And today our lawnmower, an old Deere powerhouse, committed suicide burning itself up completely.
I've heard of people burning up from spontanious combustion, but I think this is a first for lawnmowers. I parked it as usual yesterday after a two hour session with our back 40. Everything seemed normal. This afternoon I went out to the barn for organizational inspiration and there in the middle of the dirt floor was the burned out hulk of a big lawn tractor. Battery completely melted, gas tank gone, seat burned up, steering wheel melted, all the tires burned away to the rims, all the metal parts grey. We saw or heard nothing of any fire or explosion, but the fire must have been intense. It was a miniture war zone. The closest things to the creature were several feet away and there is some scorched wood and melted plastic, like the container of several gallons of gasoline which had its one side melted down, but which wasn't penetrated and didn't leak and otherwise no damage to anything. I hope I didn't just use up all my good karma, and I am grateful.
11/19/06
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We just caught the chipmonk that has been loose in the house for the last two days. Shadow, our young black male cat, brought it in to play with, as he is want to do from time to time with the animals he catches around the place. It's not enough that we have to catch or have the cats catch the mice that live in the house, like the 200 that we caught the first year we moved here, with no hunting cat. (In fact, that wonderful old cat, Lucky, just meowed at me to fix it when a mouse drowned in his water bowl, right under his nose.)
If there aren't enough animals inside to play with, the cat brings some in. The chipmonk was a worthy playmate; some mice are fast, but this small thing was amazing. At one point I opened the front door for it and pushed it in the right direction from it's hiding place in a corner, but it just ran right by the open door and over to the other side of the dining room. I got an old haveahart (live) rat trap out of mothballs, baited it with peanut butter (what else??) and positioned it near the new hiding place. Eventually the chipmonk ran out of hiding and back across the house, but not through the trap, which I thought had been placed so that it had to be the only way out. Perseverance furthers and luck prevails. Trap repostioned near a new hiding place, which we can only find by letting the cat point, the chipmonk was trapped, probably overcome by the smell of that Adams peanut butter. I released it in the small grove of cedars it probably was living in.
Two days before Shadow brought in the chipmonk, he brought in an owl. Like the chipmonk, the owl wasn't hurt much by being caught and brought inside and once it was in, it was released, I mean that's the whole sport of it, one guesses, and it flew up into our skylights. While I was looking for saftey pins to make a bird net out of an old pillow case and wire hanger, it flew down to the dining room windows and by closing the curtains over it we were able to grab it. That's the closest I've ever been to a wild owl. And probably the closest it's ever been to a wild man, everything being relative. I took it outside, and it played dead for a minute, but finally grabed my offered, gloved, finger and then flew through our apple tree and passed the walnut and over to the woods.
10/12/06
- I lit the first fire of the season in our little stove today, something to keep me company while I bake a cake. I turned the
central heating on last week, but (a) this end of the house stays cool and (b)
it's nice to have that wood heat to top things off. Nothing like standing by
the stove when you come in from the cold outside or to be able to dry something
with a little wood stove exposure. You can't say the same thing about standing under
a heater register. It was 40 F when I went out to feed the cats this
morning which isn't really cold, but it can feel like it.
As I told the woman where we went yesterday, as we do every year, to buy
tulips and daffodils, everything seems early or I'm late this year. I think,
normally we don't start getting the 30 degree nights till November or December,
but we woke to frost a few days ago. And the bulb shop was practically out of bulbs.
They have their own farm and raise everything they sell and this year it looks
like they have almost sold everything they raised. Previously their shop has been
filled with sacks of 100 daffodils, or 50 daffodils, mirriod tulips,
whatnot. This year we had slim pickings indeed. Oh well, we didn't need much.
We have been planting daffodils and tulips all over for several years, 1000 at
a time, almost. It's not Filoli yet though. Next year, I resolve to buy bulbs
earlier. And tomatoes. I always get caught not having made enough tomato sauce
when the supply of good Roma tomatoes from Central Washington dries up. Got
through two boxes of them this year, but just barely. And Apples that I think
aren't supposed to be ripe till next month are already begging to be picked and
eaten. And our older chickens are starting to molt. Winter already, ready or not.
9/29/06
- We have just gotten back from a trip down to the Bay Area of Calif,
mostly Stanford. It's a two day drive from here, about 14 hours, so on the way
down, Ashland is a convenient layover. On the way back, we stopped at Wolf Creek
which is just a few miles north of Grants Pass. The Wolf Creek Inn is a great
stopping over place. It's an old hotel from the 1880's now owned by the Oregon
State Parks, but still open as a hotel and dinning room. The rooms are kept in
the style of the 1920's which might be a bit rustic for many; no TV, telephone,
or clock, but fine for us. The cooking is great. For such a small place in the
middle of nowhere, the menu is good and the food is great. Breakfast comes
with the room. Highly recommended should you be in that area looking for a place
to stay.
While we were away, someone let our zucchini run rampant and we had a large squash to deal with and several little ones. Proper zucchini management requires discipline. So, we had to make a zucchini cake in defense and zucchini patties for dinner. I'll put the recipe for the zucchini cake in the cookbook on this site. It makes a great cake.
8/28/06
- Francesca looked out the dinning room window this
morning and said "There's a chicken outside the fence!" That's not good.
The deer fence is supposed to keep the deer, coyotes, miscellaneous
animals out of the garden and little orchard and keep the chickens in,
giving them a place to roam around without being as vulnerable to the
various and sundry predators as otherwise they would be. I went down and
found that some little beasts, maybe raccoons, had made a hole and a
path under the fence and one of the baby silver laced wyndottes, all of
which have been enjoying the taller grass that grows along the bottom of
the fence to find bugs in, had stumbled, presumably, upon the path and
curiosity had sucked it through the hole to the other side. It was
running back forth along that part of the fence looking for the way back
to familiar territory. Chickens can usually find their way back of a
journey pretty well, but this one was disoriented. It didn't do any good
for me to show it the opening from inside the fence; I wasn't speaking
its language and no amount of hand-waving would help. I cut a new door in
the fence, which is made of a plastic netting material, easily modified,
and fastened it open. By the time I had gone around to its side of the
fence, there's no gate there so I had to go all the way around the
garden, it was back inside the fence. I didn't see it go back so I don't
know if it found its way back through the new door in the fence or the
hole under it. I closed the hole by staking the fence down, which I had
neglected to do when I put the fence in and fastened the new door closed
with a stick.
8/27/06
- We're trying to tame the two
baby kittens, Peek-a-boo and Hunter. So far they will play with us with
a cat toy and barely let Francesca touch them when they come within
range. Hunter is a siamese looking kitty and when we played with them
with some feathers on a string, he would grab the feathers resolutely
and pull as hard as he could to take them away with him; very cute, thus
the name. Who knows if he really will be a good hunter , we hope so.
They moved into the wood pile in the barn several weeks ago with their
Mother, all wild. We managed to trap their Mother and take her in to be
spayed and get shots. We caught her in a trap we bought for that and
followed the suggestions that a group in San Diego that does a lot of
trapping of feral cats has on the web; which was to press the trap down
on a smelly fish, like canned mackerel, to get the cat to come well into
the cage. This worked amazingly well, with a sardine. We caught her the
first night we put the trap out. We named her Riva, after a favorite
fish restaurant in Santa Cruz. She is a pretty, medium sized black cat
with a white bib. We had planed to put her into a special caged section
of a room when she came back from the vet's to help us tame her, but she
escaped from that immediately. After starting their visit with us in the
wood pile and the barn, all three of them moved into our attic with its
regular denizen, Wolfie, our older male wild cat who moved in there a
year or so ago. He has been completely accommodating to the new family
serving as a surrogate parent to the babies and taking care of them
while their Mother was at the hospital having her operation. He never
lets us near him, but is happy to be fed every day by us. They make a
cute family, eating together by the hole into the attic. We've been
playing with the babies after dinner when we give them some special
treats and entertain them with our toys. Over the last week, they have
gotten closer and closer so we are making some progress. I doubt we will
ever tame Riva quite so easily.
Now we've got to catch Wolfie.
8/25/06
- Pressed 8 gallons of apple juice this morning.
The apple trees are loaded this year. One even tipped over it was so
heavy, but still seems to be living,lazily. This was a big tree, maybe a
gravenstein, but in any case a good eating and cooking apple, and we
could never pick much of it because it was to tall. Now that it's laying sideways, it's going
to be a lot easier to pick. The deer will probably like that too. We
have about three big trees that have ripe apples on them right now; we
don't know what any of them are, but they are all good and plentiful.
We're making apple pies, crisps, chutney, you name it, as fast as we
can, but it's a job to keep up with the ripening fruit.