It is Tuesday...........

On Sunday, late afternoon, this strange orb showed up in the sky.  We had not had sunshine for days.  Rain or cloudy foggy days was the norm for way too long.

While working with the harvesting of apples I found company with two monarch butterflies.  I share on my photo a day blog that I had two on one flower eating at the same time but I didn't get a shot of it.  I did get a couple of perfect shots of one of them but I chose to share all the not so usual compositions.  This one was opening and closing its wings while he was eating and this is the shot of what it looked like in transition.

My first efforts are to pick up what apples that have fallen from the tree the past few days.  When they land on the ground they bruise and the ants immediately find places to start chewing on them.  If I get them before the ants and slugs do I have good apples.  My rain water in the wheel barrel has become my stage one of cleaning up the apples from dirt they pick up when they land on the ground. It is easier to clean them here than to pile them into the kitchen sink to clean them up.  When you give away apples you can't have chunks of soil on the apples.

The one tree with the most apples is a yellow cooking apple.  They seem to be still green but they turn yellow after they are picked. The red apple is from another of my three trees.  One of the other trees has always matured faster than any of them and the apples seem to be on the gorund before I ever get a chance to pick them off the tree. 

 The red apples from that tree look like this.  It took a lot of hand sorting from the ground to get this many.  My one other tree that has red apples also is later in development and I think I can get a step ladder and pick them before they fall off the tree. I ended up with three bags of apples from my efforts yeasterday.  I may return Wednesday to repeat the process.  I have yet to get hit by an apple from falling off the tree but I am hearing them drop while I am out there working.

 Lost tools are found.  When I was transferring branches in the wheel barrel to the orchard area from the side yard, I lay my tools in with the brush.   A month later I finally found them next to a pile of brush that I plan on burning.  They were muddy and probably will need to be oiled up for the next time I use them. I looked down to pick up apples and there they were as all the leaves had fallen off the cut branches.

Work is in progress for the making of the high school senior composite. It took me two months to get the 50 photos that I needed.  An instructor was busy coaching baseball for the school and also going to South America to coach a bunch of American boys in a game.  The student asked to get them together flaked out on me.  I usually get this done when school is out in May.  I finally got an address on the web of the  yearbook and I was able to drag them off of that site without assistance from either of them.

I have to size all the photos to be the exact same size.  I then paste them onto a yellow background.  Finally I drag that onto a green frame.  Everything gets flattened out as one and my wife get the job to print them all out.  It will be a couple of days of computer work and then the manual work of getting them onto a mat panel for exhibition.

The final photo for today is a shot of the funny looking zinnia.  I guess it is a genetic fluke as it looks like it will never open.  It reminds me of a cabbage shaped flower.  The monarch has to dig really deep to get into it for nectar. 

Sunny and hotter today.  We have returned to true summer temperatures and true Iowa humidity.  Both are high in value and it requires an air conditioner to be on night and day.

I appreciate you stopping by to read or just view my blog.  I hope all is well with you and your families.