I find myself still borrowing my wife’s laptop to take care of online chores…Number two son should be by this afternoon with his set of diagnostics disks and tricks to see if what I have is a hardware problem to turn over to Dell…His being in New York every week for the past couple of months has made getting his help on things like this problematic. His weekend trips home are taken up more with chores and significant other…Of course had the problem happened a week earlier it would have been better because he and the rest of his crew spent the Easter week in town.

We seem to be on a roll with rain storms blowing through each weekend. I am not about to complain, we need to refill our water table. I actually was amazed after last weeks storms dumped (some reports say) seven inches of rain on us, that by the next day, most of it had soaked in to our very dry soil. Last nights batch of thunder boomers must have dropped a goodly amount (though, more normal) of rain since there are still some rather full puddles in the yard.

The damage to the trees around here, caused by Ike last fall, is still making itself evident on a daily basis. There must be numerous trees with weakened structural parts. A couple of days ago a large limb in one of our oaks let lose. It is still hung up in the tree and I’ll have to figure a way to pull it down before it hurts someone. Yesterday I was sitting out back in the shade resting my sore knee and reading when I heard a resounding crash come from the woods behind the house. Upon investigation I found the entire top of an oak had broken off and laid over…Now this was a totally living, fully leafed, probably twenty foot top out of a forty foot tall tree. It seems every bit of wind brings down more limbs…And, every time I look up in our trees I see dead limbs that weren’t dead this time last year. Though, admittedly, the dead limbs are making visits from the woodpecker clan more frequent. There have been at least three different species show up so far. Sadly I don’t own any “big glass” for my camera to pull in any shots from that far away in the canopy of our oaks…

Time to move on for the morning…Have a great weekend all