The good, the bad, and the no-it-can't-be-so!

A beautiful August day up here in the land by the Lake!  We spent it doing laundry from our guests from the last couple of days and then mowing everything so it would be cleaned up for the next guests tomorrow night.  We also went downtown to vote in the primary and check in with friends in the Gallery.  A great day!

Tonight Leann wanted to do some work on the trails up behind our house, and that led to other jobs up there and, of course, pictures.  So, first the good:

I know I shouldn't count our apples before they are ripe, but, boy, do they look nice this year!  And these are the ones up in the meadow in our "wild" orchard!  They are big and plentiful and relatively free of blemishes...compared to most years.  We'll see how things look in October!

Now for the bad...  Remember tent caterpillars or army worms? Those creepy green caterpillars that munch their way through all the leaves on the trees?  Well, last spring there was some threat that they would be coming through this summer.  Then later that threat was changed to maybe next year.  And then we started seeing some tents up in our apple trees. 

So tonight we drove our trails looking for these tents, cutting them out, and then later torching them in the fire pit.  We found 7 or 8, and we know it's a drop in the tent caterpillar bucket, but we feel better and the ugly is gone!

(Yuck!)

And now for the "no-it-can't-be-so" picture.  Below is a maple tree with leaves changing color.  Maybe the tree is ailing somehow for it to be changing so early.  Or maybe these early morning temps in the 40's are sending some message to the trees.  But, no, it can't be so!

And one more from the Lake tonight.  The clouds looked ominous to the north so we drove down to see how it looked over the Lake.  What we found were a series of rain showers drifting across to the north east.  Nothing much landed by our house though.  More watering tomorrow, I gues!