Hot busy day, cool nights

Another hot day here. 93 F was our official high temperature. Fortunately the nights are cool.

Today, I:

• chatted with my neighbor Jerry about his new garage. I learned the 2008 Corvette is not his son's car, it is Jerry's. Going from only having his wife's car to having a 400+ horsepower Corvette is quite a change. 71 years old is kind of old for a mid-life crisis.
  


• sprayed three tanks of herbicide on weeds in an effort to finish spraying the north pasture. I didn't finish. Hopefully tomorrow I will. The weeds I sprayed one to two weeks ago, before the cattle flared up where I had to work on my loading corral, are dead and dying. I found patches where I missed some weeds entirely. Some areas had so many weeds it was easy to miss clumps of them.
  
  Other areas of the pasture dried up and the only green were weeds. Made it easier to find the ones I missed earlier. I also found the Canadian thistle is not giving up as near some of the dead thistle plants new green ones are coming up.
  


• caught a regular gopher in my remaining trap. This is the latest in the year I have caught one. He must have come up for something. I have found other gophers holes have been opened so I moved the trap to one of those holes. Maybe I'll get another gopher.


• set my pocket gopher traps back out in the hayfield.


• added some wire to strengthen the south pasture gate I had been using to get the cattle back into my pasture.


• repaired the fence by the river where the cattle made their last jailbreak. I added a half dozen boards as posts along the fence. I also gathered more dead trees and branches to pile on and in front of the fence.
  
  I noticed that over the years the river is filling in front of the fence. Formerly the fence was on the river bank just above the water. Now there is some ground for the cattle to stand on when checking out the fence.
  
  The black wasps are still around and I had to avoid getting tree branches from one area.
  


• watered my garden and berry bushes, picked and ate fresh ripe raspberries.
  
  The zucchini and pumpkin plants have gone wild. Too bad it is late in the year and I won't get pumpkins. Now that I know what kind of plant the pumpkin plant is I should yank it, but with so little in my garden I am letting it be.
  
  The apple trees are loaded with apples. A few are starting to drop.
  
  At dusk the mosquitoes were out. You'd think that with no rain since July 22, the mosquitoes would be gone.
  
  A large owl flew into the pine tree above me as I watered the last of my berry bushes. I mean large.
  

The sunset this evening was fantastic. It lasted a long time. The colors slowly changed from a pastel yellow to a light orange to a dark orange. The trees on the ridge individually stood out against the sunset colors. A couple of long narrow clouds to one side provided a blue/gray/purple offset to the sunset colors.

Then to my east as I watered my plants I watched the full moon rise from behind the Swan Mountain range. Gorgeous! I didn't know whether to look to the sunset or the moon rise, and kept looking back and forth.

This evening after the sun went down I went for a bicycle ride. The moon is full tonight and it would have been fun to ride up and down Logan Pass in Glacier Park, but I didn't.

After the sun set the temperature cooled off nicely. In the dark and warn night air my sense of smell was enhanced. Riding near creeks had a nice musky damp smell. Not so nice were the couple of times I rode by some animal dead in the ditch or nearby property. Riding along highway 2 I heard some of the car stereos thump as the cars passed. I could feel the energy of a warm summer Saturday night.