Friday, June 3, 2016

Friday, June 3rd, AM - Cherry Picking

Kathy has picked several gallons of cherries already. These are the little sour cherries, not the big sweet ones. It takes a LOT of cherries to make a gallon. I helped a little this morning. Below is our morning picking. We quit because our containers were full. We probably could have picked another quart.


Things I forgot to mention earlier:

The guy I bought my GMC truck from lives in Alaska but has a vacation (future retirement?) home in Texas. The guy he bought the truck from seemed to be someone who kept, and kept track of, everything. One of the disappointments with my truck was that it had come with a Bose 6 CD changer radio but a previous owner had "upgraded" it to a GMC radio with a navigation system. The replacement radio could only hold one CD. An 11 year old navigation system is not high on my priority list of wants, especially when I have a 2 year old Garmin GPS for use with RV's. I emailed Dave, the guy I bought the truck from, and asked if he knew what had happened to the original radio and if he had another set of keys somewhere. He was in Texas over Memorial Day weekend and emailed me telling me he found the radio and and extra set of keys. He wanted to know if I still wanted them. I told him yes and asked him to send him to me. Told him to tell me what he wanted for them and that I would send him a check. He didn't want any money. Yesterday I received the radio, another set of keys for the truck, some extra keys for the travel trailer and a chip programmer for the truck. Now I need to change, or have it changed, the radio.

Last Wed we had our propane tank filled because the summer fill price was so low, $095,9/gallon. This is by far the cheapest we have paid for propane in MANY years. Thank you to all the frackers! The last time we had it filled was last summer 2014, almost 2 years ago. The winter of 2014/15 we spent in the south, except for 2 weeks when we came back to MO in January. We left the heat set on 50 while we were gone. The heat pump would have taken care of most of the heating needs while we were gone. Last winter we were home but I fired up the Hardy wood boiler and we burned wood for most of our heat. We do have a gas range and a gas dryer that gets a fair amount of use. It took 144.7 gallons of propane to fill our tank. Even with some use of the heat pump our electric bills have been very reasonable. Thank you Jesus! Blessing abound!

Wed afternoon our 2 year old AC system was not keeping the house cool. About 1 PM I called the company where we bought the system and told them I needed a serviceman to come out. Mike, our serviceman, called back in an hour or so and was very apologetic because he could not get here before 6 PM. I told him it was not a problem. After the call I started thinking about how long it had been since I changed the furnace filter. It had been 6 months and it was FILTHY. (In part due to our ongoing bathroom construction project.) I changed the filter and called Mike to tell him to call before he came, in case the increased air flow allowed by the new filter solved the problem. He told me that if the filter was as bad as I said the coil had probably frozen and that I should turn the AC off for a couple of hours while letting the fan run to melt the ice on the coil. After a couple of hours of just the fan running I turned the AC back on. It was 77 degrees in the house when I turned it back on at 9:30 and by midnight the temp had dropped to 72 degrees, where we had the thermostat set. Once again Thank You Lord. Having the thought about the filter saved us the cost of a service call. When I bought the filter I bought 2. You can bet I will remember to change it again well before 6 months.

Doug is off to pick up some plumbing parts we need and Kathy is getting ready to head over the Kelsey's to help her plant some flowers.

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