Visiting With The Kipps

 

          Now that we’re fully vaccinated against COVID, our social life is opening back up. But don’t worry, we’re still masking and social distancing in public.

          Our friends and neighbors the Kipps are fully vaccinated too, so we don’t mask when we’re around them anymore and we visited with them a couple of times this week. Let me tell you about those visits.

          We took my latest edition of my weekly jibber-jabber down to the Kipps last Sunday. It was beautiful outside, so we visited on the porch. Mike and the Kipps took a seat, but I stood on the steps. One foot firmly planted on the second step, one foot resting on the top step, leaning against the railing. A small flowerpot was attached to the post and in that flowerpot was a feather I’d stuck in there almost a year ago. I’d found it and teased Tux with it a little. He’s afraid of feathers and once he sniffed it and knew it was a feather, he cowered, and I shoved the feather in the soil of the flowerpot where it’s been all this time.

          Flowers long gone, I plucked the feather from the pot and showed it to Tux. This time he didn’t cower, this time he took the feather and chewed it to pieces.

          “Maybe it doesn’t smell like a feather anymore,” Miss Rosie guessed of Tux’s unusual behavior.

          Our next visit was just a day later. when I delivered the pinwheel I’d made for my most-favoritest, most-loved, most-beautifulest, and let’s not forget most-feistiest redheaded friend. 

          “I love it,” Miss Rosie said.

          “Good,” I told her. “You’re my guinea pig. Let’s see if it holds up.”

          “She doesn’t want that junk!” Mike teases.

          “Yes, I do!” she told Mike. “I like the things Peg makes for me.” Then she turned to me. “I’m happy to be your guinea pig.”

          And I’m happy to have her to give things to!

          I took the pinwheel and tried to push it in the ground outside her big dining room window where she could see it, but the ground was frozen.

          “Won’t it scare the birds there?” Miss Rosie asked.

          “I don’t think so. It doesn’t scare them at my house.”

Lamar disappeared and came back with a digging bar and tried to make a pilot hole, but even that failed against the icy grip of Mother Nature. I handed him the pinwheel and he looked around for a spot. Nearby was a rotted stump and he managed to jam it down in the soft wood.

Tux helped.

We watched as the wind tickled the vanes and it started to spin — and promptly fell over.

“Uh-oh,” Miss Rosie said.

Our knight in shining armor, our hero, came to the rescue. Lamar stood the pinwheel back up, jammed a few rocks around the base, and backfilled by brushing a little soil in.

The next few times I talked to Miss Rosie on the phone, she told me how much she enjoyed watching it spin — and that makes it all worthwhile.

Lamar let me know that there were duck eggs outside the duck box the conservation guys had put up at the edge of their property.

“Let’s go see the eggs,” I said to Lamar.

Sure enough, there were duck eggs on the ground. There was also a pile of bedding directly under the box too. “It looks to me like another duck pushed the eggs out so she could have the nest.” I guessed. And because the duck box was at the edge of a bank, the eggs rolled part way down the hill.

“Want ‘em?” Lamar asked.

Totally a resonable question. It would be fun to incubate them.

Lamar had other ideas. “You could make an omelet.”

I laughed. “I have no idea how long they’ve been laying here or if the ducklings have started to form yet or not. I’m afraid they’re coon food now.”

>>>*<<<

I put my tin can owl chimes together. They’re supposed to be nested a little way inside each other but I didn’t do mine that way. I’d made my owl pictures the full size of the can and if I nested them, you’d not be able to see anything except the bottom half. So, I thought to just add a clapper in the bottom can.

Sigh.

It doesn’t make any noise. We shall call this one a fail. If I make it again, I’ll nest ‘em together using smaller pictures.

This wasn’t the only fail this week either. Mike got me some thin aluminum flashing so I could make pinwheels. I cut the vanes and started decorating. I like my flowers, looked at the other five pieces sitting there and did not want to do it five more times.

I’m just gonna give ’em a wash of color, I think. Three pink and three blue. That’ll be good enough.

Now I had to decide if I wanted to have one different petal or maybe two, or did I want to erase it.

Permanent marker isn’t permanent on some materials. It can be taken off with a spritz of alcohol and a wipe.

I set it aside. I’ll decide later.

I did the wash and didn’t like it.

I took my permanent marker and drew lines on top of that and was much happier. It looks more like a flower petal to me now.

          I got all the vanes colored then had to decide what to do with the one I’d drawn the flower on. I tried to imagine it with that one oddball petal and decided it had to go. I picked it up — and couldn’t do it. I couldn’t erase my fine art. I put it aside, cut a new vane, and colored it.

When I went to put the pinwheel together, I used a bead of silicone and a bead of hot glue. My thinking was the hot glue would hold it in place until the silicone cured.

           It didn’t work.

The silicone was keeping the hot glue from holding. I wiped it off and tried just hot glue.

It didn’t work that way either.

Maybe it needs something to hold onto, methinks. I scuff the surface with steel wool.

It didn’t work.

Next, I tried a wire brush and that didn’t work. In an effort to give the glue something to hold on to, I used my knife and scored a few lines. Nothing I did would allow the glue to hold them together. Hot glue was obviously not the answer. I switched and used just silicone, lining up the center holes, put a weight on top, and left it for twenty-four hours. As of this writing, it’s working, but not well. Too much tension will pull them apart and there will be tension when I fold the vanes over.

I went to the internet.

With aluminum it’s important to prepare the surface first, my search revealed. Use acetone or alcohol to clean, scuff the surface with a low grit sandpaper, wipe, and silicone. Aluminum readily reacts with the atmosphere to form aluminum oxide, giving you only a small window to do the next few steps.

          Since my pinwheel was half together, I decided to test it on scraps first. I used nail polish remover to clean one and alcohol to clean the other, applied silicone, and gave it time. The next day it was much harder to pull them apart and I think it’ll withstand the tension when I put the other side together. And both cleaners worked equally well.

          Making a pinwheel from aluminum involves a lot of waiting. Maybe it’d be better to stick with the plastic ones, I think and decide I’d make a few more of those. They’re fast and easy. I got a couple of sheets of plastic, drew eleven vanes on each one, and started cutting. The strips of plastic that dangled as I was cutting were too tempting for Tiger and he couldn’t resist.

         I let him grab at the scraps as I cut away and was thanked with a claw to the hand and a nibble on my scissors. It’s hard to cut when there’s a cat on the end of the scissors. I don’t mind though and I don’t scold.

         When he tired of that he thought to dig around in my small-scrap bucket.          

          When that failed to hold his attention, he went on the attack and with a slink and flurry of teeth, nails, and tail, he wiped out a stack of napkins and our Skip-Bo cards.

It was all over in a matter of seconds and only the mess was left behind. It could’ve been worse. Everything could’ve ended up on the floor.

I made the pinwheel with five vanes instead of six. I thought six made it too crowded. I think the next time I’m gonna try just four.

I avoid coloring where I’m gonna glue because I think it interferes with the sticking power of the glue but I’m not happy with the white center either. Maybe I’ll try just stripes or something on the outside and stay away from solid colors. That should alleviate the problem with the white center.

I used an orange plastic cap for a center but as you can see, my design still needs some work — but I’m getting there and figuring it all out is half the fun.

>>>*<<<

I finally got around to taking my crashed hard drive to the computer guy. I only took one road picture for you.

Calaman told me that he could sometimes still get files from crashed drives and I have about a month’s worth of pictures I hadn’t backed up as well as a ton of music. He hooked it up to his machines and explained what was going on.

“This’ll tell me how many bad vectors you have. With less than 200 I can get a lot of stuff off it. Even with 300 bad vectors, and depending on where they’re located, I can still get some stuff.” He bent down and put his ear to my hard drive. “It’s clunking. When it clunks like that, it tells me that it’s been damaged somehow. Did you drop it?”

“Nope. I don’t think so.” You have to remember that my computer crashed more than a year ago now.

Calaman didn’t come right out and call me a liar but said, “The hardware speaks for itself.”

I searched my brain trying to remember if I ever dropped it. “It just sat on my desk. I can’t say what might’ve happened to it after I took it out of the computer.” Yeah, I took the hard drive out. Just Google it, it’ll tell you how to do it. Besides, if I ruined it, it didn’t hurt anything, it was already ruined.

When his program finished analyzing, the report said I had more than 900 bad vectors. There would be no getting anything off of it.

Speaking of road pictures, Mike and I went to breakfast for the first time in almost a year. The morning mist was hanging in the valleys.

Our favorite place to go was Mark’s Valley View. We’d always gotten good food there and the prices weren’t too bad. I always ordered more food than I ever ate, bringing leftovers home for Itsy and Ginger. I was a little sad when I remembered I didn’t have little dogs to bring treats home to anymore. But I’m never gonna leave food on the table, opting instead to bring it home for whatever critters would eat it. The birds would eat some of it and coons and possums aren’t picky eaters at all and would eat whatever the birds left. I’d toss it in the weeds and it’d disappear by the next day.

We wore our masks in and there were only two other occupied tables.

Mike always gets an omelet. My favorite breakfast is two eggs over hard, bacon, fried taters, toast, and a side of pancakes. I’d slip one of the eggs between two halves of toast for a breakfast sandwich, eat two of the three strips of bacon, pick at the potatoes, and share the pancakes with Mike. Everything else came home with me. I was looking forward to our breakfast out.

When our food came it was just awful — at least mine was. Mike's seemed to be okay but the pancakes I'd been so looking forward to? They needed another minute. One side was nicely golden brown, but the other side was pale. The idiot cook thought to hide the non-browned sides in the middle, but I saw it when I pick up my pancake to put butter in between — is there any other way! It wasn't that it wasn't done, it was, but just barely. Like I said, it needed another minute to get that golden brown. I buttered, syruped, and cut our pancakes into bites while Mike worked on his omelet.

And my hard cooked eggs? The ones I was going to slide between two pieces of toast and make a sandwich? They were cooked together like the cook whipped them a little and dumped them on the grill. That was okay with me. I’d just cut it in half. When I did, I saw it was slimy. The whites weren't cooked!

“I can’t eat this,” I told Mike. “I’ll have to send it back.” Then I remembered that sometimes, some cooks, will spit in your food if you send it back. I don’t know that that’s ever happened to me — and I don’t know that it hasn’t either. With cooked spit, who can tell. It’s better not to take a chance. “I’ll just take it home and finish cooking it,” I amended, but secretly thought I’d probably just throw it out for the critters.

“I’ll eat it,” Mike volunteered. “I’ll put it on my toast, and you can have my omelet.”

I didn’t think it fair for Mike to have to eat it either but in the end, I traded with him. Mike didn’t think it was fair that he’d already eaten half his omelet. Even so, I only ate a few bites of the omelet and left the rest. There’s a reason I don’t order omelets.

I was sorely disappointed in breakfast.

After breakfast we headed over to Tunkhannock and did a little shopping and came home. 

>>>*<<<

          Mike and I have saved enough money to do another section of our roof.

          The weather has been beautiful! We’ve been in the upper ’60s and low ’70s all week. Mike got the ladder out and we went to measure for supplies. It was my job to hold one end of the tape and write down what he says. We were just about done when this guy came strutting across the roof. Smudge had climbed the ladder.

           When it came time to climb down, I carried Smudge. It surprised me when he didn’t struggle under my one-arm hold. He just stayed still and watched until we were two rungs from the bottom, which he judged to be close enough, and he jumped.

          The peepers are peeping and the polliwogs are polliwoging. 

          “What is that?” Mike asked.

          I knew. “It’s a part of the pond lilies.” When Mike was digging, he dug up a bunch. Some floated on the pond and some ended up on the bank like this one. This is the root part, or the tuber, and is about two-feet long. Lots of new lilies will grow from these.

The pretty yellow of Coltsfoot is popping up in the barren landscape of our roadsides.

       Coltsfoot is in the daisy family and the leaves come on after the flowers are gone. It’s used in herbal medicine to treat cough and inflammation. Externally, a paste is made to remove spots and blemishes, But Coltsfoot is high in pyrrolizidine alkaloids which are linked to liver damage and cancers therefore it’s listed as a poisonous plant so don’t fool with it.

          The pussy willows are pussy willowing!

          And this looks like something is going to bloom. Maybe just a leaf?

          I got my first picture of the year of a Red-winged Blackbird.

          Mike and I were in the barn with the door wide open when this little Barn Swallow came in.

        “I hear a bird,” I told Mike but he couldn’t hear her. I finally spotted her and snapped a picture.

        “Are you going to let them nest in here again this year?” I asked and fully expected him to say no, to say that he didn’t want bird shit all over everything.

          “I guess.”

          Boy! Was I surprised!

          “Should I open a window?” he asked.

          “Jody said they’d find their way in.” 

           Mike opened two windows!

          In the meantime, he finished jockeying the tractors around. My job was to make sure he didn’t hit anything as he backed the tractor up. It was a bit of a tight squeeze between the post and the other tractor but Mike’s a good backer-upper and didn’t hit anything.

          With the warm weather, I took Callie and Sugar out for some fresh air and sunshine.       

        They stayed out that first night. I wasn’t worried because it wasn’t going to get very cold and they could always go in the cat room. They could, but they didn’t. I checked before I went to bed and checked first thing in the morning and they weren’t there. I don’t know where they spent the night. Rain moved in the next afternoon and Callie came to the kitchen door. I brought her back in to the cat condo. We couldn’t find Sugar and I was afraid she’d been killed.

          Callie cried more that first night than I’ve ever heard her cry. “Do you think she misses Sugar?” I asked.

          “Maybe,” Mike said.

          A day and a half later we finally see Sugar and we’re relieved she wasn’t dead. She wouldn’t however, let us get close to her. Every few hours I’d check the cat room but she wasn’t in there.

          “I can live trap her,” I suggested.

          “Let’s do that,” Mike agreed.

          I got the trap, baited it with canned cat food, and put it on the front patio, which is where we’d been seeing her.

          “There’s Sugar,” Mike said from the living room. He’d seen her cross in front of the door. He got up and went out to see if he could coo her into coming to him. I met him as he was coming back in.

          “Where is she?”

          “She just went around the corner to the cat room.”

          I walked around the outside and peeked in the window. Sure enough she was in there eating. I blocked the outside cat door so she couldn’t get out and I couldn’t go in because the people door was locked. I’d have to go around and go in through the inside door. When I went in the cat room, Sugar was nowhere in sight. I found her hiding under a shelf. That stinker! I think. She could hear me coming and hide. How many times was she in here and I didn’t know it?  I gave her time to calm down and come out of hiding. When Mike went to check on her, she was sleeping in one of the boxes.

          “She let me pet her,” Mike said.

          “Pick her up and bring her in,” I said.

          “I’m not picking her up!”

          Sugar let me put her in the cat carrier and we brought her in and reunited her with her sister.

          “Do you think all the time she was running around out there that she was looking for Callie?” I asked.

          But Mike didn’t know anymore than any of us can know the minds of cats.

          Callie hasn’t cried since we put Sugar back in with her and they sleep together most of the time.

          It’ll be a sad day when we lose one of them.

          “Let’s not put them out again until the cold weather’s over,” Mike suggested. “We paid a lot of money to get Callie well and we don’t want her to get sick again.”

          “Fine by me.”

>>>*<<<

          Our list with what we would need for the roof had been living on the corner of the table. Mike and I were playing cards when Smudge jumped up on the table.

          “Get down!” Mike scolded and, in his haste to obey, Smudge knocked the list down.

          Mike reached for it. “That shit!” he cursed.

          “What?”

          “Smudge laid on it and won’t let me have it!”

          I grabbed my camera and saw that Smudge was indeed defending his list. We let him have it and picked it up after he’d moved on.

>>>*<<<

          Mike is so happy for the nicer weather. “Now I can work on the pond,” he told me and took the little tractor down to smooth out the mounds he’d made when he was digging out the pond.

          I was working on something or another when my phone rang. “Can you bring the golf cart down to the pond? I’m stuck.”

          He was stuck! The front tire had found a hole, the back tire was a few inches off the ground and he couldn’t push out using the bucket.

          I backed the golf cart up to the tractor and hooked the tow rope. When I pulled, the tractor tipped and I was scared it was gonna go right on over. I stopped pulling but Mike didn’t know it. I got off the cart and walked over until I got his attention and he shut the tractor off.

          “It’s not gonna work!” I cried. “It’s pulling the tractor over!”

          Mike put the roll bar up, repositioned the rope and we tried again with the same results.

          “Let’s get the Gravely. It’ll pull more than the golf cart.”

          I moved over and we went up to the barn for the mower.

          Mike drove the mower back and I drove the golf cart. He backed the mower up to the tractor, hooked a chain, then had to give me instructions on driving the mower. It’s been years since I’ve driven it.

        When everything was set, Mike revved the tractor and I pushed the handles forward on the Gravely — and went in all kinds of funky directions. The independent drive levers take a little getting used to! I was going sideways and backwards but I finally got the handles in sync, gave the tractor a jerk, and killed the engine on the Gravely. Then I couldn’t get it started. Mike had to get off the tractor and help me. I didn’t know the brake had to be on. He gave me more gas, went back to the tractor, and with the next try I was able to get it going in a forward direction a little better and pulled him out.

          Whew!

          I hung around and watched for a while then went back to the house.

          One of these days that man is gonna kill himself. Yeah, the roll bar will help — but not if you don’t wear a seat belt!

         Okay, so that’s all the jibber-jabber I’ve got for this week.

          Until next time, know that you're all in my heart.

          Let’s call this one done!

         

Adventures In Crafting

 

          This week has flown by for me. I spent three glorious days crafting — and entirely new crafting for me.

          Last week, when I was writing about making the tin can flowers, I realized I was negligent in picture taking. So, this week I did a much better job of documenting the processes and pitfalls.

          Something I’d love, love, love to do is make garden art and whirligigs from scrap metals. I’ve often thought I’d ask our son to teach me to weld; Kevin’s an expert welder! But a hobby on that scale is way beyond my means, not to mention Kevin’s a thousand miles away. I’ll have to content myself with a baby version, namely tin cans and hot glue.

          I found directions and a pattern online for a pinwheel made from a plastic folder.

         I’m gonna make it from tin, methinks. I use my trusty printer to resize the pattern then set to work opening six spent red beet cans. The hardest part was getting the bottoms off without bending up the can and something I couldn’t accomplish. If only I had one of those army can openers. I thought that would do the trick. I even think I have one around here someplace and took a few minutes to look for it. But I knew even before I started the search that it would be a waste of time. I’ll just have to pound the dents out.

          I drew the pattern on the can and cut it out. I’d been playing with the best way to do this and as a result, I got five vanes going one way, and one oddball which was cut wrong.

          It took me a while to figure out how that could’ve happened and I was really puzzled for the longest time. Especially when I was getting ready to re-cut it so I had a matching sixth one and saw it would be backwards too. What is going on! I wondered. I know I didn’t flip the pattern over and I know I laid it along the seam. Those two things I was certain of. I turned the can upside down but that still wasn’t right. Finally, it dawned on me that I’d drawn the other five on the outside, the shiny side of the can, and this time I’d drawn it on the inside.

          Next, I needed a spindle for the pinwheel to spin on.  The instructions specify a straw for use in making a plastic pinwheel. I don’t think a plastic straw’s gonna hold up in a metal pinwheel, I think and start searching for something to replace it with. I racked my brains and dug through all our treasures, aka junk. I couldn’t come up with anything. I might be able to use copper tubing but I’d have to go buy some and I didn’t want to do that. Eventually I thought of a barrel from an old ink pen. I tore the pen apart and cut it to size.

With that hurdle cleared, I now had to find a way to make a hole in the vanes big enough to accommodate the tube. This is where my problems started.

          I’ll use a drill, I think and hit Mike’s tools for the proper size drill bit and a drill. I didn’t ask for help but I got caught.

“What are you doing?” Mike wanted to know.   

          “I’m getting a drill bit so I can drill a hole in my can.”

          “One of my drill bits?” he wanted to know.

          “Yeah! I don’t have any of my own!”

          Mike got up to investigate.

          “Is this the size I need to fit this tube?” I showed him the tube and drill bit.

          “Yeah. What are ya gonna drill?”

          “My pinwheel. I need a hole big enough for this to go through, then it gets a nail through the center to nail it on the post.” I held up a piece of scrap wood in my other hand. “I’ve got a piece of wood to drill on.”

          “It’s a lot easier to just go out and buy one,” Mike, otherwise known as Mr. Grumbly Pants, said.

          “I don’t want to buy one. I want to make one.”

          Resigned to helping, even though I didn’t ask, Mike took the drill bit and secured it in the drill gun for me. “What do you want to drill?” he asked dropping the gun down to his side, offering, in his way, to do the drilling for me.

          “My pinwheel,” and I led the way to the kitchen/craft room. I picked up the vane from my worktable and showed it to him.

          “You can’t drill a hole in that?”

          “Why not?”

          “It’ll wind up on the drill bit.”

          I think he was worried I’d get cut. Me, a Hoosier at heart, says, “Show me.” He did. It did. And it ripped to boot. “We should’ve tried it on a scrap piece first. Oh well,” I said and shrugged. “I can make a new one.”

          “Don’t you have a punch?” Mike asked.

          “I do!” I remembered. I’d bought a disc cutting set years ago thinking it was a dapping set and never used it. I went out to my shop and brought it in, glad to have a reason to use it. I unboxed it and handed it to Mike.

          “These are all too big.”

          “Show me.” I took the dies out, slipped the edge of the vane in. “How can I tell where it’s at?”

          I know, right! I can be slow but I’d’ve probably figured it out in time. Mike is a much faster thinker.

“Put a dot on it.”

          I felt like an idiot. I dotted it with my trusty Sharpie, slid it into place, and Mike took over, hitting the die once with a hammer and he was right. It was too big.

          “Maybe it won’t matter,” I say.

          “It’ll wobble,” Mike guesses.

          “Well, how else am I gonna put a hole in it?”

          “It’d be a lot easier to buy one,” he iterates.

          “It’s not about having a pinwheel; it’s about making one! And making things is what makes me happy.”

          “Do you have a paper punch?”

          I did! An old single-hole paper punch from a hundred years ago. I dug around till I found it and it worked — and it wasn’t even hard to punch the hole through the tin. “It’s too little!” I whined and held it up for his inspection. “The tube won’t fit through!”

          “Maybe you can just use a nail.”  

          “Will it spin on a nail?” I asked.

          “It should.”

          “What’s going to keep all the vanes in place?” I asked aloud. “Oh. I’m supposed to hot glue them together.”

          Mike left me to it and I have to tell you, I’m not a big fan of hot glue. It gets hot! I burned my fingers more than once! I got all six vanes glued together but no matter what I did I couldn’t get the other side of the vanes glued. There was too much tension for the hot glue to hold. And once again I wished I could weld.

Mike had wandered out to the kitchen to check my progress. “It’s not going to work.” I told him. “Maybe if I used something thinner, like a soda can, it might, but this tin is too stiff.” I foresee a roadside pickup-trash day in my future. It’s littered with lots of drink cans. Mostly beer. In the meantime, this is what I ended up with. The wheels started spinning in my head and I’m dreaming up ways to finish this off and make it a flower.

But I really had my heart set on a pinwheel! I’m not buying plastic folders to make one, I think. Then I remembered that I’d been given a bunch of sheets of plastic. I have no idea what you call this kind of plastic, but when it was given to me by those wonderful, beautiful neighbors of mine, the Kipps, I thought I could use it to make stencils. Now I went out to the shop and brought a sheet in. I was soaring to new heights, working with a new material. I traced the vane, times six. The whole time I was cutting them out, I wondered how I could decorate them. An image of the Shrinky-dinks I’d made flashed through my mind’s eye. Permanent marker won’t come off plastic — at least not with water. I drew and colored the vanes. This part was time consuming, although not altogether unpleasant, but I didn’t want to spend so much time on the other side and I didn’t want to leave ‘em white either. I decided to use a wash and make it a solid color.

“How did you do that?” you ask.

          Well, I’ll tell ya. I scribbled some marker on, spritzed it with alcohol, and brushed it around.

         It doesn’t take long for the marker or alcohol to dry so the next step was putting them together. I have to tell you. I hate hot glue! I did what the directions said, made a circle of hot glue around the hole, lined the holes up, and promptly burned my fingers as the hot glue squished out and clogged up the hole. I think I have a blister.

          But I muddled through. You’d’ve thunk I’d’ve noticed before I was done that it was backwards, wouldn’t ya. I didn’t.

          I pulled the vanes apart but couldn’t pull the hot glue off. I had big ole gobs of hot glue left behind. I thought about just adding more glue and sticking them back together the right way but I thought it might be too lumpy.

Inspiration struck.

          What if I iron them? Would it stick to the fabric more than the plastic?

          So off I went on an experiment. I layered it between two pieces of cloth and when I saw the glue melting, I lifted it away. It was sticky and half on the cloth and half on the plastic, so I gave it wipe, and burned my finger. Of course I did. Have I ever told you how much I hate hot glue?

          For the most part it worked beautifully, until I wasn’t paying attention to where the iron was and melted the top of one of the vanes. I actually tried to add a little heat and straighten it out, but it didn’t work. This one would have to be mine.

          I re-glued it, used a file and Exacto knife to open the center hole up, inserted the pen barrel, a nail, and nailed it onto the post.

          Learning curve, folks. That’s all I gotta say.

          I tapped the nail in until the barrel rested against the wood — and it wouldn’t spin. Dah! I pulled the nail part way back out, the wind grabbed it and it spun like crazy!

          In the end, I’m the victor!

          But I have to tell you. I’m so excited to make one for my Miss Rosie that I set to work on it straight away! This one would be a lot bigger than the first one I made. The first one had vanes that were about six inches across. Miss Rosie’s would be ten-and-a-half inches! I drew, 

and I colored, then the weekend arrived and it’s on hold till next week. But I think she’ll like it.

          Speaking of learning curves…

          Besides saving the cans, I saved the lids. I had it in mind to make spinners from them but found out you can make bells with them. Yep. You heard me right. Bells.

          It took me several tries to figure out how to make them so they were more or less consistent, but I kept at it until I figured it out. I punched a hole, made my marks.

          Cut out my vees.

          And folded them over.

          Fishing string and nuts made the clapper on one.

          Fishing string and metal staples for clappers on another.

          When I shake them, they make lots of noise. But hanging outside, I’ve yet to hear the wind hit them hard enough to make any noise. I might have to re-think the way I put the clappers in.

          Besides Miss Rosie’s pinwheel, I’ve got another project awaiting completion. I’ve got three different size tin cans and I’m thinking I’ll paint them with homemade chalk paint, decoupage pictures on them, string them in a line, and add a clapper to the last one.

          Getting the cans out was easy. When I went for my homemade chalk paint, the chalk part had settled to the bottom and was pretty firm. I stirred and stirred.

          I should try my emulsifier, I think but was a little afraid to try. When I wasn’t making any headway with the lumps and a stir stick, I did break it out. It helped a lot but I wasn’t able to get all the lumps out. When the hand mixer started to smell funny, I decided to call it good enough and washed the paint off.

          I painted the cans, added owls, and set them aside to dry. We’ll have to wait and see how it turns out.

          And speaking, once again, of learning curves…

          The flower I made last week was put out on a fence post. This week I noticed that two of my petals had fallen off. I’m thinking I’ll have to find a better adhesive or maybe I’ll try soldering it.    

 

          Besides the cans and pinwheels (as if that wasn’t enough!) I also made matching Easter face masks for Lamar and Rosie. Easter is two weeks away and I thought if the Kipps wanted to get more than one wearing from the Easter mask, I’d better get ‘em made.

          “They’re so cute!” Miss Rosie gushed when I gave them to her.

          Just then Lamar came in from walking Tux. When he saw his mask he chuckled, went in the other room, and came back out with the book he was reading.

          Rabbits all over the place!

          Miss Rosie also liked the set of bells I gave her.

          “How clever,” she said. But I can only take credit for making them, not for the idea. Mother Earth News had a simple diagram for the bells, just no measurements.

          “You’re lucky I didn’t give you the first ones I made,” I told her. “They were all catawampus and different sizes.”

          “I wouldn’t mind,” she said and I know she truly wouldn’t’ve. I just wanted hers to be better than that.

>>>*<<<

          We had a visitor this week. I looked out and saw the stranger sitting just at the edge of the kitchen patio.  

Tiger and Spitfire were both out there and didn’t scrap with him. I took a picture through the door, but as you can see, with the sunlight in the background, it’s not a good picture.

I took a chance and opened the door. He looked up. I stepped out and he started to run, but stopped.

Now that I’ve gotten a good look at him, I see he’s a gray and white cat. I’ve not seen him around here before.

I cooed to him, but he wasn’t having any of it and took off, this time only going so far as the corner before stopping again.

Looking at him on my computer, I see he has the longest whiskers!

Whiskers! I think. That’s a good name for him.

I turned to go back in the house and see Mr. Mister is on one of the patio chairs, soaking up the sunshine.

Maybe it’s a female. If it was a male, Mr. would run him off, is what I think.

Once I was back inside, Whiskers came back. This time I went out with some food but my slow walkin’ and slow talkin’ didn’t entice him to hang around at all. He took off again. So, once again I went back inside.

The third time I saw him out there must’ve been the first time Mr. Mister saw him because he took off after him like his tail was on fire!

The next few times I saw Whiskers, Mr. saw him too and ran him off.

The Kipps stopped by after their morning walk for the first time since I don’t know when! Yay! I’ve really missed our morning visits and now that we’ve all had our shots we can resume them.

I showed them a picture of Whiskers and his really long whiskers hoping they might recognize him. Could he be from one of Mama’s litters before she was fixed? I didn’t specifically ask but know they would’ve said so had they recognized him.

“He does have long whiskers,” Miss Rosie said.

“You should call him Tex,” Lamar said.

Immediately the image of a crusty old cowboy with his dusty and worn Stetson sitting atop his gray head, his face sunbeaten and deeply lined, and a huge drooping mustache the center of attention came to mind. Tex is an excellent name for this guy, unfortunately, the suggestion is a little late. He’s already Whiskers to us.

In the end it’s pointless to name him. He’s likely a roving tom looking to propagate. I’ll probably never see him again and Mr. isn’t going to let him stay anyway.

Speaking of ferals…

I told you about bringing Callie and Sugar in and housing them in the cat condo because Callie was so sick. I told you about washing the snot off her nose only to be horrified when I thought her nose came off. Two weeks ago, I notice she had bald patches on her side. It was time to take her to the vet. I called and had to wait a week for an appointment. On the way over to the vet we took the long way and went through Wysox in order to stop and have lunch before the appointment. I won’t tell you it was McDonald’s and it was a Crispy Chicken sandwich.

I only took one picture on the way over to show you. It’s something many of you may see often, and something we used to see a lot of too, when we lived not here, but it’s something we hardly see anymore. Two Staters roaring down the highway at break-neck speeds, lights flashing, but no sirens.

“I thought the Tunkhannock State Police took care of our area,” I said to Mike. These guys looked to be coming from the Towanda branch. We never did hear what was going on.

Callie, in her Pet Taxi, cried the whole trip over. I tried to ignore her and treat her meows like white noise, but Mike called to her from time to time.

We’d planned to pick up our sandwiches and eat them in the parking lot of the vet but we were plenty early so we just pulled into a spot at McDonald’s and ate. With the car parked, Callie didn’t cry.

At the vet, this little ginger cutie patootie came out to pick up Callie and take our complaints back to the vet.

“She’s got bald patches on her side, and her nose…” I told Katelyn all about it.

“Don’t forget the lump,” Mike reminded.

“Oh yeah. And she has a lump between her front legs, but that’s been there a long time and isn’t a lot bigger than when I first found it years ago.” I wasn’t very worried about that lump. It’s not fast growing and it’s not attached. It just floats there under her skin.

Dr. Lori doesn’t work Monday’s so we saw Dr. Kaleta. After she finished with Callie she came out and talked to us. “I gave her a long-lasting shot that should take care of her upper respiratory infection. And I’ve seen noses like hers before in cats with respiratory infections. What happens is their nose runs so they lick it. Cat tongues are rough so she’s licked the skin off. Once it starts to heal, it itches, and she licks it more. The shot I gave her should take care of that. I think the bald patch is ring worm and I’m hoping the shot will take care of that too. The lump is maybe a small tumor but considering her age, I don’t think it’s of any concern.”

Ring worm, in case you don’t know, is not a worm. It’s a fungal infection. If you get it on your feet, they call it athlete’s foot. If you get it in the groin area, it’s called Jock Itch. It gets its name from the appearance of a ring around the rash.

We know Callie’s old but her exact age is a mystery. Dr. K guesses she’s at least twelve. “She’s lost all of her teeth and only has her canines left.”

I was shocked! I didn’t know that, but I’ve never looked in her mouth. Callie isn’t thin. She maintains her weight well but from now on I’m going to take extra special care of her making sure she gets more soft food than the others.

“We should see an improvement in the next couple of weeks. If her nose doesn’t heal, we may have to consider alternatives. There’s a cancer that will eat at their nose but her nose looks intact.”

We thanked Dr. K, paid our bill, and took a different road home.

Can you say road pictures!

Coming back through Dushore, we swung by and visited Momma, Pop, brother Mike, as well as Aunt Marie, and others of her family that are buried here.

I thought this was just about the coolest tree trunk carving I’ve ever seen.

Look at all the turkeys that flew across in front of us.

"Don't hit them," I say, like Mike ever would.

I see them go up into the woods as we pass by.

Passing a farm, Mike says, “Did you see all the hay in that barn? It’s coming out the roof!”

I hadn’t seen all the hay. I was busy looking at the white cat as it came bounding down from the hill.

Mike checked his mirrors and stopped in the middle of the road. I knew what he was going to do. “You don’t have to turn around,” I say to him. “I’ve seen hay and barns before.”

          “I’m not,” he says and backs up.

          Outside my window, these rusted gears were tied to a tree.

          Since Mike cared enough for me to see this picture, I took it.

         And I got to see another cat.

         Callie didn’t cry at all on the trip home. “She doesn’t want to go back to the vet,” I joked.

          And this week Mike and I got our second COVID shots. I didn’t take a lot of road pictures because it’s only been a couple of weeks since we’ve been on this road and I already showed you a bunch of pictures.

        Two views of the same tire swing. I can’t decide which one I like best and they’re both so different.

          At the school in Wellsboro, we sign in and zip through the line with very little wait time. Tywanda, the gal who gave me my first shot also gave me my second one. Her name is easy to remember because it sounds almost like a little town around here.

We did have to wait our ten minutes afterwards to make sure we didn’t have a reaction and hit the restrooms before heading home. While waiting for Mike I notice the lockouts on the drinking fountains and was fascinated by how they actually stay on. I looked it over but couldn’t figure it out. A couple of the volunteers were tickled that I found lockouts fascinating.

When Mike came out, he started conversing with one of the guys and found out his name is Matt Baker. Matt was a state representative before quitting and joining the Trump team. When Trump lost the election, he resigned and came back to this area. “I was involved with the development of the COVID vaccine,” he told us. “And was interested to see how the rest of the program works so I volunteer here.”

"He's a heck of a nice guy," Mike said later.

I took a few more pictures on the way home.

Coming back into Wyalusing, I had to turn around to snap a picture I’d missed on the way out of town.

Someone spray painted over the name Biden on this guy’s political statement. I’m guessing he’s as tired of seeing it as the rest of us. I wonder how long it’ll stay up now that it’s been defaced.

In my opinion, it’s time for all the campaign signs to come down.

Let's call this one done!