Catch Up

 I've been bummed this week.
Of course, I'm upset about the chickens.  I gave up after Lizard died - I apparently did enough to keep out the raccoon, but there's no way I can block everything those little clever paws can reach through.  So the chickens have moved to the back deck.  I'm not feeling any safer, though.  It's screened in with just chicken wire, and a determined raccoon can get through that.  As an extra precaution I lock them in a dog kennel at night.   It's not ideal - for one, they're little poop machines, and for two, they don't have any dirt to scratch in - but I hope it will keep them alive.  I'll probably keep them there for a couple of months, until raccoon babies are old enough to stop nursing and Mom isn't so hungry.

Some things are moving along slowly.  The rosacea medication is kicking in, so I don't look and feel quite so much like a radiation victim.  But I'll be on sunscreen and moisturizers a lot.  I've started using a very old-fashioned (Victorian) moisturizer, which is simply a mixture of rosewater and glycerin.  No oils, not greasy, but it's a humectant which holds moisture in the skin.  Good for those hot days where a regular moisturizer would just make you sweat more.

And I'm waiting on the tooth again.  Good news on the root canal front - the dentist wasn't quite sure what was causing the toothache; the Xray didn't show anything definite.  He thinks that it just could be that my bit changed a tiny bit, and I was biting down too hard on the "temporary" crown.  So, to experiment, he ground it down.  If it quits hurting, we'll give it three weeks for any inflammation/irritation to clear and then put on the permanent crown (I put the "temporary" in quotation marks because I've had it on for 10 months now).

Adrianne had Friday off so we got together for ice creams and spinning.  Normally we have a lively time together, but she was very subdued.  There's a park that she likes not far from her apartment, and where she usually gets together with her SCA friends about once a month.  Thursday night there was a fatal shooting there.  That rather puts a damper on a place where you felt safe and had fun.

So, feeling bummed in general, I've been missing Bob a lot. Desperately.  Really didn't help when I was doing some cleaning up and found some pictures from our old SCA days - people in funny clothes having fun.  Except that you can't look at pictures like that without your brain going : Heart attack. Leukemia. Breast Cancer. Suicide.   I wonder what my prize will be for Last Person Standing?

I've been having an earworm of Jason Isabel's "If We Were Vampires"  

Maybe time running out is a gift

I'll work hard til the end of my shift

And give you every second I can find

And hope I'm not the one who's left behind

I work it out by tackling the yard (early morning, with sunscreen on).  I've been focusing the last few times on the driveway - the underbrush has been growing in enough that the driveway is getting a bit narrow - fine for my little car, but someday someone else with a normal size car might need it (who knows?  It's been six months since even Rob and Amanda came to visit).

I finished the pink linen poet's shirt tonight - pictures later.  Who knows when I'll wear it - but it does feel lovely to put it on.

And the little wrens on the catio have hatched and will be fledging in a week or so, and the poor housebound cats will be able to have some fresh air again.  So life goes on.

A Lovely Day with Jeff . . . but then

 Jeff moved from Tallahassee to Tennessee almost a year and a half ago when his husband Rob got his dream job there.  Thanks to modern technology, he was able to keep his job here.

And, lucky for me, he had to come to Tally for some meetings, and had Saturday free to spend with me.  Of course, we had to go hang out at the museum.  He volunteered there for a decade or so; in fact, it's how we met.

It was lovely just hanging out.  Usually, wherever I'm am, I'm there for a reason.  Get it done and go home.  And I think it had to be good for Jeff.  He's been quite lonely.  Rob actually goes into work with other people, and travels a lot in his job.  Jeff works from home.  They bought a house which needed a *lot* of fixing up, then they both got Covid, then Jeff got diagnosed with heart failure and had his bypass and recovery.  All of this adds up to not much chance to try to get out and meet people.  But at the museum - it seemed that everywhere we strolled, we'd see the big smiles and hear "Omygod it's Jeff!" and people would come running over.

Then we had lunch at a little hole-in-the-wall Caribbean place that has pineapple bowls served in a hollowed out pineapple half.

So a great day.  Then I came home,  I had brought the pineapple shells home for the chickens to pick at.  As I walked to the pen, I saw chicken legs sticking out from under the door.  It was Lizard, my hen who would often lay tiny "fairy" eggs - less than an inch long.  I would leave them out by a small gargoyle as an offering to the fae folk.

Dammit dammit dammit dammit.  Can't I be allowed to have one nice day without being kicked in the gut?

There's just nothing much that can be done to stop a determined raccoon.  I had reinforced the threshold, but there is still a tiny gap between it and the door (I can just get a finger in there.)  I think I know what may have happened.  Chickens are both curious and stupid.  Possibly the raccoon was feeling around, with those slender active little hands, and the hen thought it looked interesting and went over to peck at it - and got grabbed.  I won't get graphic here, but it wasn't pretty.

Quick funeral - because I had to get back to the living before the raccoon did.  At this point, I moved the remaining three hens to my back deck.  It's far from ideal; they are poop machines and I don't have running water back there, so I'll be doing a lot of daily water hauling and scrubbing.  Also - the back deck is wired in with chicken wire, and we've had raccoons break in there in the past.  But as long as I'm at home, I'll be able to hear if something happens (which I can't if they're in the coop) and I'm shutting them into a dog kennel at night.

And once again praying that it's enough.

Red Faced, Sore Mouthed, Still Got Stuff Done

 And here's the blog post I meant to write yesterday before I had to have a chicken funeral and repair the pen.

Odd, this compulsive writing.  I think it's because I literally lost 2021.  I remember 2020 all too clearly, but I can only assume that 2021 happened because at some point we moved on to 2023.  So the 13 posts that I wrote in 2021 became the 86 posts for 2022 and I think this is number 44 for 2023 so far.  

I'm trying to hang onto my life.  I was talking to my friend Judy a few months ago (she lost her husband 6 years ago) and at one point I started a sentence with "do you ever feel like you're just . . ." and she finished it with "marking time?"  A lot of this is just to remind 2024 Self what was going on, so she doesn't feel quite so alone.

On with the post.  At the end of March, I wrote that I was still dealing with the sunburn/skin damage from 2 weeks before, when during the Roads Scholar trip I went out in a boat for the first time in years.  Guess what?  I still look and feel like a radiation victim.  Cortisone creams are good for short term, but can be bad over a long period of time, and they weren't helping much anyway.  I finally went to the doctor, and the first best guess was rosacea.  That's normally just on the face, but it's my neck that's inflamed.  I'm on medication for it - which says can take 3 weeks to start taking effect and 9 to really see any results.  In the meanwhile, I'm supposed to avoid sunlight, heat, and sweating.

In Florida - yeah.  And yes, when I go outside I slather on sunblock and wear a hat, which combine to make me sweat more.  Two out of three . . .

But it one sense it made me oddly productive.  It's getting warm and wet, which means that everything is growing out of control.  But I'm not suppose to be out in the sun (and sweating).  So, for a few mornings, I would be out working in the yard before breakfast; only for an hour or so, but it's amazing how much work you can get done in a short time if you're hoofing it.  And, oddly, it really helped my mood to get something noticeably accomplished first thing in the morning.  It gave me the impetus to get more done, rather than sit on the couch and wonder what I might do that day.

One thing that I did (indoors) was start tackling the books.  There are hundreds of them.  I realize that I've been doing the culling backwards - going through, pulling out a few books to take to the Friends of the Library.  What I'm now doing, instead, is pulling the books down, and seeing which ones make me go "awwww" and those are going in a laundry basket (or 3 or 4)  The others are back on the shelf.  This means that when I'm ready to take a load to the library, I can just grab the off the shelf into the latest Amazon box and go.  When the shelf is empty, the keepers can go back on.  This is still going to take awhile - I have hundreds of pounds of books to carry out.  But it's a start.

On a side note - I'm dealing with a tooth.  Last summer it sort of gave way, and my dentist started work for a crown, but couldn't decide whether or not I would need a root canal (I like him; he's conservative and doesn't do anything he doesn't have to).  The compromise was to put on a temporary crown and see what happened.  Nothing happened for 6-7 months, so at my last cleaning and inspection it was decided that we can go ahead and crown it.  That's scheduled for next Thursday.

Except that it started aching Wednesday night.  Throbbing a bit.  Really hurts at any pressure.  Which means it's root canal time.  I tried calling my dentist but got no answer on a couple of times.  (The dump and post office are also closed today - apparently it's some holiday I don't know about.  Maybe emancipation day, which is officially tomorrow).

I did wake up at a reasonable hour this morning - with burning skin and a throbbing tooth and sadness at losing my friendly little chicken, and I said screw it with getting up and doing work.   I've had a lazy day, doing some reading (Ebaida and I finished our marathon reading of all the Harry Potter books, and in a fit of nostalgia  I'm rereading Lord of the Rings) and sewing.  When I bought the linen for my couch cover, I was fairly close to having spent enough to get free shipping.  So I could a) pay a big shipping cost, or (b get a couple more yards of linen, both for about the same amount of money.  Duh.  

It's a lovely light handkerchief linen in a subtle color somewhere between pink and gray.  As I'm making this blouse because I love handling linen and not because I'm in any great need of a new dress blouse, I'm doing most of the sewing (except for a few long seams) and finishing work by hand.  And I've added another nice detail: instead of just putting gathers in the top of the sleeve, I'm doing a little fancy smocking (which added 2-3 hours of work, but it's all about the process, not the product)  

And now it's nearly 9 p.m. and I haven't thought about dinner yet.  Everyone else (chickens, fish, cats, and squirrel) have eaten, so that's OK.

RIP Paper

 I was going to write a blog post yesterday about a few things that are going on.  One of which being a phone app called Merlin, which will record bird songs and tell you what birds you are hearing.
I had to do some fussing to get my phone to work with it.  Finally rearranged and cleared up some available memory and got it to load.  I walked outside and heard bird sounds that I did not want to hear.  The sounds of chickens panicking.

I got there in time to see the raccoon frantically escaping the scratch yard.  After Malcom got killed last week, I went over the coop, tightening a slightly loose board, reinforcing the threshold under the door, checking for any means of access.
What I missed was a loose wire.

The pen is not made of chicken wire (obviously the most commonly used fencing for chicken coops).  We used a strong welded stock wire, with a 1.5" x 2" grid.  But near the coop itself, a couple of the welds had come loose, so the that horizontal wire could slip down a couple of inches.  If I hadn't caught the raccoon going through it, I wouldn't have seen or believed it - she was able to force open a gap barely over 3" across and somehow get through it, with the wires springing close behind it.

So I got there in time to see where she got in.  But I did not get there in time to keep her from killing another chicken.  It was Paper (of my little tribe of Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, and Spock).  She was the one I wrote about in January, who had become mysteriously crippled, and who I nursed back to health, and who I had the Museum babysit when I went on my Roads Scholar trip because she hadn't reintegrated back into the flock and they were picking on her.

The one who got used to special treatment from me, and would jump into my lap.

Dammit dammit dammit dammit dammit.

A friend suggested that I move them somewhere safer.  But the pen and coop is the safest thing I have - we *way* overbuilt it.  The nickname is Stalag Chicken.
I love chickens, but they poop like crazy and can get stinky.  I really can't have house chickens.

So I was out there last night, in the dark and the rain (which didn't deter the mosquitoes and biting flies) with fencing wire, reinforcing that area.

I pray it's enough.

RIP Malcolm; More Competence

 It's been a helluva day.
Started out OK - I actually got up soon after breakfast because I knew I was covering an afternoon shift at work today and I wanted to tackle the dryer.
I had noticed recently that the dryer was not really doing its job.  It was taking something like 2 hours to dry a load of laundry.  Well, it's old.  But what a pain - I did not feel like going dryer shopping, and the hassle of delivery (no matter how many times we tell them, they never send the smaller delivery truck, only the big one that can't make it up our driveway).

I analyzed the problem.  The tumbler was working.  The clothes were getting hot.  They just weren't getting dry.  To me - that sounds like an air circulation problem.  So this morning I pulled the dryer out . . .

Yuck.  I have a hard enough time keeping the middle of the room clean; I don't go looking in hidden places.  But that dryer hadn't been moved out in years, and it was a rather nasty looking archaeological site back there.  But I got it cleaned up, and then down to the business of removing the exhaust hose and cleaning it out.  And there was the problem - there was enough lint there to make it look like a family of guinea pigs had moved in.  I got it all cleaned out and put back together, and now it works fine.  Pleased as I was at my own competence, there was still that bit of wistful sadness that this didn't used to be my job.

I was multitasking.  While I was working on there dryer, I was roasting some vegetables.  After I finished the dryer, I took the trimmings and scraps out to the chickens.  And there, in the corner, was the mangled remains of my rooster Malcolm.  Somewhere in the 2 1/2 hours between my letting them out into the scratch yard this morning, and going out with their treats, something got in and killed him (and partially ate him).  Likely raccoon.

He was a lovely bird; I don't think that I ever got a good picture of him.  A Rhode Island Red, but with the "frizzle" gene, so that all of his feathers were twisted and curled and fluffed around him when he walked.  Unlike some roosters, he was never vicious.  The only time he would threaten to jump me was when I had to grab one of the hens.  I don't think he ever ate any of the treats that I would toss to them; instead, he would cluck and peck at them and call his girls over.

I gave him his funeral, then started going over the scratch yard trying to find any loose board or gap in the wire that would have let the raccoon in.  Then I had to go to work for a few hours.  When I came home, I inspected and tightened up things more.  Finally, I fed the cats, showered, and ate.

So I'm really tired now.  And sad.  Malcolm (so named because he liked to roost in the middle of the girls) was such a good rooster, and he died defending his ladies.  While you don't need a rooster (hens will lay eggs anyway) it just seemed more natural to have him with his little harem.  I'll miss his crowing.  And, of course, now I'm going to worry that something will get the girls.  That's why they're locked up safe at night, when the predators normally hit.  But it's baby season now, so the mothers are hunting all the time.  I don't blame them - animals have to eat - but I thought they were safe.

 

I Wish . . . .and Help From Friends

 Random thought of the day:  Sometime I feel like I am the one who is a ghost, wandering through the remnants of a past life.

"I wish."  Those were words I had to be careful about using, along with things like "wouldn't it be cool if" or "oooooo, I like that."   Because if I didn't follow it up quickly with "just thinking out loud, just admiring it but don't really want it" or some other disclaimer - Bob would make it happen.  He would do it, or buy it, or make it.  Yeah - I was spoiled.

Sometimes it backfired.  Simple things - like the time I had a large bag of sunflower seeds temporarily stashed in the den until I needed to refill the bucket on the back deck.  It was the type of bag with the stitched strip across the top, which if you pull the string correctly it unzips - or you can spend 20 minutes trying to pick it off stitch by stitch.  I had to get into the cabinet it was leaning against and started to pick it up from the top corners.  Bob came hustling over, grabbed the little strip and string, and zipped it off with a "Ta Dah!"  look on his face.  I gave him a blank look.  "Nice.  Happy for you.  Now could you go get a stapler or some tape so we can close this back up until we need it and won't spill seeds everywhere if it tips over?"

Hmmm.  Got a little sidetracked there.  It's about 5 a.m.  I went to bed early last night so now seem to be awake, which I will regret in a few hours.  

Anyway - the I wish.  Most of the time it really was lovely.  Such as the time that I was wishing I had a bigger work surface in the cottage.  The cottage had come with a freestanding kitchen counter about 6 feet long, 18" wide which we had moved out to be a work table.  But I really wanted something wider.  Bob came up with the idea of getting a set of kitchen cabinets and setting them up parallel to the counter, taking the old narrow counter off, and putting on a 4' by 6' top.  Worked a champ, and gave me a lot more storage space.

It had the added bonus of some "deep" storage space, as there was a gap between the old counter and the new cabinets, wide enough to slide in some storage boxes.

As I was happily arranging stuff in my new space, Bob wandered out to the barn.  He soon returned with that "TaDah!" look on his face, dragging his new creation.  He had taken a long board, reinforced the ends, put on casters, and fashioned a folding handle out of PVC pipe.  The idea was that when I needed to get to the stored boxes I could just pull them all out, instead of having to get on my hands and knees and crawl under.  Pretty clever.

That was years ago, but I was remembering it this week because a friend wanted some wool fleece for another friend to insulate some beehives, and I was digging out some stuff in "deep storage" which meant that I would likely never get around to spinning it.  So out it came, along with all the memories.

I was cleaning up in the cottage anyway (meaning "clearing a path.")  A few months ago, when it was cold, I had my electric radiator on, and, without thinking, plugged a hair dryer into the same outlet to hurry up a painting job (it was when I was putting highlights on my crow lamp).  And blew the circuit breaker.  But when I flipped the circuit breaker back on the outlet was still dead.  I replaced the outlet - no joy.  I used a multimeter to test the wires - no juice. That is the full extent to which I will play with electricity.  I have other outlets in that room.  

But hot weather is coming, and that is the outlet for my air conditioner.  I check with Rik and Christy at the feed store - because they are the people who know everybody, and would know a good electrician.  Rik thought it might be something simple, and came over yesterday with a friend who is good with it and with a bit of poking and prodding and testing outlets and following wires came to the conclusion that it was the breaker that had burned out - it's an easy fix.  I have my outlet back.

It was really nice of them; the sort of thing you do for a friend, and they were happy to help me.  And it's nice to have it fixed.  And yet, after they left, I was restless.  I pulled some stuff out of the barn to take to the dump tomorrow, washed out some flowerpots to donate at the community garden, swept the front deck.  Finally, I fixed a carb-heavy dinner, hit the wine, watched BattleBots, and went to bed early.  Hence - up at 5 a.m.

Why depressed over getting an outlet fixed?  Well, for one, I've always been territorial about my stuff, and having a couple of people poking around my cottage was disconcerting.  Mostly I think it was because stuff like this underscores the fact that Bob ain't here, and he ain't coming back, and he won't be the one to fix things for me with that happy flourish of "TaDah!"