Clouds above me, fog around me

I'm trying to pull myself out of a funk I'm in much of the time lately, so bear with me.  Lately the high spot of my day is my morning walk through the pasture and woods, and there's only so much I can say about that.  Rain is sorely needed, but watering the whole (admittedly small) garden is more than I'm willing to do, so I water the young strawberry plants every other day, and that's all.

I have been enjoying our mid-day meals lately, thanks to the tomato plants that finally produced a few nice big tomatoes.  Wednesday we had fried green tomatoes, and yesterday we pigged out with BLT's.  OK, for me it's just BT's, since I leave off the lettuce; all it does is make my tomatoes slide around more, and who needs that?  I shouldn't admit it, but we both had two full sandwiches!  Now we're out of Costco bacon, so I guess that'll be that.  Bacon is ridiculously high-priced.

I'm about out of fruit, and that's a bad situation for me.  I can't buy more than three or four bananas in summer because we don't eat them that fast, and one can only eat so much banana bread; we don't have a decent grocery store near us, and the closest grocery store of any kind is ten miles away.  One thing I've had a lot of lately is sweet cherries; I almost have an addiction to them, and have eaten literally pounds of them in the last few weeks.  I'm a big fan of mangoes, too:  I accompanied my daughter and her husband to Cozumel three or four years ago to visit their friend Brooke, and she introduced me to mangoes; it was love at first bite.  Aldi usually has them at a very reasonable price, in season.  I like avocados, too, when the price is right, although I'll admit my main reason for eating them is because they are good for me.  That's another frequent bargain at Aldi.  Unfortunately, the nearest Aldi store is twenty-five miles away.  I suppose that should be no big deal to retired folks with plenty of time whose car gets thirty-five miles to the gallon, though.

I was messing around with Google Earth and remembered that somewhere on this blog, I had shared an old picture of our property taken years ago.  Those "fingers" through the woods are where I still walk, and I placed the red rectangle there to show where our trailer house was.  

Below is a more recent picture that shows the trailer house.  Our property is long and narrow, and consists of a little over 40 acres.  You can see the railroad tracks at the back of our place.  What these pictures from the sky does not show you is the canyons;  Most of those trees you see are in ditches deep enough to dwarf our old two-story house.  Our house sits on a high river bluff, but the back of the place is probably 200 feet or more lower than that, and north of the railroad tracks, it's all fertile (and often flooded) river bottoms where various farmers plant corn and beans.     

You can easily see our trailer house, and the driveway going past the grandson's house and leading up to our two-car garage.  I still walk the dirt trail from our house back to the "fingers" of my walk.  This would have been taken not long after the grandson bought the property and upgraded the old house, in the lower left-hand corner.  The bigger, red-roofed building north of it is the shop.  Almost straight cross the driveway from the shop,  the building with the gray steel roof is the old barn.  I have no idea why all that bare dirt is there on the right of the trailer house, but it may have been where Cliff and the grandson were getting some needed dirt for things they were doing around the old house at the time.

That's it for today.