Finally some rain. We had about 4” so far this week but will still fall far short for the month of June. The lake popped up a tad and the level should accelerate as the ground runoff kicks in when it starts saturating. It’s the typical late afternoon thunder bumper with hard, hard rain for maybe an hour. We Floridians love it because it means no more lawn watering and cooler afternoons; ie lower power bills. So my new pump installation has done it’s job – got the rains going.

Phase 1 of the summer garden is about winding down. There’s a few more tomato and watermelon plants close to giving up their fruit but within the next two weeks I should be able to clear out maybe 30% of the currently planted area and get it ready for a second summer crop. Getting it ready means adding a heavy load of mulch that’s been cooking for a couple of months and tilling it all in. We’ve decided to plant the area in corn, cucumbers, and of course, more tomatoes. We’ll cut way back on the squash which practically took over the whole garden at one point. That was the lesson learned this go round – don’t plant too many squash plants.

Joey had his PET scan yesterday and is scheduled for a consultation with the doctors next Tuesday. He has an indication from the nurse that most likely the port for the chemo will be installed next week too. He got a clarification of the chemo treatments. He was originally under the impression that the chemo treatments were a mixture of 4 chemicals administered every two weeks. So 6 treatments meant 12 weeks. In fact each treatment is only 2 of the 4 so a complete treatment cycle is 2 treatments, 4 weeks; Ergo, 6 months for the total 6 treatments. What the doctors don’t know is that Nancy made a special batch of spaghetti sauce from the garden with miraculous curative properties. No meat, no fat – all veggie, fresh from the garden. The magic ingredient is shredded carrots. It also contained green, yellow, and orange Bell pepper. Patent and FDA approval pending. I doubt the medical profession will shorten the chemo cycle based on this but …………….

The project for the week was redoing the entry way to the dock. The picture above shows the end result. The structure of the dock is unfinished, pressure treated 2” x lumber – 2×4, 2×6, 2×8, and even 2×10”. I kept the scrap pieces and made them into a parquet like entry way for the dock. The first time I didn’t do that great a job and over the past couple of years it has gradually become uneven and maybe even a bit dangerous. I didn’t realize it until we started having parties recently and I noticed people stumbling a bit. So I pulled it all up and started over again. I had planned on a one morning job, a full day at the most. Actually, at my pace, it turned into two days. But for sure I did a better job and tightened up the blocks quite a bit. In fact I think it qualifies me to enter the wood mason hall of fame.

Great weekend with all of little Tom’s graduation festivities. The graduation was in the same arena where the Magic play and beyond the normal speechifyiing, culminated in a full blast fireworks show and dropped balloons in the school colors. Very well done technically. On Friday we hosted all the out of towners – Utah, Idaho, and California – to a day at the lake which was fun even with the lake level approaching an all time low. We went back to Tom’s house on Saturday for the official party which was maybe half family and half Tommy’s school friends. The kids played volley ball in the pool and were all very well behaved. The most interesting thing was the diversity of the crowd. In the pool were people of every shade from pure white to dark black with every gradation in between. Orientals, Indians, Latino’s, and a few I couldn’t identify but would guess maybe an Arab or two; from really studly looking guys, hotties, to world class nerds. We commented among ourselves how different the mix would have been if the party were held at a Utah graduation – or Florida in 1960 for that matter. We had told Tom and the kids that they would be far more diversified in Florida than Utah but even I had no idea how true that would be.
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It turns out that the dock pump project mentioned in an earlier posting was only partially successful. The old pump I was using is rated for a 10′ rise. That means that it can only lift water a maximum of 10′ from the water surface level to the outlet point for the hose. The lake level has dropped a few more inches and now exceeds the 10′ limit – which was more likely 8′ anyway. The only solutions were to wait for the rains to come and raise the level of the lake or get a stronger pump. Last week I priced pumps at Lowes, Sears and Tractor Supply but found that we’re talking a minimum of $250 for the pump vs the $50 I was looking for. Waiting for the rains seemed the best option.

Then a few days ago I got a flyer from Harbor Freight advertising a parking lot sale with a 3/4 HP shallow well pump for $69 – regular $119. It had a lift of 25′ and was wired for 110V operation at 4A. I have my doubts about the 4A and bet it’s really closer to 6 but even so, the circuit to the dock can handle that ok. This new pump comes with a 5 gallon storage tank with an internal pressurized bladder so it should be just like having an instant water source right there. Don’t think I’m of the opinion that the $69 made in China, Harbor Freight pump is the same quality as the $250 ones and for sure I wouldn’t use it as a primary house pump but the lake pump only operates occasionally so it should have no stress at all. Naturally the plumbing will have to be changed a bit since the two pumps are totally different physically but all the under dock work I did should be just fine and I think splicing into the existing plumbing should be a piece of cake. I’m writing this pre – installation and will finish up with the final results. Maybe even a picture if in fact it works!
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The pump installation is a piece of plumbing artwork. If there’s a plumbing hall of fame, I’m a shoe-in. And beyond that, it works like a world champ, throwing a giant stream of water. It’s far more water than the old pump handled with 40 PSI pressure so it will be more than adequate to run the power washer and sprinkler down there. What I expect now is that the tropical rains will start falling. This was an insurance policy – kind of like a rain dance. I bought a generator and we’ve never had a hurricane since; so now that we have water at the dock, it should start raining as normal.

Living in the country does have it’s moments. We’re scheduled to have a lake party tomorrow in celebration of Little Tommy’s high school graduation. So we’ve been getting everything ready and finished up some last minute dock cleanup this evening and came back in the house just at dark. Nancy headed for the back to get her bath and a minute later announced that we had no water. Of course that sends tremors through the system because of the party. We’re on a well and of late the power company has been playing games so I immediately figured that the pump could have burned up due to low voltage but went about the troubleshooting systematically. Breakers ok at the house so out to the well. Dead, zero pressure. I have a megawatt spot light and noticed a procession of ants crawling up the power line into the control box. Hmm, seen this before a year ago when something decided to nest in the control box and fried. I removed the top and sure enough a big palmetto roach had gotten across the 220V lines and fried. The ants were feasting on roast roach. I removed the corpse and manually activated the pressure contacts. Oila! a few sparks and the pump built up pressure in just a few minutes. I’ll go out there after the party and see if there’s not some way to seal the box better but it can’t be so tight that you can’t get into it quickly. Oh well.

The graduation was fun and causes a few reflections. How can I have a grandson ready for college? Sort of like: “I’m going to be a father”; “I am a father”; “I have a kid old enough to go to college”; “I have a grandson”; and now a grandson going to college. How is all that possible in such a short time. I see Tommy and Simon with very cute girl friends and think – “is it possible I could eventually be a great grandfather?” New fishing buddies?? Why was I so concerned about a fried roach when there are such really big things happening? Get a grip Joe.

The lake is way down and has been for nine months or so. Down so far that the pump system I have down on the dock was inoperative because the water intake point was high and dry. In fact, the bottom was dry beneath the intake point so even extending it down wouldn’t fix the problem. That would have been too easy anyway. I’m very patient and lived with this for quite a while knowing that I didn’t really need to water anything in the winter and that when spring came the lake would rise up and solve the problem. It hasn’t happened that way and many of the plants I have down by the lake are drying up and dying. That plus the fact that we’re having a party next week and I wanted to power wash the dock but without water, no go.

So I bit the bullet this weekend and decided to correct the problem by moving the water intake point out to deeper water. I could have just moved the pump itself farther out the dock but really like it where it is. If my new plumbing job doesn’t work, that will be my fallback. The job is simple enough on paper. Just add some PVC pipe and couplings. But it had to be run underneath the dock which is a bit trickier and means I would be working in waist deep water and working over my head with a drill to install the pipe hangers. For me that means the certain dropping of hardware and couplers while trying to screw in hangers and hold a 20′ piece of PVC pipe in place; and the real possibility of dropping my drill. Which would really piss me off because it’s my favorite 19V DeWalt. Then assuming I got the pipe hangers installed, I had to cut and glue the various pieces together with all the measurements exactly right. For many guys all this would be a piece of cake. And guess what, the project went flawlessly. Not a dropped part, not a piece missing, not a bad cut or glue job. No trips to the hardware store or even the shed to get that one thing I’d forgotten about. I started the job at 9:30 and was finished by 11 AM. I need to let all the pieces set for 24 hours before firing up the pump so the story is not complete but the nasty part is done and looks very professional (to me). And because it’s located under the dock, I don’t have to worry about critics.

My next project is to assemble and install the yellow fly traps. Now that is a nasty job but the flies have come this year with a vengeance.

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I’ve often heard that after a bee stings you, it dies. I hope so. In fact I hope it’s a very painful death. I got my first bee sting this season clearing palmettos and had forgotten just how hard they hit and how nasty the after affects are. I do daily battle with fire ants and give as good as I get but the bees play at a totally different level.

And once again it’s yellow fly season. Yellow flies are like deer flies but yellow in color. They bite hard enough to draw blood and are super persistent. If you are patient enough to let one land and start to chew, you can easily kill them because they won’t let go. Nancy has trouble with that remedy. There is a way to semi control them. Sounds bizarre but they are attracted to black things. So we build traps that use the same principal as fly paper. You blow up a 20” beach ball and paint it black. Then you coat it with this nasty, sticky stuff called “Tacky Foot”. Easier to say than to do since the goop is about consistency of axle or bearing grease but is incredibly sticky. Any place it touches gets this difficult to remove gluey mess. I use latex gloves to apply it and am getting proficient enough that this year I wasn’t totally coated myself.

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And for the guys – watching the Dem’s fight over the nomination shows that we have a real problem. If you don’t like Obama, you’re a racist; if you don’t like Hillary, you’re a sexist. Our problem is that we don’t have any kind of “ist” for people who pick on us poor white males. I guess that’s ok for us Republicans since we are used to being called either Racist or Sexist but not sure how you white Democrat males – as few of you as there are – are dealing with having to take on one of the labels and not having some kind of defensive shield to hide behind.

The real shockers in the garden so far are two varieties that I’d never planted. I tried planting spinach all winter long – several different varieties, different locations, different times. Nothing really worked to my satisfaction and the crops ranged from total disaster to marginally acceptable. Tucked away in one of my catalogs was a variety that said it did well in the summer, especially hot, moist summers. It was a climbing, red stemmed variety called Malabar Spinach. I tried it out of desperation. It started slowly, as in 2 weeks before the first sign of any germination and it was more than a month before it got beyond the first two or three leaves. I pretty much forgot about it and chalked it up to another spinach failure. It’s been particularly vexing since spinach is really a no brainer crop. Overnight it seems that climbing spinach took off and within a couple of weeks it has climbed up maybe 5′ on the lines I had optimistically installed. If you didn’t know it was a spinach variety, you’d never guess. The leaves are very thick and have a rubbery feel to them. The garden calculator I designed says that I should have edible leaves in a couple of weeks and I’m starting to believe it’s correct. In fact, if it continues the way it’s going, everybody I know will have edible leaves.

The other shocker is the spaghetti squash. We love it and I’d never grown it before so really didn’t know what to expect. This is as close to a jack in the beanstalk story as I’ve come. I planted 3 seeds and have 3 plants; each with multiple stems. At this point the stems are approaching 8′ in length and the leaves are at least a foot in diameter. It started blossoming a couple of weeks ago and there must be 2 dozen baby squashes so far. And I can only see a bit of the plant since I planted it amongst the corn field just like the Indians did. In fact I planted several different types of squash in the corn and in some cases now the squash is actually taller than the corn – that would be over 5′ tall. Maybe I need to rethink my bug killing strategy and let some survive to help harvest the crop.

Also tried a couple new cucumber varieties. Holy cow!!! We’ve been harvesting a couple a day for the past month from 3 plants and they are ginormous. One day they will be micro – a couple of inches – and within a week they are over a foot long and weighing a couple of pounds. Each one would be equivalent to 3 cuc’s you buy in the store. And they are the most delicious ever. No matter how big they retain the firm, juicy character you’d expect from a baby variety. And they are burpless – no bitter after taste that bothers some people. Considering the price of cucumbers, I honestly think that one crop alone has paid for all the seeds for the rest of the garden. Ditto the zucchini.

By the end of the month we’ll be picking corn, tomatoes, green peppers and jalapeno’s. And actually pulling out the first planting of beans from which we’ve been eating for a month.

New guests – we have a pair of screech owls living in the oaks up by the carport. They are incredible birds and are harassing the squirrels (tree rats) with constant screeching and flying beautifully among the trees. The noise is really mind boggling and you can understand the terror it must strike in the hearts of any small mammals. It’s the first time in my life I’ve ever seen more than one owl at a time and in the middle of the day. The pair was perched on a low branch facing away from me the other day. I was probably within 50′ which is really close. Then both turned their heads to face me directly. No body movement at all, just the head swivel. Is that creepy – but neat. One second you’re looking at the back of the head, the next the face full on. It’s like the head is totally disconnected from the body.

We recently refinanced our house to take advantage of low interest rates available then. About midway thru the process we were told by Chase, the mortgage bank, that a new appraisal showed that we needed to increase our flood insurance because the replacement costs would be higher now than when the initial mortgage was written. Made sense to me.

A little history – when we originally built the house the surveys showed that we didn’t need Federal Flood Insurance because we were not in a flood plain and the house was elevated far enough above the lake. When it came time to finalize the mortgage, the bank (Chase) disagreed and said we needed flood insurance. I argued a little but we were far along in the process and the insurance was only $264/year and I wasn’t really sure about the lake.

So anyway it wasn’t a big surprise when the bank insisted that we uptick the insurance a bit. Fast foward to this week and we get a letter from Chase saying that we really didn’t need flood insurance at all and if we wanted to cancel it, just use the letter in a communication with the Insurance company. I didn’t jump on it instantly because I wanted to contact our home owner policy and get it exactly right in my mind about what constitutes a flood and to make sure that water damage resulting from blown in windows or roofs was covered by our home owner policy and not considered flooding. Last night Nancy is reading the local paper and hands it over and tells me to read this article on Flood Insurance since it answered all the questions I had. It did that but it also included a chart which showed how many flood insurance policies were in existance in all the communities of Volusia County and also what the average cost of those policies is. I looked down the list and noted that there were 14000+ policies in Daytona and maybe that many in New Symrna and that they cost about $400 on average. Further down the list was Pierson, our location. There was 1, one, uno flood policies in existance in Pierson at an average cost of $264. I cracked up laughing. That had to be us. I can just imagine all the people reading that article wondering who the jerk was in Pierson who had a Flood Insurance policy. Hope they publish the list next year!

Did my first work till exhaustion, jump in the lake today. I was harvesting grape vines and brush from my neighbor’s yard and chipping it into mulch for the garden. Is that over the top or what? I’m so convinced that the success of the garden is directly wired to the addition of mulch that I’m actually spending hours working on the neighbor’s jungle. Man did that lake feel good. Very cool and it brought my body temp down from 200 to 75 in about 5 seconds. Bring on the heat, I’m ready.

Of course the pic is the garden. People have asked for a picture so here it is. I guess everybody knows that you click on the picture to enlarge it but just in case……………