Another lovely day.  Tomorrow will bring a change in the weather and some much needed rain, according to the forecast.  Along with it lots of wind, and that may not be so good, but we'll take what we can get at this point.

Jack LaGue commented the other day that someone told him bee hives are high in the trees this year and that means lots of snow this winter.  That isn't exactly based on science, I'd guess, but on the other hand, maybe the bees know something we don't.  I haven't happened to see a lot of bee hives this year - we've had any number around our place in the past, and often see remnants of them after the bears have pulled them down.  One year we had one on one of the light poles down by our mailbox.  It was huge.  That same year there was one in a tree by Morgan's driveway, but that one disappeared sometime that fall - probably visited by a bear - but the one on the electric light pole remained into the winter, and was torn apart by the wind and weather.

We're thinking of our friend, Homer Fitts tonight - he's having knee surgery tomorrow.  Of course, he's looking forward to being pain free, but nobody likes to be facing surgery and the uncomfortable healing process.  Another friend, Walt Ackermann, who used to own Harry's Hardware in Cabot, recently had knee surgery, too.  I haven't heard how he's doing, but expect he's coming along well.

I've been working on filing newspaper clippings today.  I came across a folder with a pile of obituaries for Joe's Pond folks this weekend while searching for something else, and decided it was a good time to put them in order.  I have one very thick folder of clippings dating through 2006; now I have a second one started to take care of 2007 to present.  I had put in all the clippings Homer had given me a little while ago, but had forgotten about the obits.  I didn't actually begin to save them until after I'd been secretary for a year or so - then it occurred to me someone might be interested in years to come.  Obituaries are so informative - we use them all the time at the historical society to figure out family lines.  They usually list relatives and sometimes where those people live.  Genealogists treasure them.  Now I'm up to date with them, I will need to number the pages and make an index to make it easy to locate them, should anyone want to.

I like to sort of take weekends off from the historical society stuff and normally try to do something entirely different; however, it didn't work this weekend.  In the first place, putting the obits in order in albums is just more of the same, really, but in addition it took longer than I'd expected, and I worked most of both Sunday and today on it.  Once into the job, I wanted to finish it before moving on to something different.

When I was having my morning coffee, we spotted a very nice partridge under our apple trees.  There are no apples left - the deer got all of them from the regular tree, but there are the little berry-like ones on the ornamentals, and lots still in the crabapple tree.  The partridge seemed to be content eating bugs in the grass - or perhaps was picking up some of those tiny seeds from the ornamental apple.  

A few years ago we planted some hybrid hazel nut trees from Nature Conservancy or some such organization.  They were supposed to be very productive and I was looking forward to harvesting some nuts eventually.  They didn't perform as expected, and for the first three or four years I kept moving them, trying to find some place they would thrive.  I think I originally had seven or eight small bushes.  A few didn't make it through the winters, dying off one by one, and over time, I transplanted and then transplanted again those that survived.  I now have perhaps four that are healthy - two of them on our lower lawn, looking particularly robust - and about a week ago Fred told me they were loaded with nuts.  Yesterday we were taking a break and "walking the lot" as we sometimes do, just to check for trees that have blown down or to see if anything needs attention, and when we got to the hazelnuts, there wasn't a single nut on them.  The squirrels have apparently picked every last one.  It's like previous years when our grapes produced a good crop - the birds always get them the moment they turn sweet and I'm just a little too late.