We’ve had a rather nice day here today. My thermometer says it reached 15C (59F) when it was as warmest. We had sunshine for quite some time as well and that was not predicted in the weather forecasts just a day ago. We went out for our morning walk as soon as the sun rose (that was at 8:14 today, tomorrow it’ll rise at 7:16 because we’ll go back to standard time tonight).
Alma has calmed down quite a lot even though no one seeing us would believe me if I said so 🙂 🙂 🙂 Today however I really didn’t want to have to struggle all those 4,4 km (2,73 miles) we were walking so i attached an old choke collar to the leash. This one actually stops long before it would choke her but is uncomfortable enough so that she stops pulling the leash as much as she usually do. Well she still does pull a lot but not nearly as much as before.It was so nice that for once not sweating like a pig when coming home after a walk 🙂 🙂 🙂
A couple of months ago I bought one of those small and handy hand chain saws. All I had to do was to attach the tiny sword and the tiny chain and then pot on the small cover. My brain has for some reason made it up to be something hard and complex, even though I really know it isn’t 🙂 🙂 Today however I finally did it and it took almost a minute to do it, well one and a half because I put on the chain so that it didn’t saw, just jumped on the branches 🙂 🙂 My work friend told me his father had bought one from a different brand and that it immediately was filled up with saw dust.
Mine didn’t. The saw dust is sucked in to the machine but there’s an exit hole below the chain where it comes out again so all saw dust blew out. I tried it on several smaller trees and branches and it’s really good! I sawed off dead branches from my apple trees so now I’ll be able to mowe the grass there without risking getting stabbed by hard and dead branches and twigs 🙂 I also cut off those big branches on the Hungarian lilacs that sort of had laid down on the ground, old age and heavy snow that fell last winter weighed them down and they never rose up again. Now I’ll cover those holes in the hedge where Alma tends to jump over when she wants to see what the neighbors are doing 🙂 🙂
We might get almost as nice weather tomorrow as we’ve had today, clouds have arrived but will perhaps open up every now and again tomorrow. If it is nice I have a couple of small trees to plant. Two cherry plum trees and one hawthorn and a small sweetberry honeysuckle. I have several sweetberry honeysuckle bushes but since I never remember what variety I have I have most likely been buying the same one and one need two different to get berries 🙂 🙂 🙂 So this time I bought an entirely new one for us so perhaps in a year or two I’ll finally get berries 🙂 🙂 Also the plum cherry trees have a tendency to spread via roots so I’ll need to put down a barrier around them so that the roots just can grow downwards. I’ll most likely just dig down the pots tomorrow and then I’ll have the winter to think about where they should grow permanently.
Since it’s a weekend and I’ll get an hour more tomorrow I’ll take the risk of having a cup of tea after writing here. I didn’t win the 1 billion 195 million kronor winning in the lottery ( depending of the balance between the US dollar and the Swedish krona you can divide that sum with something around 10 or eleven) yesterday but no one else did either so I’ll just win the 1,3 billion kronor winning on Tuesday instead 🙂 🙂 🙂
Have a great day!
The Cottage by the crane lake. 
Hi Christer,
My old dog Tegan was a puller. It wasn’t just pulling but lungeing and running to the end of the leash and hanging on the collar. I tried a choke collar on her and she did indeed use it to choke herself. Finally, with great embarrassment, I asked my trainer for a prong collar. A prong collar shouldn’t be necessary when trying to teach a 15 pound dog to heel but she was a Jack Russell Terrier. She absolutely didn’t care that she was choking and that I was zipping the collar and saying heel a million times. I put the collar on my upper arm and yanked it hard several times to see how bad it was. It wasn’t bad so I put it on her. We went out for a walk and, as usual, she ran to the end of the leash. The collar pinched. She stopped. It was like she figured out that Oh!, I wanted her to HEEL. So she did. I didn’t have to use that collar ever again. I should have asked to borrow it instead of buying it. 😀
Thanks for the report on the hand held chain saw. I haven’t used mine yet. It came all assembled so I didn’t have to do that but the chain was on really tight. No play in it at all even though the instructions said you should be able to see some space between the teeth and the mounting when you pulled the chain away. I couldn’t pull it away. It was a royal pain trying to to loosen the thing, too, but I got it done. It runs. That’s all I can say about mine so far.
My lawn was absolutely paved with walnuts and the walnuts were hidden by a thick coating of leaves on Thursday. More were falling. I was going to clean them up on Friday but the lawn guy showed up Thursday. I told him was dangerous to go back there and he probably didn’t want to run his mower over all those nuts. So, he took his extremely strong leaf blower and spent a half hour blowing away the leaves AND blowing almost all the walnuts into a couple of big piles. Then I chucked walnuts and he mowed. So easy. I’ll remember that for next year.
Have a great evening.
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Hi Caryn!
I really wish I had one of those collars but it is very much forbidden over here 🙂 I’m sure that it would be the only thing that actually would help. She is a bit bothered by having trouble breathing but not enough to calm down especially much, as long as she gets air she’ll continue her merry pulling 🙂 🙂 🙂
I really must say that it’s a great little machine! I really don’t like to sharpen the chain, sooner or later I will have to do that but now I’ve found a thingamajig that will help me doing it the right way. It might not work with such a small chain though but then again I have a bigger electric chain saw that needs to be sharpened anyway so I might buy it. I really hop it isn’t made in China, it always takes so long time for anything to arrive from there 🙂 🙂
I can imagine what his mower would look like after chopping lots of hard black walnuts 🙂 🙂 🙂
Do You ever eat the nuts? I’ve heard that they are slightly bitter in the taste.
Have a great day!
Christer.
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I have never eaten the black walnuts from my trees because I am too lazy to even want to crack open polite English walnuts never mind these iron clad nuts. 😀 They are on the bitter side but not unpleasantly so. Cultivated black walnuts are probably tamer in taste than my old trees. Maybe I will put some of mine aside and do the work just to see. The probability is that all of the ones I collect will not have nuts in them. The squirrels are too good at picking out the full ones and carrying them away. 😀
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I remember when I tried to open one of those nuts that didn’t germinate and it was really hard, even though the inside was dead 🙂 🙂 Things growing on the edge of what they can climate vise usually taste milder, so garlic grown in Sweden are usually much milder than they would be grown further south. I can always hope it’s the same with walnuts 🙂
Thankfully the squirrels are so shy they don’t come to my garden and I’m not sure if they would know it was something edible either, then again squirrels would probably guess they are 🙂
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