15 August …
The house is changing. There are now light leaf green drapes in the living room where there have never been curtains of any kind … and plans to redo the front of the house. Plus my bookshelves are being perused and sorted between “give away” and “keep”.
All normal and expected but still a bit like watching the aftermath of your own funeral.
New house. New life.
~~~
Weather is still like late summer although the leaves are just beginning to change. And of course, fires.
There was a small, but spectacular, one at the Mt Shasta City Park …
This picture of the Mountain with the smoke was taken by a local pilot …
And one from the ISS … 
Find the “C” in Carr and move toward the top of the picture. See two light spots? The fuzzy one is Mt Shasta. Don’t know what the other one is. Maybe a reflection on the window.
Days continue to be smoke filled. Some days you can’t see the Mountain unless you know where to look … 
and even then just barely (The one you can see is Black Butte. The Mountain is to the far left … look closely).
We had planned to sleep out in the meadow last sunday to be there for the meteor shower but the smoke was too much. Maybe next year.
Then, this morning, as I went to let the chickens out, I noticed we had a light rain shower overnight (just enough to leave spots, not enough to make a difference) and when I looked up I could see clouds. Wow!
There is still smoke, just not as much.
~~~
I am late with the VanGogh once again. I see a picture or two every week and am getting so I can pretty much tell when it was painted. If you look at the brush strokes and the lighting, you will be able to date them as well.
This one, named “Small Bottle with Peonies and Blue Delphiniums” was done when he was beginning to experiment with colour shading and before his brain started allowing him to see things, such as air movement, that most of us don’t see … in June-July 1886.
I was caught by the colours of the peonies and the shadows in the fallen petals and leaves.
~~~
I read two or three books a week (I know it isn’t as much as some of you) and was struck last week by a “coincidence”. In all of the books the authors had used a quote from Shakespeare … “The fault, dear Brutus …”.
What I found interesting was that one was a history, one a mystery, and the third a short story collection.
Have you even run across this phenomenum?
~~~
We added to Paul’s Smokey Bingo while out on a walk one morning last week. We counted rings in not just one but in two tree stumps. The first one was only 28 years old, but the second one was already three or four years old when George and I bought this land.
There was an additional lesson. We learned how to tell wet years from dry ones. It was easy to see that when we first lived here the winters were “good” ones qualified as wet. However, rings from the last decade sure show the drought.
Last Monday, Paul and his brother went spelunking up in the Pluto caves off Hwy 97. Another Bingo square. And on a walk we saw a burned out tree with a baby tree growing in it. 
Yesterday, Paul and I went to a neighbor’s house to learn about sugar pine trees and collect some cones. Sugar pines have noticeably shorter needles and honkin’ big, long cones.
Then we visited the greenhouse and native plant garden at the USFS in Mt Shasta.
Out of 24 Smokey Bingo squares, the family managed to finish 13 (and completed three rows) with at least 5 other squares planned for later this month.
We all learned something this summer.
~~~
The rooster crow now sounds like a rooster crow and he has begun practicing his profession. He seems particularly fond of one of the Black Comet hens.
The second cockerel has found a new home which caused me a bit of a panic the first evening there were only 15 rather than 16 birds on the roost at bedtime.
And we are getting one egg a day! We weren’t expecting eggs for another week or so.
~~~
Radio club this evening and school starts next week.
Remember … Live for what tomorrow has to bring, not what yesterday has taken away.
So … ‘til next week …