Time gets away from me and all of a sudden it has been days since I last talked to you.

Night before last the guests staying at the cabin next door to my house looked out the window at 11 pm when the yard light came on, and there was a big mountain lion sitting on the driveway looking at him. Although it probably hunts the deer around here, these people have small children, and their one-year-old can really scurry around, so I'm thinking the big cat was hoping someone may have forgotten to take the baby inside for the night. It doesn't hurt to check on something like that because you never know.

When the dad told me about it the next day we decided they had better not take the kids hiking up the draw behind the cabins.

I have been busy working on historical crop acreages for our farm. Around here where every drop of water belongs to somebody, sometimes people hire a water engineer to determine how much water went onto a property via a ditch and how much went off of it by way of runoff back into the ditch minus the amount used up by the crops grown on the land each year. As you can imagine, different crops - beets, beans, barley, and corn - take up different amounts of water.

I am able to reconstruct how much of each crop was grown on the farm by looking at the old tax records where we kept invoices for fertilizing the fields, crop dusting the fields, and harvesting the crops going back to 1990.

There are some gaps so some of it is by guess and inference. For example I found an invoice for bean seed, but never found out how many acres were planted. There was a field of beans the next year, so I asked my tenant farmer if by chance it was customary to buy next year's bean seed in June of this year. He gave me such a look! It was scorn mixed with pity that someone could be so naive.

In another instance I asked him why they were fertilizing corn stalks in November and he told me that for a few years farmers were having a chemical sprayed on the corn stalks so they would break down faster, but it was a fad, and nobody does it any more. He wasn't our farmer at that time, and he said he bales up the cornstalks and sells them to a dairy for cow bedding, and discs the dirt deeper to work what is left into the soil. I caught a hint that he doesn't think much of some of the techniques employed by the previous farmers.

So now I know a little bit more about farming than I did a month ago, and I haven't had much time for blogging.