Living the Wild Life

HA!

Made you look!!!

Well, maybe a more accurate title would be "Living with Wildlife."  Yes, it's nearly Midsummer's Eve, and the critters are trying to move in with us.  Again.

If you know me, you know that I LOVE nature and go crazy over the rabbits, toads, birds, garter snakes, and the occasional deer or coyote we see in our yard.

But I am a firm believer that the wildlife needs to stay OUTSIDE.  PLEASE.

It happens every year.  SOMETHING decides it's too hot outside, so, gee whiz, let's move into that nice air-conditioned house that sits so conveniently in our ecosystem.

One year, it was crickets.  They snuck inside (yes, I know snuck isn't really a word, but I like it, so just get over it) and we could hardly sleep for the chirping.  Plus, The Girl decided that she was afraid of them, especially after finding them in her shoes.  (Oh, come ON.  Show some backbone!)  The Boy was fairly stoic about it all.  Of course, he didn't find any creepy crawlies in his footwear, either.

We finally banished the crickets.  Next came the mice.

Now THERE'S fun!

We could hear them gnawing in the walls.  Yuck.  We found their calling cards on the pantry shelves.  DOUBLE yuck.  We fought the mouse wars off and on, finding their entrances and plugging them, but they would eventually find another way in.  Even after we got cats! 

Our cats weren't the greatest mousers, preferring to chase flies and spiders, until we adopted The Great Orange Hunter.  Tango has a talent, and that's catching mice.  He always leaves them where we can easily find them (I've left you a love token - am I not a mighty hunter?) - like in The Girl's shoes.  
What IS it about her shoes?

We had moths (don't keep sunflower birdseed from one year to the next - TRUST ME).  We had grasshoppers. We had Asian ladybugs.  We had termites.  We had ants.  We always have raccoons knocking down the bird feeders.  But usually these things happen one at a time.

Well.

This is the year of multiple plagues.  Every spring I wage war on the carpenter bees, who like to chew tunnels into our front porch.  They start in May, and they take over the airspace on the front porch, buzzing around and dive-bombing anything that moves.  You can sit there and hear them chomping away in the evening after they've retired to their hangars.  They sound like mice!  So I buy wasp and hornet spray and squirt it into their holes, and out they come, falling on their backs and flailing their legs.  If I'm a little later, out come their larvae - large, unattractive white squirmy things - UGH.

This year, I procrastinated on the bees.  We had other issues with Nature.  Chipmunks.

That Man was working on a project in the driveway, and left the garage door open most of the afternoon.  Later, he and The Boy reported seeing a flash of brown fur in the garage.  We found the telltale signs - little holes chewed near the bottom of the sunflower seed bag in the garage.  A couple of days later, I was sitting on the patio and heard something chewing on the house.  From the INSIDE.

(Is it just me, or do most of the critters want to eat either the house or the birdseed?)

That Man set a live trap in the garage for the chipmunk, which had apparently made its way into the crawlspace from the garage.  The trap did its work and the chipmunk is no longer in residence.  However, there is still a small furry army still beseiging us outside, so the trap went back out onto the porch, where the brazen little demons sit and chatter.

In the meantime, I was planning to attack the bees, but before I got to start, The Boy woke up this past Saturday to someone knocking.  Two someones.  On the porch railing.

Woodpeckers.  They were systematically tearing chunks of wood out of a section of the porch railing, following a bee tunnel.  My friend Brenda used to work for the Audubon Society, and she says if you have woodpeckers pecking on your house, then you have an insect problem.  Big surprise!!!

Well, the woodpeckers were, but the insects were not.  Those birds were after the carpenter bees.  The Boy scared them off, but they returned.  With reinforcements.

So, I was forced to stop procrastinating and work on the bees.  I've sprayed about half of their holes, and the inmates have been evicted.  My friend Resa says the next step is to jam wads of steel wool into the burrows with a pencil, seal them up with wood putty, and then paint.

Oh, goody.

I'm willing to do all that, but the woodpeckers are persistent.  I don't want them to pull out the steel wool and putty, so how to keep them away while everything sets up?

That Man set the chipmunk trap on the railing where the woodpeckers have been working their brand of magic.  Genius!

So we will see what we see when we see it, regarding the birds and the bees.

I was starting to feel like I was in Egypt before the Exodus.  At least we haven't had frogs, flies, boils, or hail, but we WILL have locusts (oh, all right, cicadas) in August.

Cross your fingers!

Race Car Trailers and Enthusiasm

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about. - Charles Kingsley

You want to see enthusiasm?  Just ask That Man about drag racing.  Oh my.  It's an obsession.

Two weeks ago, he and That Girl went racing.  It was a sunny, hot weekend.  They were hot and sweaty and exhausted by the time it was over.  Saturday wasn't too bad - he ran one round, put the car in the trailer, and headed for dinner and the motel.  Time to cool off, rest, and recuperate.  But Sunday, he kept winning rounds, and the turnaround time got shorter and shorter.  Not much time to rest, and no place to get really cool.  Oh, they had a fan set up, and they had shade from the awning, but compared to the guys who pull their trailers with motor homes...well! Both of them came back looking like boiled lobsters. But, long story short, he came in third in his class!

We'd had that trailer for 23 years, and it was a big step up from the old open trailer.  We'd go racing with no lights, no awning, nothing.  Talk about primitive!  And then we made the change to an enclosed trailer with an awning.  We thought we were in HEAVEN, even though it was still hot as You-Know-Where when the outside temperatures soared.

Well, a week ago, he came home with a new race car trailer, and he's spent the past week getting it ready.  So what could there possibly be to do?  It was made to his specifications.  Just winch the car in, stick the generator in its spot, and away you go!

Well, not quite.

The winch cable is too short.  The D-rings in the floor to tie down the car were installed backward.  There is no shelf in the base cabinet.  He broke off the antenna on the side of the trailer, trying to adjust it.  The list grows.  But here's a view of the interior: 

And a view of the exterior:

It's mighty nice - a huge improvement over the old trailer.  Shiny and new.  Lots of light. More space.  A bigger awning.  No wood to rot.  Non-skid floor.  AIR CONDITIONING.  He will be racing in "comfort and luxury," relatively speaking.

So, will all this decadence improve his results?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  That Man LOVES to race his car.  He has ENTHUSIASM!  Isn't THAT what counts?

I'm Not Very Good at...LOTS of Things!!!

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. - G. K. Chesterton

Oh, bless you, George!

There are so many things I LOVE to do, but I do them so BADLY.

I run.  Slowly.  Painfully slowly.  I mean, people WALK faster than I run.  And my right leg is knock-kneed (one source of the problems I've been experiencing with that leg - geesh!).  But you know, this morning I got out and chugged up the street, and I passed a small river birch with a mockingbird in it, singing his heart out.  Last week I interrupted an opossum going about his opossum business.  And there are bullfrogs in a retention pond nearer to our house, and when I hear them "harrumphing," I always laugh.  And I may not be fast, but I can go forever.  At least that's how it feels, some days.

I paint watercolors.  From a book.  Nothing original (YET).  But playing with the paint and trying out different techniques is FUN.  And one of my favorite pictures came about because of a mistake!  I was trying to get a misty rain effect using a technique described in a book.  It just would NOT work, and I kept taking a paper towel and wiping down the picture and trying again.  But one time after taking a disgusted swipe at the mess, I looked and said, "Hey!"  I had made misty rain!  Not as instructed, but who am I to look a gift misty rain effect in the mouth?  I left it, and I've gotten a lot of compliments on it!  

I sail.  Lazily.  I almost never use the jib.  It's in GREAT shape!  Oh, I hank it on to the forestay every spring and keep it in its sail cover on the deck, but I almost never let it come out and play.  Fall comes and I unhank it and throw it and the cover into the cabin until spring, when I hank it on again.

I ski.  Again, lazily.  I don't want to be bothered with the effort of skiing a black diamond slope.  I'll do greens and blues, and try to find the longest way down the mountain.  I want to get as much time on my skis as possible for my ride up to the top, and I want to be able to look at the scenery, not just at where I'm going to have to plant my pole or make my next christy.  My favorite is a about a four-mile glide at Winter Park in Colorado.  It takes me about 40 minutes to get from the summit to the base.  Now THAT'S skiing!

I play the piano.  Well enough.  No audience, please.  Oh, how I HATED recitals!  I play for myself.  Everyone can thank God for that.  At least I know enough not to inflict my playing on others, if I can avoid it.  I used to be better, but ever since getting bifocals...!  Oh my.  I have a terrible time reading the music with my head thrown back so I can look through the bottom of my glasses.  And I lose my place in the music.  And I can't find the keys.  Without my glasses, it's even worse!  I keep threatening to get a pair of CHEAP single vision glasses just for the piano.  But I enjoy the noises I make.  I can hear the RIGHT notes in my head, no matter what is coming out of the instrument!

The point is, who are you doing these things for?  Do you have to be the best?  Do you have to meet someone else's standard?  Are you in a competition?

Obviously, I'm NOT at a competitive level in any of the things I like to do, so I'd better just do them because I like to do them!  What are some things that you like to do that you avoid doing because you think you're not good enough?  I need to make a list of my own, and start DOING them.

Frank Shorter, You're My Hero!

My goal has always been to slow down as slowly as possible. - Frank Shorter

Isn't that a great way to look at it?  Frank, you're my hero!  They're gonna have to drag me off, kicking and screaming.

But sometimes, I let Them get hold of me after all.  You know, life's vagaries.  Aging body parts.  The wrong food.  Family crises.  Work crises.  Injuries.  Distractions.

My spring half marathon came and went - without me.  I stepped down to the 5K, but, by golly, I ran the whole thing.  So I had a victory.  I'm trying to ramp up my running again, but it seems I'm suffering with ITBS (illiotibial band syndrome) AND a piriformis issue, both on the right side.  That leg has been somewhat tight and apparently weak for months, and now it's showing its true colors.  I tried strengthening exercises, and they helped a little, but just not enough.

For the past few weeks I've had a terrible time with stairs, in both directions.  I finally sat down and really LISTENED to the old bod, and it said, STRETCH ME!  So I started doing Those Stretches, and they helped almost immediately.  I'll just have to be persistent.  I didn't run this morning, but I should be able to get out by Thursday.

So maybe They won't get me too soon, after all.  I'm running from Them as fast I can, and trying to slow down as slowly as possible.