It Happened
Here I go again with the old, “be careful what you wish for” line of thinking. I was hoping that our new dog, Delilah, would eventually turn out to be good at controlling the populations of critters around here; or at the least, discouraging them from being a nuisance.
Late on Saturday, to our surprise, she landed her first kill. She found a little bunny buried deep in tall grass, and sat at that spot for most of the evening. As daylight faded into darkness, we began to wonder what was going on out there. It appears she felt no compulsion to need to eat it.
The next morning, after Cyndie let Delilah outside, she returned to the front door, after a brief period of free time, with the still-intact, yet definitely dead, rabbit. She was carrying around her little trophy like it was a precious new play toy.
Eeew.
Grand Day
It was a beautiful summer day yesterday for us to showcase our place for friends. Delilah got loads of attention, and was a charm the whole day. I walked our trails several times, guiding tours. I noshed and nibbled all afternoon, to my heart’s delight. Unfortunately, I didn’t pull the camera out more than once or twice, because I was so occupied with having a wonderful time that I kept forgetting to capture all the fun in pictures. Here’s a collage that samples some of the atmosphere of our grand day.
Having Company
Our many friends, coworkers, and acquaintances have been listening to us gush about our new place throughout the 10-months that we’ve been here, and only a portion of them have been able to make the trip out for a visit. For most of those who did, it was back in snowy December when we hosted an initial open house.
Cyndie and I have long hoped to host another event to welcome visitors, initially targeting June, envisioning live music in the barn, and combining celebrations of multiple family birthdays which fall during the month. That event didn’t happen. Another month slipped by, and we weren’t able to pull anything off. By August, I started to worry that, unless we just picked a day and did it, we would completely miss the summer opportunity to invite people to come enjoy a first-hand experience of this place.
A couple of weeks ago I convinced Cyndie to let me choose today’s date for a subdued “open house” event that wouldn’t require a lot of preparation from us. Then I sent out a few email invitations, mostly to folks who haven’t been here yet,
Initially, many of the responses reported conflicts, which didn’t surprise me at all. Now that the date is upon us, we are thrilled to find that more people than we expected have responded that they are intending to come. Of course, Cyndie and I can’t help but want to try to tidy things up a bit before visitors arrive, so that feeling of a “subdued” event is fading fast. I am getting the feeling that it could be a real wing-ding of a day.
There are just two things missing from the vision Cyndie had in mind for the June version of our party: a live band playing tunes, and horses in the paddocks, but I don’t think that will be a problem.
As a matter of fact, it presents an opportunity to invite them back again at another time, when things are in full swing around here.
Critter Controllers
Back in October of last year, when we arrived as new owners of this property and home, we immediately discovered that mice and moles appeared to be all too comfortable here. The mice inspired our energies toward getting a couple of cats as house mates. Mozyr was to be our big mouser, based on his incredibly intelligent and athletic showing-off performance during our visit to the feline rescue shelter.
Pequenita is just a wee little thing, but proved to be quite the go-getter and primary instigator for affection and initiator of conflict.
Neither one of them has left a gift carcass for us, during the time since we brought them home, but we have not seen any evidence of a mouse indoors during that period, either.
They are doing something right for us.
Last fall, the grounds here had an unnerving amount of dirt mounds and trail scars to indicate we had quite an infestation of moles and/or gophers. There are oodles of suggested ways to trap them, poison them, or chase them off. One brilliant method involves eliminating the insects and grub worms under the lawn that the varmints find so appealing. I’m just not up for all of that.
We got a dog.
Up to this point of the summer, we haven’t been seeing any new mounds of dirt, but something is slowly, but surely, tunneling under the grass, leaving a maze of scars in the lawn. I have no idea if Delilah will turn out to be the solution for driving off the moles, but last night, she displayed a fair amount of interest in chasing a scent she picked up when I directed her attention to one of the soft spots trailing across the turf.
Garden Tending
We have spent the last two afternoon/evenings down at the labyrinth garden, trying to finish off marking a rough outline of the path, and get things planted. The creation of this labyrinth has been an important priority for Cyndie, and she has forged progress against all manner of weather delays, lack of time, and conflicting demands.
I think she has been buying plants for that garden all summer long, and I haven’t been able to help her to see where they should go. She has needed to get some in the ground just to give them a chance to survive until we know where they will ultimately fit. Now we need to get everything planted before the growing season is over for the year.
A couple of weekends ago, Elysa helped accomplish the greatest amount of progress, defining the basic path borders for 3-quarters of the labyrinth, using paving stones that Cyndie purchased. Last night, I came close to completing the marking of the last quarter section which remained to be defined, and was then able to adjust the width and shape of the borders previously laid out. That finally brought enough definition for Cyndie to recognize the route, and allowed her to commence with relocation of wayward plants.
There is still a lot of work to do, before it becomes a true realization of the idea we jointly developed, but for now, the route is walkable, and I think that is amazing progress, given all the other things we are doing around here, simultaneously.
Evening Excitement
There was a little excitement in the Wintervale house last night, after Cyndie and I got back from working on the labyrinth garden. Actually, Cyndie was still down watering the plants when Delilah and I came back to the house. I was getting ready to shower and spotted a bat flying circles around our spiral staircase. I turned on some lights hoping I could keep an eye on him, and stepped into the garage to grab a broom.
The cats were visibly interested, but basically useless as predators. I thought it was going to be up to me, except the bat had landed and was now out of sight. Since Delilah appeared to be totally focused on her food and water, I decided to get the shower out of the way. When I came out, I heard Delilah’s bark and figured the bat was airborne again. Cyndie had returned and figured out there was a bat, so I pointed out the broom, and reported sighting the critter perched on a beam.
Cyndie took over from there, drawing on her years of experience evicting bats from the cabins over the years at the lake place up in Hayward. She grabbed a small step-ladder, and conked him to the floor. By this time, Pequenita was showing interest in finishing him off, but Cyndie would have none of that, and bagged the remains for disposal.
Order was restored. The labyrinth continues to gain definition, and we again filled every last moment of the day. Before the sun got too low, I walked the trail we worked to clear on Monday, hoping to get some better pictures with my camera, instead of my cell phone. Here are a few…
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Happy Reports
For those of you following my story as far back as June, when I may have mentioned missing my annual June bike trip to remain at work covering for a person out on a surprise medical leave for a potentially fatal affliction… I have news of a good outcome. It has been a long wait since the June diagnosis all the way to an August surgery. The surgical procedure went better than anticipated and I learned yesterday that recovery has progressed in leaps and bounds in the last few days.
What a joyous relief!
While filling in at work, I’ve returned to a full 5-day work week, and yesterday it was a good thing I was there on a Monday. My attention was needed in a lot of directions, most of them customer related. Luckily, business volume is holding steady, although on the brink of not as much as we are comfortable with, and I am processing a fair number of recent new orders.
Then the happiness continued at home!
In the mail, I found we received our first rebate check for the installation of our new geothermal furnace. Woo hoo!
Cyndie and I spent some focused time with Delilah, and decided she seemed a little under the weather. She has been on antibiotics for over a week, treating her Lyme disease. It seems like there is a battle going on in her. We hope the antibiotics are winning.
She recovered enough energy to come down to the woods with us to help clear trail. We let her run loose while we worked and then gave her repetitions at the exercise of coming when called. She performed well every time, earning enough treats that I think she is getting the picture.
I got her to grab a few sticks and move them away, and while I was digging out rocks, she gladly helped do some digging. Unfortunately, she has a penchant for coming back and digging up the holes I had just filled. She returned from one of her forays into the woods, with a particularly precious prize: an animal bone.
Our success with her, and our work down on the trail, brought us much happiness at the end of an already happy day.
I couldn’t resist stacking a few of the stones that we dug out of the middle of the path. Distributed in random groups on the side of the trail, they add a sense of spirit to the wonderfully magical route that we have carved through that part of our woods.
And that made us very happy, too.
Lacy Image
Cyndie captured this great photo of Queen Anne’s lace that grows on our property. Like all plants, some people consider it a weed, while others find it beneficial. Unfortunately, it is considered a pest in pastures, and it is sprouting all over part of the field we want to cut for hay and graze our horses.
Great Surprise
Yesterday, it being Saturday – in which neither Cyndie nor I needed to depart for our day-jobs – we set a larger than possible list of goals for chores we wanted to accomplish. We decided to start in the barn, because the 
crew had arrived there to work on putting rafters on the planned hay shed. We cleaned two of the four stables, and leveled the dirt floor in them so we could place thick stall mats that Cyndie recently purchased. She also brought home lumber for raising the walls, but we postponed that for another time, to allow us to get on to other goals we had in mind. (The previous owners had mini-horses, so their stalls and fences were all undersized for our plans.)
After a brief lunch snack, we moved on to the second project from our list, deep in the woods, clearing our trails of the downfall still remaining from the May 2nd snow storm that snapped limbs on so many trees here. We had the chainsaw, a pole saw, our new Stihl trimmer with a saw blade on the end, (like the one of Ian’s I used when we were in Portugal), a pry bar, rope, shovel and rake, along with a can of gas packed in the trailer behind the lawn tractor.
I had just cut a very large branch that was broken 12 feet farther up, and the bent-over portion was caught in the branches of several other trees. We tossed the rope over it and Cyndie and I were well into the tangle of growth nearby, tugging to pull the branch over and off the others. Suddenly we heard voices calling and wondered who it could possibly be.
I hollered an acknowledgement and hiked out of the woods and up the hill to find that our good friends, Rogie & Kris, had made a surprise visit! What a treat. I coerced them to hike back down with me to surprise Cyndie, and see the complexity of our clearing project underway.
We had a wonderful visit, walking them around to show off all the progress we have made since they last saw the place. We paused for refreshments and later, captured the moment with a picture, using the self-timer on Cyndie’s camera.
What a great treat it is to have friends stop by to see us. With the good energy of their visit, we headed down to finish what we could of the lumberjack work on the trail. The task becomes all-consuming and, as we often do, we lose sight of how long we have worked. In a blink, the sun is getting low, and we have worked right through the dinner hour.
Cyndie spent a loooong time afterward, brushing burrs out of Delilah, before we let her back in the house.
Without a doubt, these days are a lot more work than the comparative hours spent at our day-jobs. It was a real blessing to have the surprise break in the middle, and to reconnect with friends.
Thanks, Roeglins!
Itchy Dilemma
I’m grateful that I enjoyed 10 months here without this problem, but that time is over and now I face a new challenge that needs to be managed: Poison Ivy. I am sensitive to it. Cyndie says, “That’s an understatement.”
It has been a few years since I have had any serious reactions, so I was beginning to hope my sensitivity was waning. I would most often come in contact with the troublesome urushiol, the sap of the plant, up at our lake place in Hayward, WI. One of those exposures caused such a severe reaction that I had outbreaks of rash all over my body and required medical intervention to control it. I was told that I had likely breathed smoke from one of our outdoor fire pits, where wood with the oil on it was burning.
If I have a cut, or any break in my skin, and the oil gets in there, I will have a systemic reaction, and the rash can appear anywhere and everywhere. So far, with today’s infliction, the rash is limited to my arms and hands. From the location of the affected areas, and the timing of the reaction, we believe that I came in contact with the oil when touching our dog, Delilah, after we finally allowed her to run free on our property.
It is highly unlikely that we would be able to eradicate the poison ivy plant from our 20 acres of fields and woods, and will be impossible to keep Delilah from brushing up against it, so I am facing a new dilemma of how I can avoid exposure. It is dreadful to think that I won’t be able to touch our dog again. We had plans to let her roam inside our house. That seems risky to me now.
It’s really sad for me, because I was so enjoying seeing her run free. Now I have the perspective that the more she runs, the more threatening she becomes to me.
I have some time to think about this, and what I will do about it, because the rash tends to last about 1 – 3 weeks. It has me itching to find a solution for this dilemma.
