Thanksgiving Holiday at the Bertasso's

Starting tomorrow, we will be traveling to Tennessee and Indiana.  While our original plan during our Thanksgiving Week trip was to start furnishing our new home in Tennessee and to move our pop up trailer inside the carport (presently on a neighbor's property), it appears that neither will happen on this trip.  The house is not quite finished yet, and we cannot legally enter it until it is finished and signed off.  While in the vicinity, we will take time to meet a few key people, winterize our pop up, and that's about it. 

So, the main thrust of our trip has changed to visiting Julie, Matt, and our grandchildren further up the road in Plymouth, Indiana.  We are excited to be able to be with family during Thanksgiving.  It's been a while since we have had that experience.

Country living in Houma

It seems strange that in a mid-sized city, we would be able to wake up to views such as these as these pictures depict.  We are fortunate to be able to live in a city, yet have the amount of open space that we have. 

Sugar soared to a 30-year high today

On Tuesday, raw sugar futures topped 30.6 cents a pound, rising to their highest point since 1980, when prices jumped to nearly 45 cents.  To get a sense of the dramatic increase in world sugar price, I have included a link to a more recent (post-2002) trend line. A sharper than expected drop in Brazil's estimated production is largely responsible for this spike. India's decision to withhold their domestically produced sugar from the international market is another other factor supporting the world price of sugar.  Here in Louisiana, the harvest season is well underway, and harvest conditions have been good to this point.  Tonnage is down but sugar content in the stalk has been well above average, so the growers are getting an average amount of sugar to the mills even though they are harvesting less cane.  Profitability is better than it has been for a long time.  I'm very happy for the growers and millers alike.

Lexus going sugarcane green

Toyota's Lexus CT200h small luxury hybrid will be the first car outfitted with a sugarcane-based product called bio-PET, also referred to as Ecological Plastic.  The product's initial use will be in the luggage compartment liner.  However, the material may also be used in the manufacture of other interior plastic-based parts of the car, including seats and carpet.  Check out the the story at crispgreen.com.

Sweet potatoes harvested and fall garden planted

With almost no work, except for the digging at the end, we harvested a wheelbarrow load of sweet potatoes this year...getting an even bigger harvest than last year.  We don't even know what to do with them, except to give a good portion of them away .














This past weekend we planted our annual fall-winter garden which includes carrots, radishes, broccoli, cauliflower*, cabbage*, loose-leaf lettuce*, head lettuce*, beets, swiss chard, bush beans, spinach, and onions*.  Starred (*) veggies were transplanted.  The bush beans are experimental for us this year as a winter crop.  The rest are veggies that I know first-hand will thrive in southern Louisiana's fall and winter.  I would like to think that this will be the last garden crop I will plant in Louisiana, but I'm not betting very heavily on it.

Tennessee home now on site

Judy and I traveled to Tennessee over the Labor Day holiday to see our modular home get placed on the foundation prepared for it at our home site.  We actually traveled to Tennessee on Wednesday (Sep 1) witnessed the placement of the home in halves on the foundation on Thursday (Sep 2), hung around over the weekend, and returned on Labor Day (Sep 6).

We camped with our popup camper at the Shellmount Campground near the dam at Nickajack Lake, about 40 minutes from our Tennessee home.  We had previously camped at Nickajack Lake, but at a different campsite. Nickajack Lake is one of several "lakes" created by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) on the Tennessee River that weaves through Tennessee, dipping into Alabama just beyond where we camped.  Being the Labor Day weekend, there was a lot of boating activity on the lake while we were there.

Needless to say, we were very excited to see our new home become a reality.  Judy took a great sequence of pictures and a video of the activity and posted it online.  Additional work on it is being done through September, with a septic system; a big front porch running the full length of the house; a car port and a storage room behind the car port to be built; and electricity, water, and plumbing to be hooked up.  While the home was being placed on its foundation and subsequently bolted to the foundation, and the roof was being finished (part of the process of merging the two halves of the building together) and shingles were being laid down to finish up on the roof on Thursday afternoon and Friday, I took advantage of this time to clear the brush and smaller trees from the front of the house and Judy and I made some decisions as to which larger trees we wanted to keep, in order to "maintain a house in the woods" appearance while affording ourselves a decent view of this beautiful area.  Now the big question is, "How soon will be be able to sell our existing home so that we have the option of retiring and moving into our new home?"  The answer to this question is a big unknown.

Remembering Katrina five years later

In one of my earliest posts after starting this blog, I promised to post some images I took while assisting in the cleanup in the New Orleans area.  I had at least six opportunities to go into New Orleans to assist in removing fallen trees, gutting ruined homes, and cleaning up debris in neighborhoods, following the big hurricane.  Some of the visual images of the devastation will stay with me for a lifetime.  Five months after Katrina, members of  our stake, including myself, assisted in a cleanup project in Chalmette (east side of New Orleans).  One month later, members of our ward, including myself, were involved in gutting Dennis and Michelle Pixton's home Chalmette.  They lost everything and moved to Houma to restart their life.  I have included a brief PowerPoint presentation of these experiences.

Chalmette

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Pixton home

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