September Sunrise

The days are getting shorter, so it's not hard to catch the sunrise.  This is what we saw this morning. So beautiful.  Happy Fall!

September morning sunrise

Harrington's Fall Festival

This past weekend was our community celebration.  It's been going on for many years, and has seen many changes over those years.  Mostly, it's just a fun time to gather and visit and enjoy a roast beef sandwich prepared by the Harrington Lion's club.

The day starts off with a fun run, followed by a parade down main street, games and socializing in the city park, ending with the Harrington Alumni banquet.  And, if you want to stay up really late, you can join in the midnight golf tournament, but that's way past my bed time!

Here are a few images of the day, though by no means a complete representation of the fun had by all.

Runners coming in from a brisk morning jog around our town.

Glen and Eileen chose to walk the course.  They are avid WSU cougar fans, in shape from hiking the hills of Pullman to cheer on the Cougars when they play at home!

Kevin helped register parade participants.  I intended to get a few parade photos, but got busy announcing the various groups that marched down main street.  Next year.....I' think I can do both, announce and photograph!

There's always a long line of folks waiting to get their roast beef sandwich in the school bus garage.

Jamie and Randy selling chances to win an assortment of prizes later in the afternoon.

This is the cart announcing the prizes.  Roni Jo won a gift certificate to a local pharmacy and Baxter won a certificate to our local repair shop!

The most popular activity of the day!  The gold fish toss.  If you are successful at tossing a ping pong ball in to a glass gold fish bowl, you win a gold fish!  

Folks gather from the honored classes i.e. 10 year, 20 year etc. to visit and catch up.

More visiting, and laughing and visiting!

This gal was taken by the llamas that were on display for petting.

You can imagine that the miniature pony rides were a huge hit with the young crowd.

Ellie is looking wistfully at a wading pool of ducks.  Baxter also looked wistfully at this pool of ducks, but his intentions for interaction were not quite the same as Ellie's!

The Bingo table is popular.  

Josh and Kate and their two youngsters were learning about Bingo by playing a few rounds!

The ladies of the altar society of the Harrington Catholic Church always raffle a super interesting basket of goodies.  Winners are thrilled to learn that their name was drawn!

Honey!!!

Yesterday I extracted my 2016 honey crop.  Friends and neighbors, John and Brenda came along and helped.  They are new to bee keeping and wanted to experience the extraction process.  I was very happy for the help.

My girls were very busy this summer, which led to 87 pounds of honey for us to use throughout the coming year.  The extraction process is quite interesting.  Thankfully, Jim and Jenine Miller open their honey house to fellow bee keepers and lend their expertise and equipment.  They are both so knowledgeable about everything honey bee!  John, Brenda and I learned so much, in addition to having a great time, and coming home with a whole bunch of honey!

When we arrived at Miller's Homestead Honey, we loaded the honey supers in to the hot room.  This room is heated to 100 degrees to ensure that the honey is warm enough to flow.  We leave the boxes in this room for 30 minutes.

One box, at a time, we take the boxes out and Jim runs them through the hot knife capper.  This machine cuts the wax caps off the honey comb cells.  The bees seal each cell to keep the honey from running out in the hive.  The cap wax is the light color that you can see on the frame that is about to go through the machine.

You can see that the white caps are removed.

Sometime you have to run a scraping tool over the frames to make sure all the cells have been released of the wax cap.

Capped frames go in to these holding bins, nine frames per bin.

This is the wax that comes off the frames.  Jenine uses this wax to make all kinds of cool bees wax items that she sell in local markets.

This is Jenine loading frames in to the extractor.  

The extractor holds 18 frames.

Fall seeding

We've both been working from dawn to dark and beyond the last few weeks.  It's that time of year!

We started seeding Tuesday.  It's an exciting day, to be sure.  The start of our new year.  It all starts here.  A few years ago we started celebrating New Years Eve the night before we start seeding.  This year was no exception.

Champagne to start the new year off right!

I ran the coil packer over all the acres that are to be seeded.  This helps to firm up the seed bed, so that the drills go to an even depth when placing the seed.  It's kind of a fun job and leaves a neat design.

Faithful little Colt pulling the coil packer.

Meanwhile, Reynald is seeding like crazy!  Which means I have to stop my coil packing now and then to go get seed and fertilizer.  Fortunately, I still get quite a few packing hours in and I was able to finish that job Friday night.

Filling product at the home place.  This is the seed truck.  Behind you can see the blue truck which we use to haul dry fertilizer.

Both seed and fertilizer go in this cart.  There are two compartments, one for seed and one for the dry fertilizer.

The seed wheat is treated with an insecticide to combat wire worms, which love to eat newly seeded wheat kernels.  That's why it is pink!

Here's Josh, helping me fill my truck with seed wheat.  I remember when Josh was born!  I'm getting to be an old timer in these parts!

Yesterday I started mowing the straw that is left from harvesting the grain.  Alicia did quite a bit of the mowing before she left to go back to Boston.  There's about four days left, but again, I will need to stop and get product for my seed boy.  Keeping the drills going is the most important job right now. We are both hoping to finish our respective jobs by the end of this week.  Then it will be all wedding....all the time!  So much fun!

You can see un-mowed straw in the foreground, mowed straw in the distance and in the far distance is my seed boy, just getting started on the field at Pumpkin Center.

It's a dusty job.  Believe it or not, there is enough moisture, about two inches under the soil surface, to make the wheat seeds germinate.  It's kind of amazing!

Indy and I got to keep an eye on Reynald's progress while we were mowing straw in a bordering field.

Fly fishing, family and fun

Last week, when we were at Tin Can Flat, near Avery Idaho, we had some time to relax, and some time to play, and some time to practice casting a fly on the water, attempting to lure a fish to take the bait.  There was more casting than catching, but that's ok.  A great time was had by all.

Happy couple!

Baxter always finds a sunbeam for a snoozer!

more casting instruction

David perfecting the craft.  David actually caught the most fish!

Love this image of the lines flying!

Reynald found this comfy rock from which to watch the activities.

Sisters!!!!

Reading in the sun with feet in the river.

Even Baxter took some time to relax

Chilly morning snuggled up around the fire.  

Tin Can Flat

Last week we loaded up the SS Rolinco with food and kids and a dog and followed Grandpa and Grandma to the St Joe River near Avery Idaho.

Setting up camp.

And, the requisite flower arrangement for our table.

One of our meal gatherings.

 It's hard to capture the spectacular scenery.

This is the St. Joe river, at the bottom of a very steep mountain slope.  This is dad's favorite "hole".  We didn't take the time to hike down this time, but it's on our list!

What a fun group we are!

This shows how deep one has to hike to get to the river.

The kids were eager to learn how to fly fish and grandpa was the perfect instructor.  He brought along three fly rods and it wasn't long before all three kids were casting like, well....almost like pros!

The expert, testing the water!

As my mom is fond of saying, the fishing was great but the catching not so much.  We decided that there was a lot of casting practice.  It really didn't matter that there were not a lot of fish caught.  The scenery, the memories created, the sound of the river babbling along, the intoxicating fragrance of the air.....all worth the trip.  A few small fish were caught and brought in, lest you think we were totally skunked!

Here's Alicia getting her first casting lesson....

Once Alicia was settled, David was next up.....

And he caught one!!!

And then Roni had her lesson......

Even Baxter got in on the fun!  You can only imagine how a flopping, splashing fish got his attention!

I'll post more photos of this wonderfully relaxing family time.