Sleeping With a Pack Rat

and I don't  mean Pa, this was an actual pack rat! Ok, maybe he slept somewhere else but he was stuffing dog food under our mattress. Lots of dog food fell out when I made the bed. Then the next night, Pa was sitting in his recliner and put the foot rest up and more dog food fell out. We set a trap with dog food in it and the second night, we caught the little booger. I now put the dog dishes on the counter at night. We used to have a big container of dry dog food out for the dogs to munch on at their leisure during the day when we lived in Vegas but that is impossible here with our mice problem. Poor dogs get fed once a day now, plus snacks. I bought some electronic mouse thingies yesterday and have them plugged in three rooms so we will see how that goes.

There is a huge fire in Alpine which is about 50 or so miles away. It has burned 40,000 acres so far and they haven't even begun to get it under control. We can smell it here and it smells like the fire is right next door! We are getting lots of smoke here at the ranch. The sun was blood red this morning. You can see the smoke in the picture. This was taken from our back yard.

I got the rest of the garden planted. I needed some wind/sun shades and ran out of old sheets to use. I got out my extra large t shirts that I use to sleep in and used them. Pa has all sorts of raggy tshirts but didn't want to part with any of them. Anyway, the next day, the rhubarb I planted died due to the wind. And so did the Heinz tomatoes. All of my golden bell peppers dried up and there is only two green bell peppers left out of the original 6. When I watered today, I discovered my scallop squash is hanging on by a thread. Next year I am not going to start plants inside. They are just too weak to survive. The plants I planted directly in the ground are much stronger. My corn is about an inch high. The strawberries have a couple of leaves on each plant and are blooming already. I pinch the blooms off to make the plants stronger. Gardening in Arizona is really weird! The peas are going like gang busters, something is eating the leaves off the green beans. The lima beans never came up so I dug around and can't even find the seeds so replanted them. The romaine lettuce finally decided to pop up.

Pa rebuilt the stand for the water tank for the garden. This is out of steel. The wooden one was ready to collapse under the weight of 250 gallons of water. Today he is changing the oil in my truck. That's about it for now! I ran out of internet broadband so had to wait till today to add to the blog.