We went out for the morning walk and one of my neighbors came over to introduce herself as Caroline and said she had knocked on the door earlier but figured we were still asleep. I told her I was not a morning person and apologized for not hearing her knock. The dogs did not hear it either. She had come over to invite me to go with her to listen to the music somewhere in town but apparently, I had missed it by not hearing the knock. We chatted for a bit before I headed back to Quatro. 

I had a few chores to do and worked on them before it got too hot and then adjourned to the RV for breakfast. I did not bother to feed the dogs as I already know the result of that. My efforts to reduce the junk emails that I get is paying off as the numbers are continuing to drop. There are always a few important ones that take a bit of my time which is to be expected in this electronic age and it is virtually, the only way to stay in touch other than picking up the phone. As I talk better by the typed word than I do by voice, I choose to type. Much of the problem is because of my poor hearing even with expensive hearing aids and I often must get whoever I am talking to repeat what they just said. About the only good thing about the deafness is that it prevented me from being conscripted into the National Service at the age of 18 over in England and then when I came to America, I had to register for the same conscription into the Armed Services even at the age of 32 married with kids and again, failed the physical. Thank goodness or I would have ended up in Viet Nam.

We have nothing planned for today except to stay cool inside of Quatro, so I caught up with the blog and worked on a few pictures that I have taken. I uploaded both the pictures and the blog into WordPress and posted them online. We are so close on posting that it makes me nervous. When I mentioned it to BJ, she said not to worry as no one will notice if I miss a day of writing. She is right of course but it still hurt my feelings. The only person that cares about what I write is me. Still, like I said many times before I do not write to win any book awards but to keep my brain at least a little stimulated by doing so

With both the blog posted and the pictures uploaded and worked on, I closed the computer and looked around for something else to do. I do not watch TV thru the day unless it is a big soccer game of great importance (to me). I decided to listen to an Audiobook for the next couple of hours and found myself nodding off to sleep. That stimulated me into getting the dogs harnessed up and we went out for the evening walk. I have learned that walking the road is the only real continuous shade in the park except close around the wooded areas, which as I mentioned before, I am a bit leery of walking because of my earlier sighting of what looked like a coyote.

We watched as a worker operated a tractor and bailing machine. This was the same tractor that had mowed the field a few of day ago and had been raking the hay into rows yesterday. I watched as sometimes he just drove over the hay and the baler scooped it up and spit out large round bale occasionally. Then at other times, he backed up to get hay he had missed and one time, he completely emptied the baler without out it having made a bale and started over.  

This made me think of when I was just a very young kid and used to visit the hay fields with one of the local farmers. Then, the hay was raked up by hand and then loaded onto a wagon drawn by a pair of horses or a tractor in the more modern farms, by people using pitchforks. Eventually it was stacked onto huge haystacks that when finished, had a straw thatch roof. The hay was transported by mechanical elevators driven by a long continouos belt connected to a pulley on the tractor, and then up onto the stack with workers on top to spread it and build the stack. I received many warnings to stay away from the belt. During World War 2 which is when we are referring to, as a part of the drive to produce food, young women were moved from the cities to the country to help in the chores on the farms. They were known as “Land Girls”, their official title. They even had uniforms. The young men, of course, were fighting the war creating the labor shortage. 

Back in Quatro, we settled down for the evening. I fed the dogs which includes finely cut up pieces of roast chicken on top of their regular canned food and they just gobble it down. The same food in the morning is ignored because it does not have the chicken in it.  Of course, my dogs are not spoiled….

Written 07/06/2022 Read my other blog at https://pondblog2011.com