September 8^th, 2002:

It was cool, overcast and windy this morning, though the thermometer only got down to about 11° overnight. There was two tenths of an inch in our rain gauge, making a total of an inch and a half since August 31^st. The overcast started breaking up by noon and the afternoon was quite pleasant. By evening the sky was clear.

We went to Hudson Bay this morning, to help Mike and Marg harvest their crabapples and chokecherries. Doreen took her two-dollar juice extractor and they managed to put up lots of crabapple juice, and to make plenty of chokecherry jelly and syrup (If it sets, it’s jelly; if not, it’s syrup). Mike had the crabapples picked by the time we got there, then we went to work on the chokecherries. When we quit picking, at suppertime, we had pretty well cleaned out their yard, and after making all the jellies Marg wanted, had about ten gallons of berries to bring home. Doreen will extract the juice from them in the next day or so.

We thought the chokecherry picking was great last year, but this year was even better. There are a couple of tall bushes in their yard, but hundreds of short ones. Some, only a couple of feet tall and maybe an eighth of an inch through the stem, would be laying flat with their berry loads. We just lift them over the edge of a pail and strip them. It’s like milking cows, only easier. Even Meeka, the World’s Fastest Dog, got into the act, stripping berries from the lower branches. She wouldn’t put any in the pail, though.

On our way home, on the Mistatim Grid, we paced a young fox at about 42 kph for a hundred yards or more. It was running down the left shoulder; kept looking off to its left but wouldn’t cut through the tall weeds until it came to an approach. I was afraid to pass it; often one gets even with them and they dart in front of the car.

There was a small elk dead on the shoulder of the road this morning. We didn’t stop to check, but I expect a vehicle hit it. Even a small one could make quite a mess of the front of a car. We saw a few bunches of deer on our way home, but they stayed put.

Anybody need some grain cars? There are lots of them on the rail line west of Hudson Bay.

I rode my bike around Lakeshore on Tuesday morning; there were only four sites occupied and no signs of life. In one of the empty sites, there was a brightly painted rock. Somebody left more than footprints! At the peninsula, there was a family playing on the playground equipment and otherwise not a soul in sight. There were a few boats left in the Marina, but it sure looked empty.

We spent an hour or so in Lakeshore picking cranberries; I guess all that we still have to pick are cranberries from our own plantation.

Do you remember me telling you about an apple tree down by the Service Center that the porcupines had wrecked? It looks like Brian cut it down to a bare trunk about six feet tall with a fork at the top, but there has been a lot of new growth at the top of the trunk. I’ll bet within a year it is a respectable apple tree again!