Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair . . . The bigger tumbler obligingly disgorged more fibrous compost from its bountiful locks. I could almost swear that it was growing fiber from the amount there seems to be in every load, like coat hangers breeding in the dark of a closet. It is probably due to the softer stuff breaking down and leaving the fiber slowly accumulating. I may not get rid of it as long as we have monkey grass and the neighbor's pine trees shedding needles onto our yard. They are hard to chop up into little bits and it doesn't look like that much among the rest of the mulched yard waste.

I'm still dealing with the dreaded compost constipation from the balled up newspaper strips. My brother is laughing unsympathetically about it and buying lots of produce to leave lots of pulp and trimmings to feed the tumblers' microorganisms. He thinks it is hysterical that I'm pampering the two tumblers more than I'm pampering the cats.

The cats don't think it is quite so funny. Mischief let me know about that in no uncertain terms today as I sat beside the newspaper pile tearing the paper into rough squares instead of long strips. I've gotten heartily tired of tearing apart messy balls of fiber and newspaper, but the prices of paper shredders that would cut it into confetti are very high.

Since the mulching mower doesn't like shredding paper and I don't like raking up blizzards of scattered paper chunks, I decided to try tearing up a load of paper by hand. I spent much of the day spinning moistened squares into the tumblers along with more fertilizer and trimmings, with the shredder prices looking more reasonable with every bag that went into the tumblers' hungry maws.

The baby's load is nearly done, so I'm hoping that this will be the last time that I fill it up. It is pleasantly lemon-scented from the peels of a three pound bag of lemons that I juiced by hand to make a pitcher of lemonade concentrate for Steve. I still have two more bags of lemons to go before I finish that contribution to composter health.

Rapunzel will be needing lots more paper and trimmings over the next two weeks though, and I'm not sure how Mischief will take that. He kept swatting at me with his claws out to get my attention, especially after I put some chicken legs in the oven to bake for supper. It was bad enough that I was feeding the tumbler instead of him, but the odor of roasting chicken sharpened his ire as much as his claws. He finally went out in disgust and snoozed on the terrace until the cooked, cooled chicken was ready to feed to His Feline Majesty.

The tomato plants are doing wonderfully well in the first batch of compost mulch. They have lots of blooms and I am looking eagerly for the first tomatoes to set. The afternoon highs are a little hot for tomatoes to set well, but it is somewhat cooler at last. It is early to anticipate fall yet, but the planting season is coming to a close with just a few weeks left to get warm weather crops in the ground. There will be more time for the cool weather stuff, though.

I picked some snap beans and mustard greens from the first plantings. That left more room for the melon plants, which got more compost added to their little mulch heaps since they did respond well to the boost. They have a few flowers, but still no melons yet. The winter squash and pumpkin vines are flowering, too.

Our city has been rejoicing that the utility company finally got the power back on throughout the city. It was quite a long haul for many people, and the workers did an outstanding job in restoring power so quickly. Not so welcome news was the announcement that there would be a request for a rate increase to cover the costs, over thirty million dollars. We're keeping an eye on every front headed this way, and people aren't griping about the weathermen interrupting the sports quite as much these days.

Now we're waiting to see how long it will take to clean up the piles of fallen trees and branches along the curbs. The city is so overwhelmed that it is way beyond what can be mulched for city properties and for a mulch giveaway. It is actually being burned to get rid of it once it is hauled to the disposal site, although the city won't let its citizens have little fires in their yards to get rid of it there. It would cause too much air pollution and/or fire hazards, although that didn't seem to be a problem for people barbecuing their meals for days across the city while we waited to get our power back on. As long as people used charcoal or gas instead of those handy tree limbs, the city air quality enforcement personnel overlooked that.