Our weather has been nice enough that we’ve had our morning visits with the Kipps on the kitchen patio. Our presence did little to discourage the birds from hitting the yummy sunflower seeds in the feeder. The little Chickadees are the bravest but even the Tufted Titmouse came in.
The
Chickadee is sitting on a grapevine. I salvaged a bunch from an old grapevine
that Mike cut down. It was my intention to weave it into a wreath but I never
found the time to work on it.
The Titmouse is sitting on the root we
screwed to the post under the feeder as a landing for them.
I really like how these things make the
birds look like they’re in a more natural setting than sitting on the
birdfeeders.
Speaking of birds in natural settings…
I spotted a hawk!
He’s
in the top of the tree in the center of the picture. By the time I realized it
was indeed a hawk, I didn’t have time to switch cameras or to even zoom in.
Such is the woes of highway driving.
This week we made a few forays into
the wilds of our COVID infected world. Our county has had increasingly record setting
number of cases for five days in a row now. Thus, we’ve been staying home as
much as possible. But the need to eat and care for our pets has driven us to brave
it.
“What’s going on?” I know you wanna
know.
Itsy isn’t much better. She continues
to cry a lot! She’s been on an antibiotic and pain meds for a week now so I’m
wondering if the problem isn’t itching of the rash on her back and belly. I’ve added
Children’s Benadryl to the meds she’s already taking but I worry about over-medicating
her. Case in point, I gave her some Benadryl before breakfast on Saturday
morning. I was at the computer and something made me turn around and look. Itsy
was laying on her side with a pile of vomit beside her.
Oh no! I silently cried. I’ve killed my dog!
I jumped up and picked her up but she seems
fine. She puked up a belly full of green bile, which happens sometimes if she doesn’t
eat. I’m guessing she lost her balance, fell over, and I got to her before she
had a chance to recover.
I’ve only been giving her Benadryl for a
couple days and so far, I haven’t seen any improvement. I don’t know what we’re
going to do about her.
In
the meantime, Macchiato, our seven-year-old tabby, has been yowling a lot too. Then
when I found someone peed on some towels left laying on the floor; I suspected
it was him.
“Maybe we should have him checked for
a urinary tract infection,” I suggested to Mike.
I kenneled Macchiato twice trying to
get a urine sample to take to the vet. The first time he peed on the bed I had in
there and laid in the litterbox. The second time he wouldn’t pee at all despite
being in there most of the day. I let him out in the late afternoon. The vet
likes the sample to be fresh so getting one and having it sit overnight wasn’t
an option. What was an option was to day-kennel him at the vet’s office and let
them get a sample.
Macchiato.
Poor guy. He cried the whole way over to Towanda and puked in my lap. Luckily,
I suspected something might happen so I was prepared with a puppy pad and didn’t
get any on me.
He had to be there by 9 a.m. and there
was still fog in the valleys.
Another picture I took that morning. A
lot of yard art going on here.
Dr.
Lori called in the afternoon. “Macchiato’s urine is totally unremarkable,” she
said. “There’s no sign of any infection. But he is blind or sees very little
and this could be the cause of his vocalizing. It could also be the cause of
his urinating around the house. Maybe you could add another litter box?” she
suggested.
I
didn’t address her ‘add a litter box’ comment because I already have 6 boxes in
the house and one on the patio. “We’ve suspected he was blind,” I told her. “He
runs into the door sometimes and doesn’t see when I put treats on the floor in
front of him.”
“My concern is what might have caused his
blindness.” She mentioned some of the things that could cause it, none of which
I remember. “Do you want me to send a blood sample out?”
“No. We’ll deal with whatever happens
when it happens.” And that’s probably why I wasn’t paying attention to causes.
“He can go home so you can come and
get him anytime,” Dr. Lori finished.
On our way, heading down our mountain,
I see a dead critter laying beside the road. I always take note of what’s been
killed. I know, I’m weird. It had a white body, black tail, black ear tips. I’d
just been reading in the book The Mammoth Hunters how Ayla was hunting
the white winter ermine for its fur and it was described as having a black tail
and black ear tips.
“Is that a mink?” I asked.
Don’t laugh. Without actually thinking
things through, my mouth spit out the first critter that came to mind, which,
in this case was mink because we’d just seen it on the news. Plus, I knew there’d
been a mink farm someplace roundabouts. Momma pointed it out to me once. “It
stunk to the high heavens,” she said scowling with the memory.
“I hope not,” Mike answered. “They
carry COVID.”
We get closer and I could see it was
someone’s cat. “Awww. Someone’s gonna be sad,” is what I always say. I’ll spare
you the picture.
And,
just an FYI, ermine don’t have black-tipped ears. I referred back to the
passage in the book and it said it was white from its black tipped tail to the tip
of its black nose.
Macchiato has spent every afternoon on the patio all summer long.
Now that the weather is
starting to cool off, I don’t know where he’ll spend his days. One thing I do know
for sure though, is I hope it’s not prowling around the house yowling all day —
which is what he’s doing now because it’s too cool on the patio for him!
>>>*<<<
Mike has been working on the pond. He’s
gotten quite good at working all the levers that operate the backhoe.
“Peg, we’ve got rain coming in. Would
you help me get the tractor in the barn?” he asked.
Much to my chagrin I have to admit
that I was feeling a little put-upon. “Really, Michael! Like what! You want me to
watch you put the tractor in the barn?”
He
wanted me to come along so he wasn’t mad that I was being snarky.
“Well, the bucket’s full of mud that
won’t come out so I have to dig that out first. But I thought we could take the
golf cart down and you could bring it back.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “I can get pictures
of you digging the mud out.”
We stopped by the barn and got the shovel and when we got to the pond, Mike got on the tractor. He tried dunking and swishing the bucket to dislodge the mud but it didn’t work.
He swung the arm in and I
decided that rather than make him climb off the tractor and back on, which is
the hardest part for him, I’d try to help. I grabbed the shovel and waited.
When he saw it was my intention to help, he positioned the bucket to make it
easier for me. Then I went to work picking and hacking and prying until I got
all the mud out.
Mike raised the stabilizers and the
tractor headed for the water. He put the bucket down to stop the rolling and
reset the stabilizers. Repositioned the bucket, lifted the stabilizers and the
tractor started rolling towards the water again. I thought for sure he was
going to end up in the drink. But he managed to get it stopped and using the
backhoe bucket, pushed himself to firmer ground.
The stabilizer pads had a ton of mud
on them. I knew Mike wouldn’t want all that mud in the barn. While he made his
way from the backhoe-operating seat into the tractor seat, I knocked the mud
from the pads. Mike saw me. First, I did the one on my side, then I walked behind
the tractor, under the backhoe arm, and cleaned the other one off.
Mike yelled something at me. I couldn’t
hear him over the tractor.
Mike headed for the barn and I crossed
behind him to get to the golf cart. I looked up. I don’t know what made me look
up and not at the muddy, rutted ground I was picking my way across, but I
looked up — and the tractor was coming right at me!
I couple of quick steps and I was out
of the way.
“WHAT ARE YA DOIN’!” I yelled.
“I’M GONNA DIG SA’MORE!” he yelled
back.
“I’M GOIN’ HOME!”
“OKAY, WAIT A MINUTE!”
Mike shifted his position on the seat
and headed for the barn. I followed on the golf cart. Not far out of the pond area
is a small hill. Mike stopped and the tractor started drifting back — and I was
too close.
He’s gonna kill me yet! I
thought, gunned the golf cart, and got out of the way.
Once the tractor was parked in the
barn and we could talk, I told Mike what happened.
“You tried to kill me! Not once but
twice!”
“What!”
“I was walking behind the tractor and
you were backing up.”
“I told you to stay out of the way;
that I was going to back up.”
“I couldn’t hear you over the tractor and
I didn’t think I needed to. I thought I knew what we were doing. You said we
were putting the tractor in the barn. Besides, don’t you look when you back up?”
“No. It’s too hard to turn around in that
seat so I only do it when I’m getting close to where I want to be.”
I never asked why he stopped on the
hill but I suspect he was trying to put the tractor in a different gear for the
ride to the barn.
And it’s that easy, folks. It’s just that easy to die in a stupid accident. That’s why you can’t wait until the last-minute, thinking you’ll live your life the way you want to and — just in case there’s really a heaven and hell — use the loophole of coming to Jesus on your deathbed. You may not get that chance.
The rain came in. It rained all day. A
nice soaking rain. Itsy’s not a big fan of rain and would rather do her business
in the house then to get wet.
There was plenty of grass under the awning before we laid the patio stones, so she never
used to get wet.
“I cover Yodi with my umbrella when I take
her out in the rain,” that beautiful West Virginia friend of mine said of her Chinese
Crested.
With that in mind, I took the umbrella with
us every time she wanted to go out and managed to keep her covered as she
walked around the yard.
I propped the umbrella up on the feral cat
house to dry and Tiger was curious about what it was. He sat under it for a
couple of hours. He loves to be outside and spends a lot of time out.
In my picture of him and Mr. Mister, they’re both watching something but I don’t know what. I didn’t see anything.
>>>*<<<
I was at my computer one morning, and hadn’t
yet had breakfast. We eat Cheerios most mornings but this morning I was in the
mood for something different.
Eggs à la Goldenrod popped into my head. I
haven’t made them in a while and a plate of them sounded good to me. I dug out
my Fannie Farmer cookbook and it just about fell open to the right page. These
are easy to make and oh so yummy. The only change I made was to put it over cut
up English Muffins rather than the diagonally sliced toast it called for but
that’s strictly presentation.
The recipe is for two but Mike already had
breakfast — and I like the white sauce anyway so it didn’t break my heart. In
my mind’s eye I could just see me fighting to keep all that yummy sauce on the
plate. A bowl would work just fine,
I thought. Then I took a picture of it to make y’all just a little bit jelly.
I wondered if I could tempt Mike. I took my
bowl in to where he sat in his recliner watching the morning news.
“Wanna bite?” I offered him the bowl.
“I already had breakfast,” he said, eyeing
the bowl.
“That was hours ago.” I was trying to make
it easy for him to accept my offer of a bite.
“What is it?” Mike reached for the bowl.
“Eggs à la Goldenrod. They’re yummy.”
He took a bite. “YUCK!” he said but didn’t
give the fork back. He scooped up a second bite.
“Really?” I questioned. “Yuck?”
He smiled and shook his head, relinquishing
the fork as he chewed. I took a bite and offered it back to him.
“I don’t want to eat all your breakfast,” he
said taking another bite.
I shrugged. “I can make more if I want it.”
That was earlier in the week. Guess who’s
been dreaming about Eggs à la Goldenrod?
“You?” you say.
Yeah, me. But Mike too!
“Sunday morning I’ll make it for your breakfast,”
I promised.
And I did!
>>>*<<<
Mike and I really enjoy grilled chicken. He’ll
take a breast and slice it thin before grilling it. One whole breast will make
several meals for us.
“With the spike in COVID cases and the
looming shutdown,” Mike started, “we should find a deal on chicken and get a forty-pound
box.”
I dug out the recent store ads and
discovered the market in Dushore was running a sale on chicken breast. “One-eighty-nine
a pound,” I read.
“Is that good?” he wanted to know.
“I don’t know.” When we want chicken breast,
we buy chicken breast and seldom pay attention to price.
Mike called our local grocery and asked how
much chicken breast was. Two-eighty-nine a pound came the answer.
We got in the car and headed for Dushore. I
only took this one picture. The ladder would be easy to miss if you weren’t
looking for it. Deer season is in. Maybe that’s where he’s going to hang his
deer if he gets one.
Remember the rule?
Spend fifteen seconds looking at a photo
and you’ll find something to like.
At the market, Mike asked about getting a
box of chicken.
“I’ll get the butcher for you,” the gal
behind the meat counter said.
“Yeah, I can get you a box. I’ll have it for
you tomorrow,” Chris said.
We bought a pork roast and a few other things
then headed for the Jeep.
“We could go on into Tunkhannock and check
out the new Aldi’s store,” I suggested. A brand-new store opened eleven days
ago. “And Walmart is right across the road.”
“What do you need from Walmart?” Mike
asked.
“We could look for new sheets for our
bed.” I rotate our four sets of sheets and yet we recently wore one out and
another is on its way out. The edges frayed and the center so thin it was
starting to rip. Besides, someone (who shall remain nameless) volunteered to
make a couple of face masks for Dr. Lori and wanted to look for cute animal
pattern material.
“We’ve got meat in the car. We can run
past the house and drop that off first,” Mike reminded me.
“I’ve got the cooler bags,” I reminded
him. “I’ll put the meat in that and it’ll be okay. Then we can just go up Route
87 and go to Tunkhannock that way.”
Mike
halted on his way out of the parking lot and pulled over. I put the pork roast in
the cooler bag and YAY! New road pictures! This is a road I’ve only been on
once or twice and Mike doesn’t think he’s ever been on.
While going through my photos I noticed
a lot had lines in them. Power lines, phone lines, cable lines. Whatever they
are, they ‘ruin’ a lot of my photos. Sometimes I can crop them out, sometimes I
can ‘erase’ them, sometimes I can’t, and sometimes I don't try.
The
new Aldi’s store is nice, as you may well expect. We bought some of the items
that we use most frequently. Eggs, cottage cheese, cereal, frozen pizza, oyster
crackers. I was surprised they had canned red beets. The other two Aldi’s that
we shop at had stopped carrying them. I guess there wasn’t enough demand. I
picked up a case of those.
At the checkout, we chatted with the
cashier.
“Have you been busy?” I asked. There
were a lot of shoppers in the store but it wasn’t too bad.
“Oh yeah! We’ve been slammed since we
opened.”
“I bet Walmart hates seeing this right
across the road from them,” Mike said.
“Oh! Too bad!” she said sarcastically. “I
worked as a manager over there for seven years and I quit to come here.”
Aldi’s hires at nineteen dollars an hour.
Our next stop was right across the road at
Walmart. We grabbed a cart and headed in. “You want to check out electronics
while I go through the sewing section?” I asked.
“That’s right. You need thread,” he reminded
me, and it’s a good thing he did too. I’d forgotten I needed that.
We didn’t find any sheets we wanted but
managed to spend money anyway.
Fat Quarters, I told you, were ninety-seven cents.
Yeah. That’s what I said. But guess what? They start at ninety-seven cents.
The ones I liked were a dollar forty-seven.
The road home is a road we’ve traveled
many times. I only took the hawk picture and this one of the cows laying down.
See that long-legged cow standing up in the back there? That’s what Mike jokingly
calls them.
Saturday, early after-morning, Chris, the butcher, called. “Your box of chicken is ready.”
“Great!
We’ll be right there to get it,” I told him.
We
picked up the chicken and were delighted to find that he was able to do even
better on the price. We got it for one sixty-seven a pound, twenty cents a
pound less than we expected. We thanked him, paid, and headed for home,
traveling another road we don’t travel quite as often.
“Did you see that?” Mike asked.
“See what?” I didn’t know if we saw
the same thing or not.
“On this side of the road.”
That clarified it some. At least then
I knew I hadn’t seen it. “I guess not. I was looking at the turkeys out in the
field on my side.” By the time I spotted them I didn’t have time to switch cameras.
“You’ve got to see this,” he said and
looked for place to turn around. He chose this driveway because you could see
well in both directions and I got a picture of the barn.
“Good. It’ll give me another chance at
the turkeys,” I said.
“Now, it’s right up here. Are you
ready for this firetruck?”
“It’s
a firetruck?” I wondered what made this firetruck special enough for Mike to
turn around for.
And there it is. A big huge
endorsement for our current president — and a dead deer, which I didn’t even
see until I looked at the picture on my ‘puter.
And
I did get another chance at the turkeys with the other camera. Too bad it was a
wasted chance. If you didn’t know these were turkeys, you probably couldn’t tell
from this picture. But in my defense, they were pretty far away.
On down the road we go and pass a
farm that has goats. One of the goats was climbing a steep rocky bank and using
a tree to aid him.
“I
should’ve gotten that picture,” I bemoaned the missed shot. “You could turn
around for me.”
Normally Mike is pretty good about
this but today he wasn’t much in the mood to put up with my shenanigans.
“Nah.”
I was incredulous. “Wait a minute! You’d
turn around to show me a Trump sign but won’t turn around for a cute goat
picture?”
He
frowned. Faced with that argument, how could he refuse? The driveway he chose
this time only got me a picture of the dried and nodding heads of five
sunflower plants.
This time Mike didn’t waste time
looking for a second turn-around place. He pulled right in the driveway of the
goat owners. The shot I wanted was gone but I still took pictures of these
cutie-patooties.
Just past Turrels Corners we pass a car with something on its roof. I watched as it got closer and realized it was just a canoe rack for two canoes.
“Did you see that?” Mike asked.
“The canoe rack? Yeah, I saw it.”
“No.
That lady in the car was doing this.” Imitating her, his eyes got real big, his
mouth dropped open, he let go of the steering wheel long enough to franticly
wave his arms back and forth.
“Nope. I didn’t see that.”
A short ways up the road, this tanker is stopped right in the travel lane. “I guess we know why she was waving at you now.”
The guy on the opposite side of the road
cleared us to pass but Mike didn’t see him. “He’s waving us through,” I told
him.
As
we pass, I see a pair of legs sticking out from under the truck.
“He picked a good spot to break down,” I said.
Remembering his truck driving days,
Mike says, “There’s never a good place to break down.”
“No. Not for him. For us drivers. You
can see him in plenty of time to stop from both directions.”
As soon as we got the chicken in the house,
we set up an assembly line and went to work getting it freezer ready.
“If we’re going to keep doing this
maybe we should invest in a vacuum sealer,” I said. That didn’t help right now.
We opened our box and pulled a breast out.
“Wow!” I said. “These are huge!”
I wrapped a whole breast in plastic wrap,
getting as much air out as I could, then passed it to Mike who wrapped it in
freezer paper and dated it. We ended up with fifteen packages of chicken
breast. Our box was forty pounds, divided by fifteen packages, equals 2.66
pounds each, more or less.
Let COVID come. We are ready!
>>>*<<<
In the summer. I get sunset pictures. In the
winter my sunset view has moved behind the trees so I’m more apt to get sunrise
pictures.
The other night I looked out while I washed evening dishes and see a sunset sky that would rival most sunrises. I grabbed my camera and went out.
I wonder what the western sky looks like, I
thought and walked around the end of the mill. Here’s a shot you’ve not seen
often. This is looking up towards the upper barn.
The colors my camera picks up depends on where my focus is.
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