Saturday Morning Delights

We had two errands in Lawrence this morning. Just as we got in the car to leave home a torrent of rain began to fall. Puddles formed almost instantly. Rain on the car roof created a great din. We had been hoping for this. It was thrilling.

Both errands were one-and-only chance situations. Off we went.

Our first stop was at Fabian’s Seafood truck in a car wash parking lot selling fresh Gulf shrimp. This was Fabian’s last visit to Lawrence until next spring. Dennis had to stand in line.

 Shrimp safely iced in a cooler, we proceeded to the next event: electronics recycling in the Free State high school parking lot. It was an awesome scene. Cars drove up, the workers unloaded the electronics and piled them on wooden palates.

The forklift guy then moved palates into two huge trailers. All of this equipment will travel only 35 miles to Topeka where it will be disassembled and sorted for reuse. Little children in India will not be involved.

 We were very happy to unload yet another collection of useless objects, moving our ridding out process another step forward.

As is his habit, Dennis took the back roads home. Our first stop was at the Clinton Lake dam, which was formed by damming the Wakarusa River. This lake is the source of our rural water and water for the city of Lawrence. An astonishing number of coots – we estimated hundreds of thousands – dotted the lake and its shoreline. Click the photo to see more coots, which appear in this photo as tiny black dots.

Just after we turned off the blacktop we came upon a recently-harvested soybean field in the Wakarusa Valley. A murder of crows was gleaning the remains.

Now our road turned east and wound along the middle of a hillside. The view was long, with fields being prepared for the planting of winter wheat in the foreground.

Eastern Kansas terrain is only partially prairie. Our neck of the woods is hilly with farms in the valleys between. Although someone logged out all the old oaks from our own woods, the woods along these nearby roadsides have many old oak trees. This particular hillside sports some that have turned deep mahogany.

But oaks turn countless shades ranging from mahogany to bright red or yellow. These and their neighbors were brilliant even in the misty environment.

We made one more stop to check on the progress of the vast field of ashy sunflowers where we intend to harvest seeds to plant in our own pasture. The petals have dropped, but the stalks (brown things) haven’t yet dropped, indicating that the seeds are not mature. We will go back in ten days or so to check again.

This afternoon another storm moved through, leaving half an inch of rain in addition to the inch that fell this morning, and another big cell is on its way now. 

What a fine day this has been: Gulf shrimp, ridding out, autumn colors and rain, beautiful rain.