I have been wanting to get a blog post up for weeks, but the planets seem to have aligned against me and the muses have been ignoring me. Which is another way of saying nothing too exciting has been going on in Ed and Lise world.
It’s not like we aren’t staying busy. A few weeks ago, we did an overnight trip down to Bloomington to help a friend dispose of some woodturning equipment. Which means I now have a still disassembled lathe in the shop. Which I can’t get assembled until I get a couple other projects finished. Which I can’t finish because I have too many disassembled things in the shop.
My lathe waiting to be assembled and have a bench built for it.
Like some church pews. I came into possession of some mahogany church pews. About nine of them. When they were offered, I figured they would be some nice straight backed hard and flat Puritan-approved “you gotta suffer to get to heaven” church pews. Something I could easily turn into a bench or tabletop. Nope. These have contoured seats and backs, as well as a fifty-year collection of dried chewing gum stuck to the bottom. And every curve is different. The contour on one end of a pew is not the same as on the other end. I like a challenge but it’s going to take a little longer to make Lise’s mahogany bench than I initially predicted.
Part of the pew collection taking up what was once a parking spot in the garage.
We also did an overnight trip up to Michigan to stay at a hop farm and brewery. A childhood friend of Lise’s decided to buy a farm and raise hops. Naturally the next logical step is to build a brewery to use the hops. We had a great time and if you are ever in the area of Buchanan, Michigan I highly recommend stopping by the River St. Joe brewery. All the beers are worth drinking, but the Scythe Imperial Stout is just about as good as a stout can get. And it comes in a great looking bottle.
Hop vines.
Inspecting the plants.
Hops on the vine.
Preying mantis on the hop vine.
Hop processor.
The final product. Scythe Imperial Stout from River St. Joe brewery. This is a good one that Ed highly recommends.
Birding has been slow the past weeks. We did go chasing a rarity for here. A swallow-tail kite showed up at the Willow Slough Fish and Wildlife Area, just a bit north of here. The kite is normally a Florida bird. This one was reported to be typically seen soaring above the gun range. We did the hour trip up to the Slough, went to the gun range, looked up, and there was the swallow-tail kite. An easy twitch for the year.
On the same trip we popped over to The Nature Conservancy’s Kankakee Sands area to see the buffalo. Didn’t see any free ranging buffalo, but we did get to see an amusing sign warning of the consequences of trying to pet one of these cuddly beasts. If anyone is stupid enough to climb over an electric fence to play tag with a 2200-pound horned animal, maybe we should let them. The more stupid people we get out of the gene pool the better off we all are.
Like you need to be warned not to play tag with a buffalo.
Another fun day outing was to see the orange-fringed orchid. One of the few remaining Indiana populations is about an hour north of West Lafayette. We met some friends at the site that drove several hours up from Bloomington to see the orchid. There are other historical records of the orchid in Northwest Indiana but those are mostly corn and soybean fields right now.
Orange fringed orchid.
Meadow beauty, another uncommon species at the site.
Lise in part of the tall grass prairie at the site.
Between our short trips and the time suck of daily existence I haven’t gotten out much for dragonfly pictures. Only a couple times this season. Still, better than none at all.
Stream bluet damselflies.
American rubyspot damselflies.
Females from one of several spreadwing damselfly species. The species can only be identified from female specimens if you have a dead one under a microscope.
Female Eastern pondhawk.
Ed's and Lise's Biggish Years 