And we're baaaaack!
These are not my pictures but it does look like that over here at the moment in the San Tan Valley! Snow!
Well no, just kiddin' of course .. the cotton is ready and is being harvested.
So this is how they harvest:

And
this is how they move the bales.
The bale truck comes from the cotton gin and
loads up the bales from the fields. The truck has a chain-drive track at the bottom of the cargo-area, the truck backs up to
the bale and the track starts pulling the bale in the truck, while the
truck keeps backing up slowly until it's all in there.

I would have raided some of the picked fields for those left-overs, but I have more than enough cotton, which I picked a couple of years ago when we were in Arizona and more recently in Georgia, where we were stranded for a couple of days, waiting for a new landing-leg for the RV.
OK, what else? Of course, there was another Thanksgiving:
We 'did' our usual routine, a nice little breakfast, coffee with that delicious pumpkin-mousse pie we discovered at Walmart last year (like James said 'so good, I can eat the whole thing'!), while watching the Macy's Parade ...
Of course that parade was a weird one this year due to Covid-19! You have to give it to the organizers who somehow managed to put something together that resembled the 'real' thing.
But
the floats did not tour the streets, they pretty much started right at
Macy's, there were no spectators anywhere and the whole 'show' was
filmed over two days and all in advance, since everyone had to maintain
proper distances which took much longer.
See, these are the Rockets, right in front of Macy's, where normally there would be a grand-stand and masses of people lining the street. Nobody in sight this time ..
Like I said, they did an incredible job to make this much
beloved tradition happen, despite everything, but it was very weird and
made me a little emotional. What utterly strange times we live in ..!
Of course there was food, I had prepared a lot beforehand and it was all very good! We didn't have turkey by the way, I'm not such a big fan of it, so we changed it out for chicken quarters, but the rest was pretty standard: overnight salad, stuffing, gravy and cranberry sauce.
Well, we did for the walk .. we're not totally off the deep end yet!
I guess it's what an Arizona Fall looks like!
We can still have coffee on the back porch .. which is often too hot actually!
Or on the front-porch, which has shade almost all day long .. much better!
Did we do any 'work'? Well, yeah, we have to pay our dues somehow, don't we? (free rent, free utilities, gas for the truck and pay .. yeah, it's another tough deal we got!)
So what did we, sorry, HE, do? He installed a Bidet in the master bathroom:
The two high-school boys showed up on Tuesday and first removed some overgrown rosemary bushes ..
While Eric and Marilyn, the people that wanted the pavers which had to be removed from the backyard (where the pool is going in), came over all the way from Mesa, and started to pull them up.
It took them 3 days to move them all to the front of the house, and another one to get them all out of there.
Although we'd hoped to get some money for them, we ended up letting them go for free (nobody wanted to pay for them). But of course we we're very happy we didn't have to do all that work ourselves!
OK. Where were we? Oh, yeah, the kids. Next, they started tiling the living-room wall:
They are inexperienced, but willing to learn, so James is teaching them as-they-go/do ..
Almost there! |
And while parts of that were drying , they also started on the kitchen island, that was getting the same tile ..
They finished on Saturday and helped to hang the ginormous TV back on the wall:
Beautiful!
Cool! Several more projects done, up to the next! Which will be demolishing the bench in the back-yard and getting rid of some of the trash, like the rosemary.
In the meantime, Doug and Brenda will be back this coming Wednesday (late in the evening), and they will be staying for a couple of days (leaving early on Sunday morning). A lot has been done since they left only a couple of weeks ago, I imagine it will be fun for them to see the progress!
Also, now thanksgiving is over, its time to start decorating for Christmas! Let the fun begin! ♫ Deck the halls with bows of holly, tral-la-la-la! ♬