A Boat

Where we used to live had bulk trash pickup 4 times a year.  Let me tell you about the awesome crap people throw away!  My brothers have enjoyed participating in my cruises through the neighborhood.  One time we found a Little Tikes boat.  It's either a kid pool or sand pit, unfortunately there's a hole in the bottom.  I've had the intention to repair it for some time, but that has yet to happen.  That doesn't stop the grandkids from playing on it every chance they get.

One Year Anniversary In Our House

Has it been a year?

I remember when the relator brought us to this house.  How many times have I driven into this neighborhood to visit my college roommate?  But this street?  I had no idea even existed, tucked away inside a golf course. 

We walked around the yard before entering the house.  Wow, the yard, it was huge.  It reminded me of a park, all lawn sprinkled with trees.

  

Next to the house are two mature lilac bushes.  They were in bloom and I pulled a fluffy branch to my nose and told the relator "this right here could sell me this house."  And it did.

We walked through the interior and it fit absolutely everything we needed.  It's a practical house, not a two story, century old lady that I have long dreamed of owning.  It's a sprawling ranch that my husband and his bad knees can maneuver with ample room for all of our furniture, including my ridiculously oversized recliner.

The basement was finished and came with a pool table!  More attractive to us coupon clippers was the huge pantry with built-in shelves.  And yes, I have managed to fill it quite nicely.  Friends have declared this to be the destination of choice when the zombie apocalypse hits.

Most importantly, the house was clean, ready-to-move-in, unlike so many of the foreclosure homes we had viewed.  Despite wanting to tear down walls and completely overhaul the kitchen, the house is solid as it stands.  Even if we don't start remodeling for years to come, we are perfectly content living with it as is.

One year ago we took possession.  Moving in was hellish and the many hands who helped make it happen have my eternal gratitude.

It only took days to discover the glory of our front porch.  This one caught us off-guard.  It's actually not big enough, but the covered shelter is perfect to sit and enjoy the scenery any time of the day.  

We are most frequently parked there well past sunset, listening to the frogs serenade each other.  Our quiet, tree-lined street from this vantage makes it feel like a vacation rental.  I'm still surprised there isn't a lake lurking beyond the rooflines.

Next to the front door is a perfect perch for Maxi, the cement goose, we inherited from my grandmother.  She has a suitcase of different costumes that keeps us amused.

 

My mother remains the matriarch but she has passed the torch for hosting family gatherings.    My brothers and I are left to figure it out.  Thanksgiving 2013 proved that I can easily seat 20 people for dinner.  I didn't even know this was on my wishlist, oh but how I love it!  Here are two long tables, side by side, allowing children and adults all in the same room, boisterous conversation from all directions, and most importantly, we were together!

Practically everyday I stop at my backdoor, a sliding glass window, looking out on a squat red porch with an ugly red fence and I just sigh, feeling lucky, blessed.

I am happy.

OH THE STENCH!

On Sunday we were grilling on the back porch.  My husband kept saying he smelled something dead.  I got a whiff of it as I passed the trash so it had to be chicken bones or something.  We didn't think anything about it from there on out.

Oh we were sooooo wrong.

There was definitely a dead body in my yard.

On Tuesday my son discovered it and came running in the house insisting that I come look.  Tangled in the netting of a strawberry cage I had leaning against the house was... a.... five foot long SNAKE!

According to Facebook friends I should pack up and sell the house.  Nah, I'll keep the house and just get rid of the carcass. 

It was up to ME to evict our little friend.  Not the two men living in my house, me.  Had this been a live snake my story would be drastically different, but the bastard was dead so I had no problem being the one to remove him.  I had to pull the cage away from the house, snip the netting away from the cage framing, then used a pitchfork to move the snake into the trashcan.  My difficulty was with the horrid smell.  It took forever as I would walk to the edge of the yard, take a deep breath, come back to do a few steps, then run back to the edge of the yard.

The consensus from coworkers is that this was probably a black snake.  It really was about five foot long and about an inch diameter. 

I was happier thinking my moles and voles had vacated the premises because of the noise - I never even considered that they may have been eaten!  I have no idea how long Mr. Snake had been living in my yard, I would prefer to think he was just visiting and his actual residence was somewhere across the street.

OH MY GOD THERE WAS A FIVE FOOT SNAKE IN MY YARD!!!!!!!!!!!!

Voles, Moles, Squirrels... OH MY

Last fall I left you with moles going into hibernation somewhere beneath my rose bushes.  My yard had several mole habitrails running behind the house as well as several vole holes.  Warm days would bring fresh activity on the mole trails and I would punch them down and drop in a few pellets of poison.  The voles remained very quiet during the winter, even on warm days.  The poison in my traps sat for months untouched and eventually molded over.  EW

Then in March we brought down the trees.  They fell so hard the house shook.  I think that rattled a few cages below decks.  For days we would roll, flip, and drop the heavy logs across the yard trying to get them into a reasonable pile.  Then we rented a wood chipper and ran it for two days.  I'm pretty sure that ended any attempts to expand Mole Nation across my yard.  Those little buggers packed their bags and headed for a quieter neighborhood.

So far, pound on wood, ZERO mole activity and I haven't seen any vole activity either!  I'm not so naive to think they won't be back but maybe I can get my yard in order before they return.  ...in several years.

The squirrels, however, remain.  All tree access to my roof has been eliminated so no more pitter patter echoing through the house on a quiet morning.  That has been awesome, but they are still gnawing on the trashcans and plastic chairs.  Hubby bought an electronic noise thing that buzzes and squawks like a hawk.  It sat mere feet away from my trashcans where squirrels sat uninterrupted as they tried to chew the handles off.  The box was more effective is annoying the humans than any squirrels.  It's time to bring out the hot sauce spray again.

TIMBER!

Sorry I missed posting yesterday, I overslept.

What I wanted to share was the progress of the yard.   When we moved in last year we knew our tax return this year would go to a new AC and taking down some trees.  Little did I know those checks would be written in the same week!  My hippie friend who does AC work had to tap dance around the biker dude slaughtering our trees, or maybe the other way around.  I was at work and just heard secondhand reports from my husband.  The guys are weird characters but both do excellent work at killer prices.

We had three tall pine trees near the house that dropped needles in the gutters.  I actually liked them and they tossed a lot of afternoon shade on the house, but hubby felt a big storm could be catastrophic.  We also had a very mature sweet gum at the corner of our lot that dropped spiky balls of death.  There was zero love loss in taking this tree down and even the lady across the street was grateful to see it go. 

To keep the prices down we asked that we do the clean up and removal.  I wanted to keep the logs for firewood and chip the limbs for mulch.  When he dropped the trees he cut everything down to the right size for firewood.  My sons and my brother's family came to the rescue to help move all of that timber to reasonable piles and feed the stack of limbs through a chipper shredder.  The exceptionally large logs still need to be split so I will be renting a splitter sometime next week.

I keep rolling through my pictures because I'm sure I have a couple of the yard with the trees standing.  The landscape has totally changed.  I didn't get pictures of the first day when the pine trees came down.  That was a holy mess with green branches sticking up everywhere and made me think of a mass murder, but when the sweet gum was dropped the next week it looked like a tornado ripped through.  And with THAT I have pictures:

My first glimpse coming home

Fifty year old sweet gum.  It was a BIG tree and very dense.

Our woodchip pile

In a few weeks I should have pictures of the new garden and how the yard looks cleaned up.

I am still alive

Everyday I open my computer I think "I really should post something on my blog" and then catch up on Facebook and play a few games and before I know it time has slipped away from me.  Actually my TV and computer time have become grossly shortened.  I miss it, that's for sure, but life got busy.  Don't worry, though, I've had a camera capturing much of it.

Work has been crazy busy for me.  Last week was our annual auction which always sucks the life out of me.  The very next day I jumped into the finishing touches of our new website.  What should have been a couple of days worth of work has turned into over a week.  A lot of my progress has been hampered by my learning curve.  I'm having fun and definitely got the hang of it, but it's hard to stay on task when there are so many cool possibilities!

On the home front life is even crazier.  We have so much work that needs to be done for our house and only so much time and help to get it accomplished.  In March we had four trees dropped.  Instead of letting the cutter haul away the debris we kept it.  I wanted firewood and mulch.  The drawback is that the piles are moving very slowly.  My brother and his family descended on my house one weekend to haul the wood to one central location in the yard and run the limbs through the chipper/shredder.  Now it's May and the city has cited me for the bigass mess in my yard - not like I haven't been working on it since March, though.  I've been out there every weekend puttering away.  Half of my woodchip pile has been transferred to the front yard to kill the grass for a large flower garden.  The awesome part of that is the woody scent fills the air and is absolutely wonderful.  It's definitely much nicer than the nasty bagged crap the neighbor put out.  We were gagging on that for weeks.

My stacked wood pile wasn't far enough off the ground for the city's regulations so that has been torn down and raised.  I actually knocked that out in one day on my own.  There's still another pile of even larger logs that still need to be split.  They are too heavy for me to wrestle so I need my sons and a rented log splitter to converge at my house in the next couple of days.

There's light at the end of the tunnel and it will be great once it's all done.  This definitely took 3 times as long as expected.  Oh well.

We've also been wrestling my husband's worsening issues with his legs.  He has been suffering severe swelling and sores below the knees.  After several visits to the doctor I finally asked about compression socks.  We were sent to a medical supply/pharmacy who then sent us to an orthotic supplier.  The lady who met us there took one look at his legs and said, "lemphadema".  This was later confirmed and diagnosed by his doctor.  Basically he has had an injury to the lymph nodes behind his knees, his was years of wear and tear but for many people it comes from chemotherapy.  He requires wraps like ace bandages to bring down the swelling.  Finally it came down far enough that he was fitted for compression garments, not a sock, but a velcro locking system that goes up each leg. 

None of this is ideal and we have had to shift a lot in our lives to accommodate what is now a real disability.  His mom stayed with us for several weeks to drive him to and from appointments and treatment sessions.  He has lost nearly all ability to drive except short distances.  He needs help getting dressed and undressed, especially when wearing his compression garments.  It is time consuming but there is also light at the end of this tunnel.  He will never be cured of his lymphadema but now we know how to control it.  Our biggest hurdle is getting the gross ulcers on his legs to heal.  Last week I had the doctor prescribe silvadine and immediately, I mean within hours, we saw improvement.  That shit is MAGIC.  It's frustrating that I have to lead his doctor around by the nose but I haven't been wrong yet.  I learned from the lady at the orthic office that most doctors are uninformed about lymphadema.  Crazy but solutions are coming.

The happy part of my life is that I now live significantly closer to my grandchildren.  The daycare center is just around the corner from my house.  If it's even two miles away I would be surprised.  Later this week... well tomorrow... I will be picking up my two beautiful grandbabies to spend a few hours playing at my house.  In a few short months my daughter's baby (it's a boy!) will get to join the fun.  We are impatiently awaiting his arrival in mid-August. 

I have many many stories to share so maybe my hiatus will have been a good thing!



I wonder what I will post tomorrow?

Vole Update 12/2/13

Pushing spiky balls from the sweet gum tree into the holes seems to have had some effect on my yard chomping voles.  Or they went into hibernation.

My live traps aren't very effective traps.  And what they trap don't tend to live very long.  Something has figured out how to enter and exit, taking all of the yummy poisoned bait with them.  So I keep loading them and until two weeks ago they would be empty.  I'm pretty sure field mice are the culprits.  I've caught two field mice and one vole in my traps.  One mouse had his tail caught in the mechanism and the other got his foot tangled in something.  The vole just baked in the hot sun.  All of them have required a little manipulation to remove their carcasses... with a stick.  What?  I ain't touching those things!

Unfortunately, MOLES have crossed the street and hit my yard with a vengeance.  Three neighbors expressed surprise that their vermin made the trek.  For years the moles would move from their yards to the golf course and back again.  Evidently they got word from the voles about the sweet pastures found on this side of the street.  Chatty bastards.  I now have mole poison that I drop into their tunnels.  I'm going to have to wait until we have warm weather for a long streak before really attacking them.  Hopefully I can eradicate them before spring.

Autumn is here

10/29/13: This morning I looked up at the exact moment the sun rose.  It was a cloudy morning casting an orange glow over the neighborhood.  It was very pumpkin hued and I tried to get a picture unfortunately the colors didn't capture well.  It only lasted a few minutes and went away.

 

Two days later a rainstorm hit and every leaf dropped from the tree

The Holes In My Yard

Shortly after we put in an offer on this house I discovered that the bigass yard had some issues going on with the lawn.  Not all of it.  The biggest portion is thick, lush, green grass.  But this one section is mostly weeds.

At first I suspected moles but none of the identifying mounded tunnels ran through the yard.  Maybe it was mole damage from the past?  Then I wondered if it was a fungus of some sort?  I had noticed spots on one of the trees and a couple of the rose bushes.

Over the weekend I discovered tons and tons of holes in my yard.  These were something different than cicadas emerging from the ground.  I accept those bastards like ant hills, just part of the natural outdoors that is easier to ignore than battle.  In one hole there was an acorn.  Oh okay, I thought, squirrels are ripping up my yard.

Yes, yes, I realize that is a rather passive attitude, however, squirrels are not hell-bent on devouring one's lawn or ripping it to shreds to gnaw on the beasties that live under the lawn.  They make random holes, inadvertently planting future oak trees.  This damage is minimal and I can live with it. 

On Sunday I decided to mow the lawn (yes with my awesome new riding mower, vrroom vroom).  I moved the boat shaped kid pool...

 

Notice the nasty lack o'grass?

Lo and behold, under the boat were TWO brown critters.  They were longer than a mouse but not quite shaped like a mole.  I totally forgot that moles have digging flippers or I would have instantly realized these were not moles.  One darted off but the other just sat there staring at me, and me at it.  Was it a mouse?  It had mouse-like ears and a very mousy face but a shorter tail.  I realize most people DETEST mice but really, they are cute, if you can get past the fact that they carry fleas and the plague and will devour your entire pantry.  This guy was super duper cute.  I resisted the urge to touch it and then it ran away.  

Great.  I have mice.  At least they aren't in the house... yet.  As I said it wasn't a type of mouse that looked familiar.  The tail really was the wrong length.  I broke down and googled it.  Yes, it is a type of mouse, more commonly known as a vole.

I have since educated myself about voles.  Voles are vegetarians and prefer grass.  They LOVE golf courses.  Oh yeah there is one just beyond the house across the street.  Lucky me - golf balls and voles in my yard!  (we are collecting the golf balls and so far have found five)

Voles burrow down to a colony.  The exterior hole is the diameter of a broom handle.  Yep!

Moles form visible tunnels as they paddle just below the surface.  Voles, on the other hand, basically plow the top of the land for their tunnels.  This isn't quite as obvious in my yard.  I just have lots of brown patches with dead grass.  A lot of the green that has taken over are weeds.

I posted to Facebook my plight.  The suggestions ranged from getting a cat (two prowl the neighborhood already), shoving cat poop into the holes, concocting a brew of human piss, dishsoap, and garlic juice to pour down the holes, to dropping handfuls of human hair into the holes.  The last one would be easy considering how much I shed.

One of the easiest and least gross suggestions was to put pieces of partially chewed gum in the holes.

Guess what I had in my desk????

A "bat" filled with old gumballs.  

 

Seriously, shit like this only encourages my packrat tendencies.  Of course I have old gum.  And yes, I was willing to chew it.

Last night Doubting Teenager dispensed gumballs to his deranged mother who pranced from hole to hole depositing half chewed gum.  After a while he sort of got into it and was helping me find more holes.  Holy crap something has been very busy in my yard.  Most disturbing are the fresh holes in my lush, pretty grass.  This is all out war and it may mean forcing the menfolk of my house to urinate in coffee cans.

Fortunately this morning when I checked a few holes before heading off to work I noticed the gum was gone.  

I will keep you apprised of my vole adventures.