Books Read in 2026: August

Call It Horses by Jessie van Eerden . This one was listed in July, but I'd barely started it so didn't really have anything to say about it.  Now that I finished it, I wanted to give a quick review.  It was not at all what I expected from the blurb on the cover. And, (disappointingly to me) it doesn't have much to do with horses at all, they only come in at the very end of the book. It is not a light read, nor does it have a cute happy ending.  That doesn't mean it was a bad book, it just means its not one you want to pick up if you are currently weighed down by some heavy life circumstances. (Which I wasn't, so I read it, but if I were I don't think I would have had the mental bandwidth to finish the book.)

On to August's list!

Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry by Harry Kemelman.  This is the second in the series, and I loved it just as much as I did the first.  I got ahold of it from the library via the state library interloan system, and was surprised by how old this particular copy was: 1966!  It actually had the old original due date slip taped on the page inside the back cover with due dates from the 60s and early 70s, then on the inside of the cover itself was a pocket with the due date card which had more stamps from the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. So I not only enjoyed the story itself, but also got great joy seeing a book older than myself still in circulating condition!  Really stood out as to the durability of books printed back then versus books made in this century.  On the other hand, it also made me realize that these stories have fallen out of fashion and tend to languish in library storage rooms these days rather than out on the shelves where browsing readers can see them.  Let's bring them back into popularity because this is a great series and I fully intend to read all of them.

The old blue cloth bound covers of the 60s.

Stitching that held the pages together (stitched, not glued!)

A Dark Path by Linda Castillo.  This is a now-in-print version of several short Kate Burkholder stories that were previously released on Kindle only.  Since I don't Kindle (or any other form of reading books on a screen instead of on paper) I was really happy to see that stories I knew about but wouldn't ever read if they were electronic-only were going to be compiled into an honest to goodness book.  And I wasn't disappointed, either!  Each story is stand alone and roughly 60 pages long.  Perfect for a time when you don't have hours available daily to devote to reading.  They are all well written, with no rushed or sloppy feeling to them.  Really makes me hungry for a whole novel; I hope the author has got a new full-length Kate Burkholder story in the works.

Nantucket Second Chances by Pamela Kelley.  This one was suggested to me by the library's automatic book picking system when I requested a different (not in print yet) novel recently.  Looking on Amazon for the blurb, it sounded like it could possibly be something I'd enjoy reading, so I put a hold on it. It was okay; although if I were to be brutally honest, I didn't like it.  I had a hard time getting into the characters, not just because they were so obviously from a different economic class than me, but also because many of them seemed to be shallow stereotypes.  Similarly, I felt that every drama point resolved too easily and quickly to be realistic.

Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie.  This is her third novel, and in my on-going personal project to read/re-read all of her mysteries (since I read the majority of what I could get my hands on of hers as a teenager, it's been a long time), it was next on my list.  It did not disappoint.  She most definitely was and still is, in my opinion, the queen of murder mysteries.

Oh No, Not Bots!

(I'll start with apologizing for potentially blurry pictures.  Not the best angle, lighting, etc for a cell phone camera when you are crouched next to a horse, leaning slightly into the underbelly danger zone and trying to be quick about it all the while hoping the horse doesn't move.)

Recently, there was an evening when I brought horses in from the pastures to put them in stalls for the night and feed them dinner, and I saw this on the inside of one of Poetess's front legs:

 

BOT EGGS!

Oh no, not bots!  I quickly checked her other legs, and yep, the other front leg had eggs attached to the hairs too.  Which meant, without a doubt, that the time of year the bot flies are out laying eggs had come.

What are bots and why does it matter if they put eggs on the horses' legs?  Bots are a fly that, as an adult, do not eat.  They only mate, lay eggs, and die.  It is the eggs that are the problem.

Eggs are laid on certain parts of the horses bodies, parts that the horse can reach with it's mouth--say, to rub an itch, or to smack at a different fly that is biting them.  When those eggs are rubbed by the horse's mouth, they come off and are ingested. Once ingested, they hatch, and the larvae dwell in the horse's digestive system as parasites.

As we all know, parasite = bad.

Which means that it is imperative to removed those eggs as soon as I discover them.  The less chance of the horse ingesting them the better.

So, I dug around in the tack room and pulled out my trusty pumice-like bot block.  A bot block is used, with some pressure, in the direction of the hair growth to scrape off those bot eggs.

Bot block employed.

If the horse stands still, and standing still no matter what I'm doing to them is an important skill I teach my horses, it really only takes a couple of minutes to remove those pesky bot eggs.

Leg free of bots once more.

PHEW! Potential crisis averted.  (Crisis being intestinal worms to get rid of, which are much harder to reach than eggs on legs.)

I checked each horse, and did need to do some scraping with the bot block on the other horses too, some as much as Poetess, some less.  A quick daily check has, so far, found no more eggs deposited.  Thankfully this 'season' (botflies) is typically only a few weeks, which means I only have to be diligent in checking for eggs for a little longer.

Did You Know?

 Did you know that September is National Sewing Month (in the US), and has been so since 1982?  I sure didn't!  I only learned of this (or maybe paid attention to the mention of it) today while reading the comment section of a quilting related blog.

I'm not typically a person who hears of an activity and says "Yep, that's for me, I'm doing it!" Usually I need to think on things a good long while and examine them from all sides, determine their worth and feasibility to my life, and then, maybe, I will take part months or years later.

But you know what?  I haven't sewn anything since the very beginning of this year, and for the past two months I've really been having an increasing urge to get back to the sewing machine.

The bowl cozy I sewed in early January.

An urge that I have mostly ignored because my sewing area is buried in lots of not-sewing-related crap.  Plus, it's summer, and there's so much to do outside that I haven't even been able to sort of keep up on.  So how could I possibly rationalize taking time from outdoor tasks and doing some sewing?

Last month I thought I might possibly be able to excuse taking time to sew by saying I was getting a jump on Christmas presents, as both Lucky and Octavia are slated to receive reading pillows this year. I all ready have the pillow forms and I all ready have the fabric.

But still, I couldn't quite bring myself to take the time to clear all the stuff off my sewing area in order to be able to even pull out and cut fabric for those pillows.  So I didn't.

But now!  Now it's National Sewing Month!  And, as that comment I read on that other blog said, devoting just 15 minutes a day to being in the sewing room, whether that was in the form of cleaning, organizing, planning a project, pulling fabric, cutting fabric or actually sewing was not a selfish or unreasonable goal.  It's even something I could do in the evening, when I'm done with outdoor stuff.  I mean, the sun does go down before 8:30 p.m. these days.

OK.  Sign me up.  Yep, that's for me, I'm doing it!

I Canned Them 'Maters

 Last week, I canned the half-bushel of tomatoes that DH had brought home from his run up north with the borrowed truck.  Did I have room in my schedule to can tomatoes?  No, not really.  But here they were, and they only stay good for so long.

So, after getting two horses worked one morning, I spent the next roughly six hours canning tomatoes all by my lonesome (DH was working in-office that day).  Would it have gone faster if I had had a helper?  Not that much.  Most of the time factor was because each canner load takes 40 (pints) to 45 (quarts) minutes to process after the canner comes to a rolling boil.  With 6 quarts and 14 pints to put up, that meant three canner loads.*

Why did I not do all the tomatoes in quart jars and cut down to two loads instead of three?  Because, with just DH and I here, there's only a few recipes I make that require an entire quart of tomatoes anymore. I would rather take an extra hour-ish to do a second canner load of pints than, throughout the coming year, have multiple times where I have a half-jar of tomatoes that is opened and needs to be incorporated into a meal in the next few days before it goes bad.  

Invested time now saves me from potentially wasting time and food later if I have opened jars of tomatoes that don't get eaten soon enough and have to be thrown out. That would waste the time I spent now canning them, plus half a jar of tomatoes.  Hence many more pints than quarts got canned.

*The rack in my canner can easily fit seven pint jars at a time.  Quart jars, sort of, if they are the narrower kind and not the fat-round type.

Haulin'

After DH picked up his newly assigned small SUV, he immediately put in a request to 'borrow' one of the fleet trucks because, as he stated on his request form he had "all ready made several plans requiring a truck (his previously assigned vehicle) for the coming week."  Thankfully, that request was granted and, while he wasn't 'given' the EV truck back, he did get to 'borrow' a one ton diesel pickup for a week.

We decided that we had to make the most of having a truck during that time period, even if it wasn't exactly all things we'd planned to do right then (if it needed doing in the next 1-3 weeks, we rewrote the schedule to be NOW).

So, on the first day he had the truck, after work DH hauled: 

• a free treadmill he had found on Craigslist over the weekend,
• a load of free oak firewood.

On the second day he hauled home another load of that free oak.

On the third day he hauled, you guessed it, a third load of that firewood.

On the fourth day, he got up early, got his work computer crunching some numbers and running a data analysis (so he was 'working') then headed up to his Mom's house (which is a 3 hour drive), where (after calling in to a work meeting and setting the computer to running another analysis) he loaded up and brought home:

• about 4 dozen 1" x 6" x 8' roughsawn pine boards
• four 1" x 12" x 8' roughsawn pine planks
• about eight 2" x 4" x 8' roughsawn pine boards
• two of our kayaks he'd left up there earlier in the summer (the ill-fated trip that resulted in a totaled blue truck)
• several milk crates holding boxes of cereal, bags of mini-muffins, a few jars of pickles, a jar of peanut butter, a box of elbow macaroni, 2 jugs of tomato juice, 3 cinnamon bundt cakes, 6 ears of corn and a giant head of cabbage that were leftover from the weekly food pantry delivery that his Mom helps distribute locally.  All of which she wanted DH to pass along to our kids and their families rather than throwing it out.
• a half-bushel of canning tomatoes he picked up from a fruit market on his way home.

On the fifth day he had the truck, he hauled a hay wagon with 68 bales of hay on it that I'd purchased from a local farmer.  After we unloaded the hay into the loft of my barn, he hauled the hay wagon back to its home a mile or so away.

On the sixth day (which was Saturday) he had the truck, he hauled three trailerloads and four truckbeds-ful of more free oak firewood.  

On the seventh day he had the truck, he hauled: 

• another free treadmill (I'm thinking there's going to be a treadmill post appearing on this blog in the next few weeks)
• a pallet of horse bedding
• lumber for the final tack room project (a shelf on each of the two 16' long walls, at about 7' high, for storing the horse-related stuff that is seasonal in nature, or just plain extra. )
• Our mower, back to DD1's house to mow their lawn because their mower died again (mower issue previously mentioned here). . . 

Phew!  It was a busy week. And rereading what I just wrote, it brings to mind The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.  Except nobody turned into a beautiful butterfly at the end.  They were just very, very tired.  And a little bit sore.  And had a bunch of stuff to put away, redistribute, can, cut/split/stack, and build.  Plus, DH had to give back the nice hefty truck and drive the smallish SUV again.

Wouldn't Ya Know. . .

 I told you about getting my Suburban back road-worthy again so that I could haul horse and chicken feed and things like that without having to arrange for DH to take me in his company-issued truck since the blue truck got totaled and I no longer had a truck to drive.  We figured that was a good solution, as I could do most of the farm related truck-type tasks in the Suburban just as I had for years before we bought the blue truck.  And any large/heavy hauling we needed to do we could use DH's work truck for--the Suburban, being rather elderly and having lived most of it's 21 years outside, was retired from trailer towing a few years ago after we were advised by the local auto mechanic that it wasn't a good idea to pull weight attached to the Suburban's rusty frame anymore. I believe the descriptive phrase he used was "Swiss cheese".

We thought we had it all figured out: Suburban to do the light trucky tasks, and the EV truck DH had been assigned to drive as his work issued vehicle for the heavier stuff.  We could get along without the blue truck just fine, and didn't need to rush into purchasing a replacement (that will be a subject of a future post, give me a few months and perhaps I'll get it written).

And then, wouldn't ya know, the day after we picked the Suburban up from the shop where it had gotten it's brake issues repaired, DH got an email from the company vehicle department at work.  It was time to turn the EV truck in and get his next assigned vehicle.

Which isn't an unusual thing.  In the past four years, since DH got the promotion that qualified him to get a company assigned vehicle for personal use, he has had each one for six to nine or ten months and then they call that vehicle back (where it gets sold as company used) and issue him a brand new one.  The EV truck came to him late last fall, so really, we were kind of expecting it to get called back soon.

What we hadn't expected, was the new vehicle to be what it is.  DH has been assigned one car, two medium-largish SUVs, and two trucks of varying size so far.  We figured he would get something in that category again: something we could haul stuff and tow a trailer with.

Uh, yeah.  This time, not so much.  He got another SUV, but this one is the smallest one yet (not counting the car, as you can't really tow anything with a car).  Ironically it is the same model of SUV that both Honorary Son and DD2 have as their daily drivers.  Works great for them who don't live on farms or haul anything other than passengers, groceries, and occasionally a small piece of furniture.  Will not work well at all for hauling anything big/heavy and shape-shifting like 50 pound grain bags--I know this because I have tried and the cargo space is so small you have to load the bags facing one particular direction and stack them because you can't fit two side by side. Grain bags don't necessarily stack well; they have a tendency to slide on each other and also come flopping out at you as soon as the rear (cargo) door is lifted. This size SUV also doesn't have the guts (or the labeling) to haul our 16 foot trailer with anything on it--like, say a pallet of baled horse bedding, or even two dozen bales of horse bedding. . .  We know this, because we've known this make of vehicle for the past seven years.

Well, poop.  Guess we aren't getting along without a real truck afterall.  Although, on occassion, it is possible for DH to borrow a truck from the fleet at work, provided they aren't all busy/assigned elsewhere on the dates he wishes to borrow one.  Which is how he was able to haul home all that free oak last week.  He requested to borrow a pickup for a week.  And we hauled all kinds of stuff with it.  Which made for a busy week indeed.

Free Oak Firewood? Yes, Please!

 Last week was a busy week in many ways.  One of which was DH hauling a truckload of aged oak firewood home after work three days out of five.  Those three days were his scheduled in-office days, and this free firewood just happened to be less than five miles from where DH reports to work.  A good friend of his who lives nearby alerted him about a neighbor who'd had multiple large oak trees cut down about three years ago and recently had come to the conclusion that he (neighbor) wasn't going to use that wood after all.  Now he just wanted it gone.

Now, oak has high BTU value, which makes it very desirable for using to heat our home in the winter.  As an efficient burning wood, it also has a high price if you were to need to buy it.  So of course free oak is something worth our while to go get if it's a reasonable distance away, or, in this case, pretty much on DH's way home from work.

In addition to those three truck-beds-ful, he also spent about 12 hours on Saturday running back and forth with our 16 foot trailer getting the longer and/or larger diameter stuff that wouldn't fit into the bed of the truck.  Unfortunately Saturday was a day of off and on deluge rain and thunderstorms, which meant sometimes he had to stop loading and take shelter for half an hour or so waiting for the rain to pass before continuing to load wood.

Still, he managed to bring home three trailers full plus fill the truck bed each time.  His friend came along to help unload at this little place here, and so when DH took the friend back home shortly before dark they unhooked and left the trailer here and just filled the truck bed for a fourth load.

That's a lotta wood.  The photo above is just the three trailer's worth and two truck-beds-ful.  It doesn't show the truckloads from earlier in the week (or later on Saturday) that were unloaded into a different spot closer to where we stack our split wood for the winter.

The picture below shows the truck loads from earlier in the week.  That was smaller stuff that mostly won't need to be split, just stacked.  Or maybe cut into the correct length and then stacked, as some are branches as thick as your arm but six or eight foot long.

DH estimates it should be almost the entire winter's worth.  We'll see. . . once it's split and stacked and we can see how many rows we get on the base made of pallets he and Toad prepped the weekend before, we'll have a better idea of how many heating months of wood he just got for the cost of fuel in the truck and his time.