Of Nebraska's Earth and Sky

This is a really high falutin' title for a very simple blog, but it came to me as I was laying in the back pasture at 4:45 this morning watching the Perseid Meteor Shower. I suppose grand thoughts like that tend to come during quiet moments of speculation while witnessing things of great beauty.

I really didn't want to get out of bed when the alarm went off at 4:30 this morning. I know the weather service said the best time to view the shower would have been from 4am to 5am, but I figured I could only take so many meteors anyway, and a half hour would be plenty.

I did get to see a lot of shooting stars. The picture below naturally doesn't have any shooting stars in it, because they just wouldn't cooperate and shoot across the sky as I was taking a picture. You get what you get.

And now to the earth part. One of the dubious pleasures of living in Nebraska is the weather. As people in most rural areas say "if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes and it will change." That's the case here. We have days of beautiful sunshine, cool clear nights, soft nurturing rains, and then we have the wind, the heat, the hail, lightning, tornados, blizzards and everything else that makes it "interesting"

This is our week to begin dealing with the most recent hail storm. Actually it is two hail storms, but since we didn't make any repairs between the first and second, we get two repairs for the price of one.

We're starting off small, reroofing the two small garages whose roofs were totaled. The Mister tackled one on Monday, and I stayed home Tuesday morning to pitch in. 

My original intent was to only participate in the beer drinking portion of reroofing, but apparently it is sort of a pay to play type proposition. If I want to swap stories and drink beer, then I first have to participate in the story generation, ergo there I am up on the roof.

The lifesaver in the whole operation is our young neighbor. He has the energy and stamina to work like a demon in the morning tearing off a roof, then go to work at 3:00 to 11:00 on the railroad - two days in a row!

It is actually a win-win for both of us. The young man is a car-restorer extraordinaire, and he has more cars than he has safe places to store them. With all of our young people away at college or otherwise out on their own, we have garages in abundance, they just needed new roofs. He helps reroof, and he gets a place to store his cars.  Wonder which one it will be? The 1967 Mustang, 1968 Mustang, 2010 Camaro, 1950 Ford? Lots of choices.

That's the state of things in my little corner of the Nebraska Outback.

Thanks for stopping by. The coffee is always on.