We came home to an overgrown mess after our trips.  I ended up having to use a machete on the front yard and by the driveway to tame some of the blackberries, etc that had grown substantially.  Tom came through with a tractor afterwards to level it all out.  He then weed whacked the property and mowed.  It was a lot of work.

I was way behind on my garden.  The weeds have taken over, and I had a lot of plants in the greenhouse that needed transplanting.  I have way too many tomato plants.  I know that some of you know that I do not like to kill things.  Well, this year that includes thinned tomato seedlings.  In the spring I had pulled them in the morning and then felt guilty in the afternoon.  So I decided to transplant them to give them a chance.  Well, they all took off just fine, and now I am inundated with them.  But, of course, I can’t just kill them now so I have been slaving away for days, hauling heavy soil around transplanting lots of tomatoes and don’t sure which one each is.  I put in a row of them in the garden which I don’t do because of the blight.  I filled up our clothesline with upside-down hanging ones.  And put the rest in larger pots in the greenhouse, which is now completely full.  I still have to transplant the peppers.  But my back is not happy with any of this.

I did try to figure out which chickens we didn’t lose in the bobcat massacre.  The Ameraucana and Leghorn hens seemed to do well.  Some of the mixed breed black ones did OK, but our really mean one didn’t, which is surprising. Here are the ones that survived (sorry that the photos aren’t great).

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For the Fourth of July, I decided to smoke a turkey.  It was a small one, only 7#.  So it didn’t take very long, and I thought would keep the house cooler to cook it outside.  Here it is in the smoker.

And when it was done.  It was a nice farm meal (except for the potatoes and butter).

Yesterday afternoon at 1:00 this showed up behind our back fenceline.

It does not look good.  I am thinking mange.  I am feeling sorry for it, but it definitely was looking at our animals that are in the alleyway next to the barn in the daytime.  Fortunately it appears to have left.

Today Tom tackled the grass that is overgrowing in our pastures.  It is just crazy.

I did the animals chores but got dizzy.  I still have adrenal insufficiency, even though I am off of the hydrocortisone.  Stress can bring on a crisis, but I also haven’t been able to wean off of the fludrocortisone yet.  So with heat I tend to drop my blood pressure and get faint.  I was able to sit down, drink water, and cool down some. Later I was able to make it back to the house and get some Nuun water.   But it was only 11:00 and not that hot yet.  Very frustrating.

In really good news, there has been major progress on the Dad cabin rebuild.  The front wall is in place.  You can really see it coming together and what the view from inside is going to be like.  So exciting!  We haven’t been helping with our trips, but Tom was able to get out there for a few days to help out last week.

We did break down this evening and put up one of our air conditioners in the living room window.  It got to 80 degrees in here, and I think this will probably be a long hot summer.  It is so nice with the air.