, about 12 x 12 x 5, chockful of very old Jackson and Jenkinson (Norma’s maiden name) family photos.  I also found a plastic bin with a lot of old photos, too.  When I get all of these scanned, I’ll give digital copies to Larry’s brother Kenny and his children, in addition to our own children.  They were important to Norma... and they are important to us, too.

As I type, I’m nibbling on Schwan’s frozen strawberries and banana slices.  They’re pretty good, but they sure can’t equal fresh strawberries.

When I was young and we’d visit my Uncle Don and Aunt June Swiney on their farm near Shelbyville, Illinois, they’d give me a bowl and tell me to go pick and eat all the strawberries I could hold.  Mama always quietly cautioned me not to be greedy about it.  I appreciate the manners my mother taught me – doubtless more so now than then.  heh

My Fitness Tracker told me I’d taken 8,155 steps that day.  A little over 8,000 steps seems to be my ‘normal’ for a busy day.

It was too chilly and windy to work outside Friday morning.  The temperature finally made it up to 48° by noon.  My breakfast was half a bagel, toasted and lavishly buttered, with raspberry jam, and a big cup of milk to go with it.  I think that might very well be my favorite thing to eat for breakfast.  Honey might be every bit as good as jam, though.

One of the things I brought home from Loren’s house was a large wire bin full of new and nearly-new (though, for the most part, expired) bottles and jars of homeopathic and ‘natural’ health ‘remedies’, aka “Jeremiah Peabody’s polyunsaturated, quick-dissolving, fast-acting, pleasant-tasting, green and purple pills, ♪ ♫ oh yeah! ♫ ♪ ”

Loren gets heaps and piles of ‘medical’ advertisements.  I got a lot of it stopped by returning the postage-paid envelopes in various magazines asking his name to be removed, or calling their 800 numbers and asking same.  But then he went and ordered something from a couple of magazines he got during those days he had the mail returned to his house, and the onslaught took right up again where it had left off.

Male English sparrow

Now the mail-forwarding has expired, so we only get things that actually have our address; he gets any mail with his own address.  Hopefully, I still get all the bills and financial documents.

I wish I could put a stop to those Fountain-of-Youth magazines.  I worry that Loren will forget and take too many, though it’s probably more likely he’ll forget to take it entirely.  But maybe it’s all nothing but sugar pills?  😆

A lot of the stuff in this wire bin is in powder form, and some is liquid in tall bottles.  Many still have the price written on them, and they weren’t cheap.  Two liter bottles containing a clear liquid that has no odor whatsoever is for a ‘foot bath’.  The price written on each bottle?  $75!  A small typed paper of instructions is taped to one of the bottles saying that one is to boil a gallon of water, add one cup of this liquid, cool it to a certain temperature, and then soak one’s feet for an hour.  (Do you have time to soak your feet for an hour?!)  The stuff can be rewarmed and reused for a week, and then it should be discarded and a new batch should be made. 

Yuck.  I think it would reek of toejam long before the week was up.

Loren didn’t use a lot of these products, probably because the instructions were too long and convoluted for him to decipher.  He’s always thought he couldn’t follow a recipe in a cookbook – and that quallyfobble is certainly a whole lot worse these days.  He cannot cope with a series of instructions. 

I found an expiration date of November 2008 on one bottle, and when I looked it up on the company’s website, I found some extremely vague description that I finally decided was referring to cancer, and I see that it’s supposed to circumvent all sorts of surgeries.  “Never have another organ removed!” it says.

Janice most likely ordered a lot of these things in the hopes that they would help her.   We learned when we went through some of her things after she passed away that she was not feeling well a long time before she ever told anyone.

Most of this stuff is labeled poorly.  The labels seldom tell what the ingredients are, and never tell what it’s supposed to be used for – because of course the Peabodys of the world have gotten their pants sued off for advertising ‘cures’ for cancer, asthma, heart disease, you-name-it.  There are hundreds of dollars’ worth of who-knows-what in this bin.

I extracted one bottle of multi-vitamins; we’ll use it.  The rest... I’ll look them up online, I guess.  And throw a lot of it out.  I dislike wasting all that money, even if it wasn’t my money; but I dislike Jeremiah Peabody’s green and purple pills even more.

This is a mourning dove on one of the birdbaths.  Can you see that his throat is extended?  He’s happily cooing away.  

And this is the larger and lighter-colored Eurasian collared dove:

That afternoon I got a news notification with the following title:  Biden unveils $6 trillion budget.

$6 trillion.  That’s a six with twelve zeros after it.

Good grief. 

Ah, well.  I can’t do anything about that, but I can look forward to walking on streets of gold someday, even if our country is totally bankrupted.  🥴

How about this? – the missus and the mister American goldfinch finally found the new bird feeder out front!   Aren’t they splendid in their summer finery?  Mama used to call them ‘wild canaries’.

I took an extra box of food to Loren Friday with a big label taped on it reading, “Saturday’s supper”, since Larry and I were planning to take a drive to Milburn, Nebraska, 150 miles to the west, as Larry needed to pick up an air compressor and a bumper and grille guard that he’d purchased through an online auction.  I put the box into Loren’s refrigerator, and promised to call and remind him of it the following afternoon.

Once again while I was there, Loren pointed at the large-letter clock and day-of-the-week display I got him and put on his table, and asked, “Do you know why that girl left that ‘Friday afternoon’ clock on my table?”

“I put that there!” I told him.  “I gave it to you; it’s yours!”

He was just as surprised as he was the first two times I told him this.

Double Knockout rosebud

When I stopped scanning photos that night, I had 19,328 scanned.  66 albums are done, and there are 61 to go, not counting these old photos of Norma’s.  I have 377 old family photos scanned; there are probably another 3-400 to go – if I don’t find more.

It’s like the widow of Zarephath’s barrel of meal and cruse of oil, in Elijah’s time:  no matter how much she used each day, there was always more the next day!  😃  But at least nobody is shooting pictures with film cameras; so one of these days I just have to come to the end.  Don’t I??  Don’t I?!

Again Saturday morning, it was too cold to work outside.  Larry told me we would leave for Milburn, Nebraska, at 1:00 p.m.  I was accordingly ready to go at 1:00 p.m.  Silly me.

We left home precisely 3 minutes before 3:00 p.m.  We had planned to go to Calamus Reservoir after collecting Larry’s compressor and bumper, but we didn’t have time.

The man from whom Larry purchased the bumper and grill guard has a very large farm alongside the North Loup River (a bigger river there than in Columbus, where it’s been siphoned off into the Loup Canal).

We drove to Burwell to eat supper at our favorite little home-cookin’ restaurant, the Sandstone Grill.  Burwell has a population of only 1,210, but they host one of the country’s largest rodeos every July.

We parked the Jeep and enclosed trailer... walked down the street to the Sandstone Grill...  — and found a sign on the door informing us that it was ‘Permanently Closed’.  Waa waa waa  That’s doubtless because of last year’s shutdown on account of Covid-19. 

So... we went instead to the Pizza Palace a block down the street.  We ordered what we thought was a meal for each of us:  Larry got a small taco pizza; I got a chicken fajita salad.  After a lengthy wait, the entrées arrived – huge things, piled high.  Larry had three slices of pizza; I had two.  There were three left; we took them home.  I had a small helping of my salad – and couldn’t even tell I’d eaten anything, it was heaped so high.

I ate a large helping of that salad for supper tonight, and it’s still only half gone.

They offered nothing in the way of dessert at the Pizza Palace, so Larry stopped at the Pump & Pantry.  After filling the Jeep, he got a couple of small, boxed cherry pies and a tall cup of Schwan’s soft-serve strawberry ice cream, complete with large chunks of strawberries.

As we headed out of town, two deer ran across the road in front of us.  Shortly thereafter, a huge bug hit the windshield, kaTHWUMPSHPLAT!

“What kind of a bug hits the windshield that hard?!” I exclaimed.

“I think it was a Volkswagen,” replied Larry.  🤣

This little squirrel, when he saw me taking his picture, scrambled to the top of the tower that holds the bird feeders, and took a wild, flying leap to the maple tree, barely grabbing a very small branch that bent low under his weight while he scampered on up to safe territory.

Last night after church, Bobby and Hannah and their family came visiting, bearing venison enchiladas.  Mmmm, mmm.

It was a beautiful day today.  Larry first went off to continue deconstructing the hog barn he bought some months ago, which will be reconstructed on Teddy’s property.  Then he did some welding on his truck at Walkers’ shop, and now he’s helping Maria’s father Dwight, who owns an auto rebuilding business, move his many vehicles to a new place, as the people from whom he rents have sold the building.

This afternoon, I took Loren ancient-grain-encrusted cod, broccoli, applesauce, peaches, prunes, a slice of cheese, V8 cocktail juice – and a strawberry-lemonade Starbucks Refresher drink, which I told him was especially for when he’s been working outside, and comes in hot and thirsty. 

I loaded the back of the BMW with a bunch of stuff from his basement, took it home and sorted it, then took some things back to the Goodwill and threw the garbage into the trash bin.

And now, since tomorrow morning will be perfect for working outside, I’d better head for the feathers.

,,,>^..^<,,,          Sarah Lynn          ,,,>^..^<,,,