Day of Endless Rain

Early yesterday evening I looked out the window and saw large clouds moving ponderously from right to left and small wispy clouds speeding from left to right. Weird. Shortly afterward thunderstorms moved in. I was surprised by the first flash of lightning because I thought it was too chilly for a thunderstorm. Apparently not. Sometimes the thunder was loud with bolts of lightning streaking through the sky; sometimes it was a low rumble, but it never stopped. Usually, thunderstorms pass through quickly but it began thundering at about 7 pm and continued until well after I went to bed after 11 pm.

And the rain! It started to rain during the afternoon, and it rained and rained and rained through the night and all day today. The US National Weather Service for our area said this morning that we had gotten 4-5 inches of rain with another inch expected today. There were flood warnings issued. I’m glad we live high on a hill where we don’t have to be concerned about floods.

With all the rain, the chicken yard is even muddier than it was. The cats were both out in the coop when I went out to gather the few eggs the chickens are laying. Theo came out with me when I left, walking on the walkway I put down for them.

We spent today running errands. First we dropped off our bags of garbage at the waste treatment place. We found that it is actually much cheaper to drop our garbage ourselves than get curbside service. Curbside service charges us a monthly fee no matter how few bags we have. When we take it in ourselves, we pay only for the bags we actually have, which isn’t much.

After we dropped off our garbage, we drove to a farm store to buy a few more bales of straw. Eric wants some straw for his garden, and I want a few more to insulate the coop for winter.

Next, we went to another farm store. We have about four farm stores that we go to because each offers different items we need at better prices than the others. The first store we went is a good place to buy straw. The second store is a good place to buy wild bird seed. The store puts together its own seed mixes at better prices than other stores. We bought 40 lbs of black sunflower seeds, 40 lbs of deluxe mix, and 25 lbs of split peanuts–all for about $68. I was at first uncertain whether to buy the seed today or wait for another paycheck or two, but we decided to get it now. We expect things could get a bit crazy after the presidential elections so we’d rather get all we need for the winter now so we can stay home and wait for things to calm down.

We stopped at a farm market on the way home to buy apples. EJ bought me a small bag of my favorite Gala apples. I like to dip them in melted peanut butter. Yum. He bought a half bushel of mixed “seconds” to make pies and other yummy desserts. All these apples were only $12. They wanted cash, but we were $3 short because we tend to pay for most items with our debit card. The woman said, “No problem.” We could just put the $3 in their dropbox the next time we drove by. I thought that was amazingly generous of her.

Although we were just running errands, we had a good time together. The drive through the autumn forests was beautiful. We are past the peak and the trees are getting barer, but it is still very beautiful.