Katinka!

The coolest thing this month was that Katinka came to visit. We got to hang out for several days, and we had a great time.

Her sister-in-law Dawn came also, for a Chico adventure. It was great to have our sister in the beer garden again.

Katinka rocks the hat and pigtails!

As usual, I was having too much fun in the moment to take enough pictures, and all of the ones I took involve beer! Well we did a lot of beer drinking. Turns out Dawn likes beer! So we had to go to Sierra Nevada, Park Avenue, Winchester Goose, plus Mariscos and Cafe Coda. I didn't have the energy to cook, and besides, I had to show off Chico's eateries.

This doesn't look like it involves beer, but it's us walking back from the Winchester Goose.

Fix Blitz, First Egg. Last Peaches

My ongoing saga of trying to keep the farm insured continues. This time, they asked us to take out a tree, fix the porch roof and add handrails, and paint the house. Now that last makes sense because we all know that a fresh coat of paint will make a house much less likely to catch fire... Also, Chico city code says I need handrails on any landing higher than 30 inches, and that one is 17. So basically they are just fucking with me. But I have to have insurance, so we decided to comply. Rick replaced the front poles on the porch while I continued to clear the whole perimeter of the house.

Rick put new roofing on the top. I cut the pieces and Buddy handed them up and steadied the ladder.

Then we rented a pressure washer, and washed off a lot of old paint.

I got M and S Wesley to take out the tree. That really needed to be done because it never should have been allowed to grow in the first place, and the roots were trying to get under the foundation. Plus it hangs over the roof and in the electric wires.

You can see how it's much too close to the garage.

We watched from the safety of the beer garden while they cut it down. The guy who did it was very skilled.

It didn't take that long, and it was the only part of the whole project we didn't have to do ourselves!

Tree be gone!

Meanwhile, back at the painting project, we started primering. I tried using a roller but... yikes! We quickly decided to get the tool co-op's paint sprayer.

Rick had to do all the ladder and roof work.

We had to do a lot of scraping and caulking.

But once we got the color on, it looked great. I'll have to add more "after" shots later, because we're still doing cleanup and touchups. But this should be good enough to placate the insurance agency. I mailed the pics off with a few days to spare.

When we were all finished, we treated ourselves to a well deserved reward. I had beeramisu, and Rick had wings.

Meanwhile, other things happened at the farm, even though it seemed like this took all our time. One cool thing gets its own post, but here are the rest. We got our first eggs from the baby chicks. Our babies are hens now! That means soon we will have to integrate them.

The peach tree put out a bumper crop of really delicious peaches. This pic also counts as a weather note, because we got a smattering of rain on 8-4. That's good news in a summer of drought and wildfires. Anyway, the peach was ripe about the first two  weeks in August, for future reference.

I picked the last of them on 8-16.