Odds & ends

We’ve spent the week putting shingles on the roof.  Not all day and not every day but that’s pretty well all we have to show for the week.

 

Yesterday Marilyn & I pulled most of the old shingles off the east side.  We finished that up this morning and got it cleaned up.  Then she went off to art class.  Neighbour Keith showed up this afternoon and we got about 5 feet covered.  We’ve got 2 sewer stacks, a chimney and 3 roof ventilators to work around tomorrow but we should get pretty close to the peak if we have a half decent day.  We may run out of shingles – in theory I bought enough but it sure doesn’t look like we have enough to finish.  We didn’t completely finish the west side so we don’t have an accurate count on how many it takes to do a side.  That was a mistake.

A couple of nights ago I took the little Case that I rebuilt last fall down to the other house with the mower.  It mows great – I think I was easily done in under an hour but the job was not without incident.  I was cutting under some old lilac trees, dodging branches and getting slapped when all of a sudden there was a loud bang and my ear started hurting.  At first I thought one of the dried up branches had given me a fierce whack upside the head.  Then I realized that there was a little blood coming out of my ear and the hurting was more inside than outside my ear.  Eventually I came to the conclusion that – unlikely though it may sound – I must have rammed a little dried up branch directly up my ear canal and punctured my eardrum.  As the little Dr. Singh in Canora said yesterday morning “Are you sure?  That is very hard to do.”  Hard to do or not she confirmed that there is a hole in my eardrum.  Dr. Google says it will take from 2 to 3 months to heal.  Dr. Singh was more optimistic but I’m keeping my expectations low.

Neighbour Keith is a gardening fool.  But he very kindly planted twice as many hills of potatoes this year as he did last year to accommodate our appetites.  He’s very precise – measuring all the time, making straight rows and marking them with little flags.  And he uses a lot of sheep shit – A VERY LOT of sheep shit.   He brought home a whole truckload of bagged sheep shit – who knew that they even put sheep shit in bags? 

He seems to know what he’s doing because he grew one hell of a garden last year.  He’s been helping us with the shingles and then rushing back to his garden so tonight I thought I’d help him out with his garden.  He had a whole area of the garden where there weren’t any of the little flags yet so I put a couple there.  And he didn’t have any in the row with the tomatoes so I put one there.  And then just for good measure I put a couple in between a couple of the other rows.