Another exciting cow day. I was hauling the wash out to the line when all of a sudden, here’s this black cow coming through the palmettos. Then a second one. The same guys as yesterday had escaped again. This time they crashed through the fence line between our place and George’s and headed for the garden. Luckily I got between them and the garden first and scared them away. I think if they had gotten a taste of the goodies in the garden, that sweet bucket would have been useless. These are 1 year old cows, not a fully mature bull or anything so there wasn’t much danger (I think). For a while they were content to eat tangerines and grapefruit from George’s trees. We called the owner again but before he could get here, they wandered down to the lake, around another fence line and onto the field past George’s place. By the time the owner’s hand had shown up with the sweet bucket, they had wandered another 1/4 mile or so west. They can really cover quite a bit of ground in a short time although I don’t know why – our grass is certainly nice and green. They followed the bucket again, almost a mile to a stronger pen.
Chris is attending a company event all week at Disney and came in a day early to visit us. It was fun catching up. Florida is a bit hot and muggy for him, even when it’s not. We hooked with Tommy and his family on Sunday for lunch, then to Joann’s, then home in time for Nancy and him to watch the Oscars and munch on freshly made kale chips. Monday we took him halfway to his hotel and Tom took him the rest of the way. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen him so it was a nice, albeit short, visit. He brought Nancy all the necessary essential oils, soaps and cosmetics but saved the best for me. He brought me 5 purple potatoes that had sprouted eyes. We had discussed purple potatoes when his nutritionist suggested how good they were for you as compared to regular white potatoes and I decided at that time to try to grow some. Nancy bought a few but instead of sprouting eyes, they simply rotted so I forgot about the whole project. I cut these into chunks, each with a sprouted eye or what looked to be a place likely to sprout, and planted them in the spot I had just cut down the shell peas. If all the chunks grow into plants, there should be 14. I had planned the entire garden, 100% of the space, with no place for potatoes so something had to go. I opted to cut back on the amount of squash planned – squash is always problematic so a reasonable choice to cut. It’s about a month later than I would have wanted to plant them but in any event, I’ll find out if they can handle Florida weather or are yankee potatoes.
Little bit worried about my next door neighbor, George. Apparently he has some internal bleeding going on and his blood count dropped from 9 (already very low) to 7 in the past 2 days. I’m sure they’ll be giving him blood tonight for what has to be a substantial leak. He was noticing some changes late last week, mostly being very tired, and made an emergency trip to a GI doc who thinks maybe he has a bleeding ulcer. He was scheduled for a scope on Tuesday but opted to get to the hospital today.
What a fiasco this budget thing is. I can’t imagine any gov’t agency that couldn’t cut 2.5% from their budget and not blink an eye. Ditto most commercial companies or most families. That just isn’t a devastating blow. And the cuts they’re talking about aren’t even cuts in the classical sense but rather a reduction in planned increases. Give me a break. One of my favorites was the head of the NIH who said that medical research was going to die. No more research on cancer, alzheimers, diabetes etc.-not that instead of a year, the project will take 13 months; or the Transportation secretary describing the chaos at the airports because TSA will not be working at full strength. How about pre screening or letting 5 people out of a hundred, randomly picked go through security untouched by a TSA person. They must think we are all idiots.
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