For the past month or so, we’ve had ADOT working on the corner of road right by our place. We are on the corner of Prince Placer and South Stone Ridge. They have been upgrading the road where the water washes over it during the monsoons. It seems that a few years ago, after the fire, they had some real trouble with flash flooding. So far this year that has not happened, but now we are completely prepared, just in case. They have been using some extra heavy equipment that actually shakes our house as they are performing some of their grading exploits. The dogs and cats really hate it. Yesterday, one of the men working on the site asked Sue if he could grade a portion of our property – outside our fence- that runs along Prince Placer Road. We thought that it belonged to the county, that’s what Sue was told when she moved in. They even stopped us from using the driveway entrance off of Prince Placer.
Turns out that the county doesn’t want it any more and we can reclaim it! However, they are doing some special grading and they are placing a culvert for drainage, pulling out old concrete and rebar and trash that we didn’t even know was there! In return, we’re letting them park their heavy equipment there and also keeping their clam jack thing inside our gate so that no one walks off with it. It’s actually quite large and very heavy, so that would be a bit difficult. In the photo at right, almost all of this graded dirt area will be additional space for us. We’re talking about planing trees all along in there, once they’re done. Maybe intersperse some roses close to the fences or something pretty like that. It’s quite exciting, really. I’m tellin’ ya. The last several weeks, I never know what changes will greet me when I come home from work. Never a dull moment!
Anyway, tonight is going to be a short post, as it is late and we’ve just been going and going. Sue mowed the equivalent of 10 miles today!!! At least that’s what her iPhone health app is reporting for her. That’s a honking lot of mowing! Now we have our vast green “lawn” back. It’s so amazing how quickly the grass and weeds just spring up. We had to rescue some of the little trees and shrubs we planted along the fence line by the depression – they were being covered with morning glory vines. Crazy! They’re good now, and what I’m hoping is that the morning glories that we left on the fence, will actually help keep the harsh winds off of them when they blow. We’ll see if that works or not.
Only other small thing I want to share tonight is… ta da ~ we made our first cake with our own goose and duck eggs! We made Barbara Levin’s Sherry Cake for company that is coming over on Friday. (It’s a process, so I wanted to start it this evening) It is going to be so incredibly rich. You can already see from the photo that it is an amazing color of yellow. I should have taken a photo of the eggs themselves; the yolks were a deep orange color – beautiful. The goose egg, by the way, was a double yolker. Go Roma! Maybe we’ll take a photo and post it on Facebook, once we cut into it – just so you can see it’s amazing loveliness :). Maybe we’ll have another update here, we’ll see. Until then, as always~
Thanks for reading!
Today’s Weather: we have not had any rain since Monday. You can already see that the grass is looking like it needs a good water. When the clouds are gone, the humidity simply goes away and everything becomes dry, dry, dry. Right now, 9:30 p.m., it is 68°. Don’t really see any rain in the forecast, but definitely clouds on Friday. I’d still like to see us get some more rain before the monsoons are over.
Egg Report: Yesterday we 14 eggs altogether, today we had 17 eggs. We’ve been consistently getting two duck eggs every morning, so those numbers always include the ducks. We’ve started on our 3rd dozen of the 10% that we give to the food bank, this has only happened one other time, and not this early in the month. So – overall we’ve done very well. We’ve sold 7 dozen eggs in the last seven days, with a couple of standing orders coming in. I ordered egg cartons, which came today, but my blank labels are still in transit. We’ll share those with you once they’re all put together nicely.
Wing and a Prayer 