The Week in Pictures

Just a few of the things, normal and not-so-normal, going on around the manor this week…

The dogwoods shook off their yellow early in the week, and are now their usual blazing white. The blooms aren’t as plentiful this year as they have been at least some years past.

This particular shot is the dogwood at the corner of the driveway, with a gigantic cypress in the background. I’ve joked about renting a bucket truck to string Christmas lights on that sucker.


Mason loves being outside, and loves getting a bath. He got too big for the bathroom sink, so now he gets his dunk time in the kitchen sink.

I didn’t have any pix from the various baby food showers he administered to his grandparents this week, unfortunately. On the other hand, I don’t have to worry about cleaning off the camera lens if one of those sneezes got directed that way either.

The Boy takes Mason outside in the stroller; sometimes he sits and plays guitar for him. Mason is fascinated by the guitar and the sound it makes… but most of all he enjoys his “dad time” (what little he gets). He also met Buster T. Butthead, who is officially the first dog he’s petted (stroke, stroke, grab handful of hair). When he’s running around in a few months, I expect Buster will be his best buddy. We’ll probably need to give the dog a bath, now that I think about it…


I spent much of yesterday cutting up a poplar tree with Mr. Sunshine. This was not my plan for the day — I was going to do the Bakin’ Fool thing and hot up the kitchen all day. But they’d dropped it in the area in front of the chicken house, where feed trucks will soon need to go, so it needed to be taken care of. It took us most of the day, cutting off the smaller branches to clear the work area then feeding them to my chipper-shredder… once the work area was clear, the rest of it went fairly quickly. Everything is stacked or piled up here at the manor except for the trunk pieces. We moved them out of the way and Mrs. Fetched said she’ll get the splitter down there and finish that up this week.

Now that’s not even beginning to address what’s waiting for me behind the manor — the above picture tells that particular tale (left side morning, right side evening). Mrs. Fetched has complained for a while about several oak trees close to the house out back; one does make a bad habit of dropping limbs on the roof above our bedroom. Since the renters requested removal of a similarly-positioned tree at the old place, she decided to deal with both jobs at once. So now I have quite a bit of raw firewood to process, and I won’t have to go far to get to it. I’ll have to see if The Boy is interested in getting started on it. I think we’ll miss that extra shade in the evenings, but what do I know?

But even though my day got spent cutting trees instead of kneading, what I wanted to get done yesterday actually happened. Instead of making bread, we bought a loaf. DoubleRed made cookies. And after supper and a brief rest, I made some cinnamon rolls. I took a few to Daughter Dearest, since her Spring Concert was today. Still plenty left, come by the manor and grab one!