Phew, it was a rather hot week here in Willamina, Orgeon! 
Tempeartures reached 95F here around the RV on Tuesday but Wednesday was even warmer at 97F!

  

After almost 3 weeks of no rain whatsoever the fields and meadows are all dried up,  and although my considerate neighbors try to slow down as much as possible when they pass me on our dirt-road, there's no avoiding the dust their cars throw up ...  everything is covered in the stuff, even the inside of the RV.

I walked down to the river, which has dropped considerably. 
It's very shallow and those rocks you see in the picture up above are normally completely covered in winter.

It's actually a nice cool spot to sit down for a while with your feet in the water. 
I'll keep it in mind for a hot day, of which I'm sure we're going to have some more before the summer is over.

At the moment the river bank is still covered in Sweet peas and Thistles and the sound of bees buzzing around the last flowers is all you hear ..

                

They've been busy all Spring, the bees I mean, since all our fruit trees are positively loaded with fruit!
Since they are never trimmed, some branches of the old apple and pear trees are bending that far over under their load that I'm starting to worry they might break.

        

And look at those little plums! I thought they were 'ornamental' but it seems they're actually edible!

The first of the blackberries alongside our road, those that are having the most sun, are starting to ripen as well!

 

 

I picked a few (they are nice and sweet!) together with a couple of left-over Snow-peas and the first of my cherry tomatoes. Yeaee, I've got tomatoes!

The three deer, that come by every now and than to graze on the weeds and grasses in  between the Christmas trees, showed up a couple of evenings this week.
This looks like a young buck, he's growing his antlers .. 
                                       

                           

He's always accompanied by these two pretty girls .. his first harem?

                                                                                                                                                          

On Friday morning we hit the yearly 'City garage sale' in Willamina.

We didn't 'need' anything but it's a fun day to cruise all over town, talk to lots of people and find those unique, affordable items you didn't know you were missing ... or find things for a bargain that you would like to have but don't want to spend much money on.
Besides, we like to re-use/re-cycle!

We came home with a dress ($1, very flower power-y!), a brand-new wind-shield wiper ($2), a walking measuring wheel ($2, handy for James 'in the field' since his laser is occasionally not working), an easy-up canopy ($25, our old one went kaput) and an ancient video (1984), Murphy's romance .. of all things .. (for free)!

          

(There's a story to that video though, James brother lives in the town (Florence, AZ) in which' hardware-store some parts were filmed. We actually were in that store a few times when we worked on his house and since I've never seen it James thought is was fun to watch it)

But our greatest 'catch' was this .. a generator!

We'd talked about it many times, how nice it would be to have one in case of power outages, but we never really had the budget to get one. Those suckers are anywhere between $600 to $1000, at least the one we wanted, as in one big enough to keep most of our 'essentials' going.
This particular one costs $699 new and we got it for ... drum-roll .. $225!
It's used of course, but it works and is in good condition. Score!

What else did we do? O yeah, we finally washed and treated the roof and gave the whole RV a, much needed, scrub-down. 

 

 

 

We try to do this at least twice a year (the cleaning at least, the roof treatment only once a year) but it got away from us a little and we started to look a bit rough around the edges. 
Not quite looking like 'trailer-trash' but not very 'posh' either. 

 

                                                             

James did most of the scrubbing and coating and I the washing and rinsing ...
Teamwork!

My ankle is slowly getting back to almost normal but now my neck and back are misbehaving, so I didn't want to do anything too crazy .. sigh .. always something!

It didn't stop me from making another bread though. 
This whole wheat one (actually only 1/4 but most whole wheats are like that, a 100 % wheat flour bread would be inedible) rose beautifully. 
The slices are huge!

  

 
OK. Another week in the books, let's see what the next one will bring shall we..