TheBanyanTree: Hot Moon

[Dale M. Parish]

Tropical Storm Edouard did little to southeast Texas than blow down the
loose limbs and drop an extra helping of rain on us.  I'm still angry
with myself that I've not managed to mount the rain gage that Cindy gave
me for Christmas last year.  I mounted the wireless temperature gage,
but wanted to mount the gage where it had an open sky from which to
collect, but it hasn't happened.  I'm going to mount it on top of the
pumphouse-- it's a two-story barn-like structure that I think is high
enough not to be sheltered by the house and will only be sheltered by
the hardest driving south winds by the gum tree about 10 meters away.

Cindy and the rest of The Jason Project of SouthEast Texas were due to
fly to Boston this morning about the time that Edouard was crossing the
coast and heading straight over George Bush Intercontinental.  They
watched the weather reports all night and left Beaumont at 0700 at about
the peak of the wind and rain.  By the 1100 departure time, it had
dissipated enough that the Continental flight to Boston left Houston on
time and arrived only a minute late.  Tomorrow they leave for a whale
watching expedition on which I had been scheduled to go, but I had some
other things come up that I need to attend to here, so am staying home
on my vacation to try to get some of these things behind me.

Tomorrow morning, I intend to take advantage of the cooling that Edouard
brought us and get in the upstairs store room of the pumphouse and
finish assembling the shelving I cut and stored there.  It was too hot
to work up there, so I was waiting till fall, but tonight is cool and
tomorrow morning early it will be tolerable working upstairs for a
while.  Today while it was raining, I pulled everything loose out of the
utility room and vacuumed the corners.  My objective is to make places
for the new kitty's litter box and arrange a place for her food that is
protected from Shotzi, our Schnauzer.  He feels like any food that he
can reach should be his.  I had fixed a barrier between the dryer and
the clothes folding cabinet for the previous, now AWOL, feline, but
bending over it to get clothes out of the dryer was a pain in the back.
I'm going to remedy that situation.

One thing the rain has done has made it too muddy to do much tractor
work.  I wanted to work on getting the rest of the larger logs felled by
Hurricane Rita out of the way so I could rent a trencher and bury the
dispersal lines from the effluent treatment plant down where I have
bamboo planted on the southern property line.  Now that JB's cleared out
all the timber and underbrush that remained between me and the highway,
I don't like hearing all the highway noises, and want to get a stand of
timber bamboo started.  I had thought I'd lost the bambusoides madake I
planted three years ago, but when I was finally able to get the tractor
down there and move some of the larger downed trees, I found it is
hanging on.  It hasn't been watered for nearly three years now, but it
was in a low area and must have gotten enough water to survive.  Maybe
now that it can get a little sunlight, it'll come start putting out some
larger culms.

Hugs,
Dale
-- 
Dale M. Parish
628 Parish Rd
Orange TX 77632
parishdm at att.net