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!