Wednesday, January 16, 2019

It rained on Monday; it rained over 1/2 an inch on Tuesday, and so far today, it has rained 1.68 inches. According to our neighbor Michael, it rained buckets for about an hour and a half, but it also rained a lot during the middle of the night. All this rain was enough to send the creek behind the houses across the street from us roaring. Everyone in the Canyon gets so excited when the creek starts to run. We just hope it keeps running. And tomorrow’s rain, which looks like it will be all day, should help that.

So, there wasn’t any work going on on the house, which is surrounded by a sea of mud.

Nina went out there today to check the chickens and the water diversion bars, to make sure they had not clogged up. Pete stayed in Laguna with his friend Bill.

I thought I would add a few more photos of work Pete has been doing. Last week he helped us dig up two loquat trees and a citrus tree growing in the dirt beds in our patio at the condo. The entire patio is going to be jack hammered out at the end of the month, so we needed to remove the plants we wanted to keep. Pete planted the bigger loquat in a new bed he built out of old scrap bricks. Some of the bricks were from the chimney of the old house and some were from the original front walk. Behind the loquat, which seems happy, you can see a bunch of brush he cut down.

He has also recently moved one of our citrus trees and thinned the bananas.

And back in Irvine, Nina’s tomato seedlings have started to come up. They were planted January 6th, 12 days ago. They are under a light and on top of a warming mat in the condo garage. The two six-packs on the left were much slower to germinate than the ones in the middle and are smaller right now. She just got some new cherry tomato seeds that her sister-in-law Cecily recommended. They are called BHN-968, a name that just rolls off the tongue. She will plant them in the last 6 spots on the far right tomorrow.