2026 Hopkington FAIR!

We went to the Hopkington fair on Saturday Sept 5th, just before we left I'd checked the weather, it said we'd get a 4 minute shower.  We were there around 5PM and were there an hour or so and it started to rain pretty heavy, everyone was scurrying to get out of there. I checked the weather on my phone and it said it would now rain until 9pm...  We still had a good time, Rose had a sausage, pepper and onion sub ($15), I had a pepper-burger ($10) yikes but so good though.

We stopped over to see Mom and Dad with James and Jason "the boys" on Sunday

Bullet and Winston are getting along so good!

51 Degrees Monday Morning! It's cooling off that's for sure

The boys came over for a cookout on Monday! 

Jason went back to NJ on Tuesday he made it back, less traffic than he encountered on the way up here.

Tuesday and Wednesday the hummingbirds were still here, by Thursday they were gone. 

We have a couple deer coming into the yard now.

Looks like they're coming to put on our new roof on Saturday, they think they can do it in a day!  They did, finishing up around 7PM.

It's really starting to look like fall around here!

One or our apple trees went crazy and produced so many apples looking more like bunching tomatoes there are so many, it's a yellow delicious variety we think, they are small, a bit gnarly, but so abundant we'll have to do something with them!  I'll check on the other apple trees too while I'm at it.

 

A powerful tribute to the victims and heroes of September 11th begins tonight at the top of Mount Washington.

• The "Honor Summit" will send two beams of light into the night sky from the summit of New England's highest peak—similar to the iconic beams displayed each year in New York City at Ground Zero.
• The tribute will run from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m. tonight and each night through Saturday.
• Organizers say the beams could be visible from as far as 135 miles away on a clear night, creating a sweeping reminder of the lives lost and the heroes who responded on September 11th.

Friday we poured the concrete platform for the propane tanks we use to run the generator. 

Saturday the roofers showed up at 7AM and finished up with the roof install around 6:30PM the roof looks great!  There was a lot of scrap plywood pieces from the job, a bunch of 1/2 and 1/4 sheets of plywood, we saved them all from the dumpster, now what will we build?

Sunday was a wash out, Rose went food shopping, apparently everyone else had the same idea she said the register lines were crazy, I stayed home nursing my knee.

Tuesday 4AM it was 42 degrees, brr, 62 in the house, time to get the pellet stove cleaned and running in the morning.

• Rose saw a Bald Eagle Tuesday in the back yard!  So cool! 

FALL FOLIAGE MAP  Use the slider at the bottom of the map.

Beautiful sunrise Wednesday morning

We're seeing butterflies, Monarch's and Swallowtails headed south  

We're still knee deep in getting ready for winter, we need to get a plow company still, sand barrels out, and a few projects we just haven't gotten too yet!  

Gas is crazy out there $4.49 at one station, we filled (4) 5 gallon jugs last night $90.17 to fill just those 4 up!  Yikes.  And 4 more to go, we try to have 8 jugs on hand for snow equipment, mowing, and generator duty.

Our oil company isn't publishing fuel oil plans yet... (waiting for the price to go up) Last time we called it was $4.99 a gallon!  Today, Thursday Sept 17th it's $5.699. It's gonna be an expensive heating oil season! 

Last I looked our pond and therefore my well level is high.

I'm ready to give in to retirement!  Thinking January!

Mortgage rates are up again!

• Zillow / Yahoo Finance: 7.00%
• Better Mortgage (settled index): 7.22%
• Money.com: 7.00% APR (average)
• Bankrate: 7.02% national average
• Wall Street Journal (via Bankrate data): 7.02%

We've been talking about all of the special dogs we've had over the years. Good times..good dogs ...good memories.  Some really special dogs. Our amazing companions over the years: Jake and Midnight, Magic, Chloe, Cooper, Gordon, Harley, Zebulon, Hannah, Winston, Bullet! Some pretty special rescues in that mix! 

One of the roof returns (pigeon boxes) was showing some rot and carpenter ant damage after 130 years I guess it's to be expected. 

Rose was caulking some of the cracks at the peak of the roof that showed up during the re-roofing of the house. 

With the concrete pad now cured, I got the two 100 pound propane tanks up unto the platform, I'll look to get the hood installed, tanks connected to the regulator and hose run to the generator in the shed.

I have a lot of shrub trimming to do the bushes get out of hand so fast!

We're recharging/replacing batteries in cameras, and various lights in sheds in preps for colder weather coming.

Saturday we picked up a few things at the grocery store, a pumpkin for carving, and a couple of Mums for the walkway.

Sunday: Today's the day, deep cleaning of the pellet stove!  It'll be fun, I'm used to the stove now, every time I clean it out it gets a little easier, just in time too, it's cold in the mornings 46 degrees.  Rose worked on putting all her teapots back on the shelves that she'd pulled down during the roofing. It's done, and the pellet stove fired right up.

We finished filling up (8) 5 gallon gasoline jugs we store for the generators, snowblower, and lawnmowers, $180 later we're set for winter. 

Rose has almost finished the teapot shelf in the dining room, all sparkling clean and gleaming!

IT'S THE FIRST DAY OF FALL! 

We're off to the Vet Wednesday, Bullet for his booster shots and Winston has a bump on his nose that we'll get checked out.  The two dogs together are a handful, they did well though!  Winston's nose bump she wasn't worried about, we'll put Bacitracin on it and watch it over the next month.

39 degrees when I woke up this morning! Brr, I fired up the pellet stove to take the chill off.

Gas prices dropped a bit back down to $4.21 a gallon by Wednesday 9/23

We've got a Nor'easter headed our way for Friday night thru Sunday, doesn't sound like it'll be to bad, time will tell. 

The bad weather turned up like an uninvited guest full of booze and bad manners.

Hurricanes lowest level in the Atlantic in over 100 years!! 

We've got a Nor'easter headed our way, we're just about ready! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A new survey from the Center for Strategic Politics found that 59 percent of Democrats would favor a military coup to remove President Donald Trump from office. All it took was four years out of power for these Democratic voters to embrace a coup d'état to negate the results of the last election. What is particularly chilling is that many of these voters still portray themselves as defending democracy by calling for a military takeover.  

"I dunno, but if I were president and the poverty rate dropped to the LOWEST RATE ON RECORD, I might make a big deal out of it — a lot bigger deal than the Trump White House is making,"

Listen, I’m not blind to President Donald Trump’s successes, nor am I ignorant of his failures and excesses. But I am thankful for his unconventional approach to governance. I think he has made some mistakes while pursuing the right objectives, winning some and losing some, but most of which are successful resets and long-term actions that get lost in the leftist propaganda mill that runs 24/7/365.  The media will do anything and everything to minimize the positives and amplify the negatives. 

Wasn’t it CNN and MSNBC who didn’t cover the Thursday night Trump press conference to America and now they are crying because they want to report on Trump. Can’t have it both ways you idiots.

Do You Remember When Old Joe Biden Cut Credentials to 440 White House Journalists?… The DC Hacks Didn’t Cry Back Then 

Most Americans have never experienced that kind of speed. They’ve known recessions, certainly—the technical kind, the temporary kind, the kind that ends with rebounding markets and analysts declaring victory. They’ve never known a genuine crisis, the sort that grinds forward for years, rewriting the social contract so gradually that each degradation feels like common sense by the time it arrives. The sort that leaves permanent scars.

We may be closer than we think. Not because of prophecy, but because of arithmetic. Debt structures, demographic shifts, and institutional fragilities have accumulated to levels that historical precedent suggests are difficult to sustain. The question is not whether stress will come, but whether those experiencing it will recognize the tremors before they’re already falling. 

The Democratic Chicken — or the Socialist Egg?
Who created whom? The answer is demonstrably clear: Democrats radicalized themselves.

The US DEPT CLOCK https://usdebtclock.org/ 

Democrats... Free health care. Free child care. Free college. Debt forgiveness. Housing assistance. Food assistance. The list changes with the election; the appeal doesn't. There is something you want, and we will find a way to make somebody else pay for it.

• None of it is free, of course. Somebody always receives the bill, whether it lands on the taxpayer, the consumer, or the next generation. But that isn't what the voter hears when a politician says "free." The voter hears exactly what the word says: Free. 

I know some of you won't get this, still funny though!

 THE END!

Mid August to mid September

Rose chopped up and froze a bunch of tomatoes already. 

We've picked 17 tomatoes so far from our 3 plants. 

Our apple trees have apples on them this year, just enough rain I guess. They're starting to ripen

All the birds have now left their houses, a couple of the Sparrows raised 4 broods, Bluebirds one brood each, and our Tree Swallows had a single brood as well. 

The birds are quieter, the landscape is tired, they're calling the first day of Fall... 

We worked on the last side of the run in shed removing the rotted boards and replacing them.

The U.S. Faces A “Historic” Cattle Shortage As The Size Of The U.S. Herd Shrinks To The Smallest Since 1951 

One week, coffee causes cancer.
The next week, coffee prevents cancer.
A month later, somebody announces that butter is deadly. Six months after that, another study insists butter was misunderstood all along.
Sound familiar? 

We've met with a few roofing contractors to get a quote on a new roof.

We're off to Home Depot today to pick up stuff we need for various projects here.  Concrete, gravel, 2x4s, roof panels, screws, etc.

We put a new deer block out in the winter deer yard on Sunday

The apples are starting to ripen on the trees in the orchard, we'll be picking soon.

Rose is working on the tarp door on the run in shed this week.

We ordered 3 pallets of pellets, they'll be delivered on Sept 4th 

Our roof will get replaced the week of Sept 14th! It's time, the current roof is 30 years old! We'll have to start clearing the yard, take down the cabana, and the arch trellis and anything else that may get in the roofers way.

Jason is coming home this week!  He'll be back up here on Thursday 8/27

Here's hoping it's not cloudy! Spoiler, it was cloudy!  Bummer.

Rose has been clearing around the house so the roofers coming on Sept ~14th will be able to get all the old shingles off. 

We took Bullet our new German Shepherd to the Vet last week so they know him and get hartgard and a couple shots, they called Tuesday to say yup he has Lyme, disease so Rose'll pick up Doxycyclene for him today.

We're still picking tomatoes, though the plants are looking bedraggled!  

In denial it’s already September and we’ve already started prepping for winter days here on the farm. 

We picked blackberries on Wednesday not a lot ~3 cups.

Saw this quote Friday, We have enough. We will make it through another winter. We will see the spring. 

It's been great seeing James and Jason last week! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In August, ICE arrested 50,925 illegals, breaking its record for the third straight month. 

89% of Americans see widespread corruption in government
A Gallup poll published on Wednesday found that Americans believe corruption in government is widespread, hitting a record 20-year high. 

“. . . the worse they become, the more they blame you for it.” —El Gato Malo on the Lefty-left

• As the Democratic Party pulls out all the stops to make itself ridiculous, their proxy warriors in the federal judiciary play chicken with the executive branch on sane, uniform standards for mail-in ballots. The Democrats don’t want sane, uniform standards for mail-in ballots because they are insane. They want to “defend Democracy” with mail-in ballot chaos. Democracy is their flabby rubric for any artifice or subterfuge that beats a path to power so they can continue their racketeering operations. Yes, it’s that simple. 

In March, the president issued an executive order instructing the Post Office to work with the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that mail-in ballots were delivered to U.S. citizens only. California and other Democrat-led states sued to block the president’s order, which is revealing by itself.

• A left-wing federal judge appointed by Barack Obama issued an injunction blocking the president’s order. But in a 6 to 3 decision, the conservative justices lifted the lower court’s injunction, ruling that the Democrat states lacked “standing” to sue. 
• We can thank President Trump’s tireless efforts to restore confidence in our voting systems. He is not the one undermining confidence in our elections. Democrats are undermining confidence in our elections by resisting every commonsense idea, including voter ID and proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote. 

Sadly, Democrat racist smears are typical of the “tolerant” and “progressive” Left. 

PANIC in the CNN Control Room over NEW POLL on Democrats & the Economy Harry Enten just dropped the bombshell on live TV: White non-college voters still trust the REPUBLICAN PARTY over Democrats by a massive +16 POINTS on the ECONOMY… and another +16 on INFLATION!  “Look at inflation… the Republican Party is STILL trusted more by 16 points! The Democrats are NOT trusted on this!” This is seismic. Michigan. Ohio. The entire Rust Belt. These voters decide elections — and CNN just admitted the GOP still owns the issue that matters most. They can spin all they want… the numbers don’t lie. 

Anthony Fauci refused to sit down and honestly testify about the COVID years. He will not explain why the FDA fought to keep Pfizer's trial data hidden for 55 years, then 75. He will not explain the preemptive pardon that shielded him from criminal prosecution. The endless legal maneuvering is not a defense strategy; it is a confession.  

“The left are incompetent biotrash who purge everyone too attractive, too capable or too intelligent to uncritically accept their retarded worldview.” 

And so, all of a sudden, having failed to subvert or assassinate the president they abhor, and foil his attempt to repair our country, the combined forces of the Democratic Party, the seditious news media, and a traitorous government bureaucracy resort to communist jihad in their crusade to wreck the USA. 

So, while the last summer breeze still wafts over the barbecue in the air, and an unnerving stillness persists, forces are moving and roiling under the surface. Enjoy at least the appearance of calm seas while you can because it’s going to roughen up in the weeks ahead.  

Just in case you missed it, Massachusetts, which is a rich, liberal enclave in North East America, just signed into law a bill which permits abortion at the point of birth. Reflect on that. At. The Point. Of. Birth. As in, kill your baby as you give birth to it. There's no nuance here, no grey area, just sheer demonic infanticide. 

The White House Government Transparency Task Force on Tuesday released the documents, exposing a counterintelligence operation codenamed “Round River.”

• The Round River team allegedly formed in December of 2019 “to gather any/all derogatory information reported by confidential human resources on Joe Biden’s corruption and other Ukraine related information,” to red flag the info as “Russian disinformation.”
• The topics targeted by FBI analysts included Burisma, Hunter Biden, and Ukraine meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
• The FBI operation divided the characters involved in Biden’s corruption scandals into two categories, those complicit in the scandals, and those exposing them. The operation sought to defend complicit Democrats and discredit Republican journalists and politicians as conduits of “Russian disinformation.”
• A long list of Democrats, including Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, George Soros and others, were portrayed as victims who were “targets” of Russian disinformation.
• Conservatives like Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo, Chuck Grassley, Ron Johnson, Jim Jordan, Fox News, Greg Jarrett and John Solomon, meanwhile, were branded “conduits” of Russian disinformation.