Visiting & Chores 1-16

Look how pretty it is looking.

Yesterday dawned bright and sunny.  It was time for a road day trip so I called my cousin Linda to see if she and Don were going to be home.  They were and told us to come on down, so we headed to Pine Grove which is about an hour and a half away from Cool.  We took Salmon Falls Road from Pilot Hill to El Dorado Hills Road...what a beautiful drive and there are a lot of humongous beautiful homes there in the hills...wow.  In El Dorado Hills we picked up Latrobe Road to highway 16 to highway 49...and on that stretch it was beautiful rolling hills with grazing cattle and enormous old oaks.

We had a great visit, this was my first time seeing their home...they moved there in '05...Larry had stopped by there when he was in the area on a fire a couple of years ago.  Linda and Don invited us to stay for dinner...a yummy bar-be-cued tri-tip, with salad, the best green beans on the planet (sorry Aunt Millie) and tasty rice with mushrooms.  I carried the camera in with me and then forgot about it...I'm awful about getting pictures of people when we are visiting...it feels weird to pull out the camera and start snapping pictures.  I didn't take any pictures on the way down because I would have been shooting into the sun.

We left and headed home around 7:30 and hit fog almost immediately...yuck.  Larry heard on the scanner that in the valley there was zero visibility in some places so we returned home a different route.  We hopped on 49 and stayed there most of the way home...it got us up a little higher sooner.  We stopped at Jack in the Box for a little dessert and a bathroom break....the bathroom was the most important and the dessert was just...dessert, ha ha.

Here is a before shot.

After we crossed 50 we hit very little fog the rest of the way home.  When we got out of the truck here at home we were almost deafened by the roar of the frogs croaking all around...every frog breathing within hearing distance must have been croaking.  It was amazing.

Today Larry ran into Auburn to get material for his workbench.  It was sunny here but foggy over there.  While he was gone I cleaned the house and did the laundry.  After he got back he was busy building and I took a break with a cup of coffee and my book on the deck in the sun.

Here is today's after shot.

Later I got out my pruners and evened out our little citrus tree and took a crossing branch out of our plum tree.  Then I got the pruning saw and lumber jacked three small pine trees that we wanted gone.  We don't want any pine trees close to the house.  The biggest one in the middle of the coffeeberry took longer than the other two but mostly because I had to fight the bushes branches, plus I was getting tired.  I drug the trees to the burn pile and that was it for me for the day...enough working.

That's the fog hanging about and being creepy

Late afternoon the fog was very thick in the canyon and it began creeping over the hills toward our place.  It was kind of creepy weird...we had sunshine still but the fog was creeping in on two sides and held off until just before dark when it covered us over. 

These bucks wandered through just as the sun was going down and walked in the beam of light shining through the trees...nice of them.  We hit the low 60's today but when that fog closed in we plummeted 10 degrees really quickly.

the four pointer

the two pointer

heading over the hill