Winter?

There is no snow here in SE at Pine Island and the temperature nudged 50 degrees this afternoon. Margo and I took a drive back to WI to pick up some things I had fogotten to bring along down for the winter.

Mom is doing well--studying garden catalogs and brother Marv is busy making 20 wooden trophies for next September's Family 22 rifle target competition. Every one under 16 gets a trophy as well as the 3 best shots in the older crowd. Marv spend a lot of time making a wooden base, mounting a tiny gold sprayed plastic rifleman on the trophy with whatever else looks fancy. Of course, 15 of the 20 will go to his own grandchildren!

Farmer Chuck, who rents the farmland we have has three large piles of turkey manure dumped by semi-truck in the different fields waiting to be spread in the spring. I borrowed a little last year and put a quart or so under each watermelon plant on our sand garden along the old St. Croix River Road. It boosted the melons greatly, but the early frost meant few actually got ripe. This year, instead of mostly black diamonds, we are going with rattlesnake and those other oval light green/dark green striped ones that ripen earlier and taste just about as good.

There was only one mouse in the traps at the cabin on the lake--frozen stiff. He was one of the pretty brown and white country mice that live in the woods. City mice are gray and not nearly so pretty!

Projects for tommorrow and next week include a web site for the Sterling Eureka and Laketown Historical society as well as a newsletter to be sent out in two weeks or so.

I bought a 15 foot video cable so I can run one from my laptop computer directly to the TV and show Hulu videos as well as youtube on the TV while controlling the whole thing from my easy chair!

We are still uncertain about heading south--may do it in a few weeks as my knee replacement surgery is now set for March 12th unless a cancellation happens in February.