A Roaring River

I ran to the post this morning to get a few groceries, and to take pictures of the Missouri River, which is going to be at flood stage later this week after they open the floodgates further up in South Dakota. 

Here is is from Riverfront Park in Leavenworth, which was originally a ferry landing.

It is very, very full, and moving very fast.

I would not like to venture out on it right now.

That's the view north, or upstream.

When we lived in Leavenworth, we lived one block over from the riverfront, which was on a high bank where we were.  There was a row of houses on our alley that faced the river, and we were the next houses.  We always took Oscar daily up to Esplanade, 

and Nicky the cat followed us.  There we would sit on a bench and watch the Missouri roll by at the bottom of the hill.  Hidden by a fold in the hill were railroad tracks.  Since I had grown up within the sound of the railyards in KCK, I loved to hear the trains coming day and night.  Once Oscar broke loose and disappeared down the hill and gave us a heart attack... he was very naughty, and would not come when called.  Thank heavens he reappeared and followed us home with Nick.  

 In the meantime, Keith was home working on these:

This gives you some idea of the layout.  The deep bed from last year is on the left. The foreground is the potato bed.... the arbor in the middle, with hyacinth bean growing at it's foot again... and on the other side, the two mirror beds.  As you can see, the inside bed, which will be for bramble fruit... stretches all the way to the compost bins. The yard-side bed will be another perennial/annual bed.  Yes, we have our work cut out for us.  To make it worse, there is a new iris bed under the maple tree at the north end of the garden.  There is now, as of this evening, a mirror bed across from it. 

I sprayed the Ozine in the big henhouse this afternoon, and then spread a bale of pine shavings on the floor instead of straw.  Fifteen minutes later, I remembered why I didn't use pine shavings for bedding... the smell was overwhelming.  I'm hoping it will dissipate over the next few days.  I am putting the feed up in the cans at night (the feeders, rather) so the mice are still mighty disappointed, and going to be mighty dead, as I have spread packets of poison. 

We finally knocked off at 6:30, worn out from the high heat and humidity, showered, and ran down the road to the new diner outside Tongie.  It was so nice to sit and be served dinner instead of cooking quickly and running back out to work some more.  So what did we do?  Came home, I did the watering, and Keith went back out and finished a bed!  Now he is going down to Sonic to get us some treats for our hard day's pay! 

As I went out to lock up the bantams (always the last to go to bed) I took Gertie, because she rarely gets to go in the henyard.  I had already closed the gate to the pasture.  There, where I had just been 20 minutes before, hung in the air the smell of a skunk.  Gertie began to bark wildly and I said a quick prayer that the polecat wasn't still there under the weeds. 

As we came out, I could smell it just as strongly in the yard.  I called out to Keith, and he turned around and said "I smell skunk!".  Gertie ran for the north fence barking, so we think it went that-a-way, away from a succulent chicken dinner!