Aerie Report, August 6, 2009

With company (Terry's Aunt Nancy and Cousin Lorraine) from South Carolina due on Wednesday, Terry and I did a little house cleaning during the day. We also went through the garden and picked more string beans (another frozen quart), zucchini (some from the neighbor's "free" pile; another four loaves), and cucumbers. Lots of cucumbers. We ended up with 20 cucumbers on the counter. That stash prompted Terry to make seven pints of garlic-dill pickles. We saved some out for salads the next few days. We have plenty of Romaine lettuce from the garden.

The ladies arrived last evening around 6 PM and after a dinner of salad, lasagna, garlic bread, and wine, we had a nice visit. They were quite happy to find the "high" temperature for the day had been 76 degrees and that the overnight low was to be 52. Beats the heck out of the temperatures in SC.

Today, Terry took the ladies over to the Grand Canyon of PA (the Pine Creek Gorge) and then to Wellsboro for lunch at the diner to do a little sightseeing.

While they were out, I took the chainsaw up the hill and spent four hours on a couple of tree tops that I had lopped the smaller branches off the other day. I've got a long way to go toward clearing up the tree tops from the logging that we had done, but every four to six hours I spend up the hill makes things...well, neater. Plus I've several small stacks of firewood logs awaiting hauling to the house. Of course, there are also several sizable piles of branches and limbs too small for use as firewood. I'm limiting myself to saving anything over four or five inches in diameter and cutting it to 16-18 inch lengths. And even then I'm throwing some really twisted branches that would meet the diameter requirements onto the "debris" piles. Lord knows there's still more firewood than I'll ever burn in the next five years.

Tonight promises to be another very cool night (perhaps even down into the upper 40s according to accuhunch) to be followed by a day where the temperature may not reach 75 despite being mostly sunny.

The ladies will be going up to Corning on Friday. I'll be playing lumberjack again.