End of Year Project- Kudos to Bob

I wish I had thought to take a picture of the barn before Bob put this lovely wood door up! He really surprised me by just taking the initiative and doing it.
Previously, this section of the barn (which store Maggie's hay supply) was cloaked in an increasingly deteriorating tarp. Looked like shanty town! But Bob cleverly used wood that we had left from other projects and hardware that we had been given to us... in short, it cost like nothing and works really well. The right hand side rolls on a track so you can open  and close it easily. He put a great metal handle on it and it will weather to the same grey in short order. Both Maggie and I are very happy although the picture below doesn't seem to suggest that! Sometimes, it's very difficult to make your horsey friend put her perky little ears forward in a semblance of a good mood:

She appears a tad suspicious in this picture; sort of the "Leave me alone. I was sleeping and what's that annoying little box in your hand? No, I won't put my ears forward and look like your pleasant little palfrey!" But at least her hay is nice and dry and the barn looks so much better. I guess the unseasonably warm inspired Bob to get the door done. We are enjoying the strange December benevolence but it's worth remarking that this is happening during the Paris Climate Summit. Mother Nature does seem intent on reminding us that we're messing around with the natural order of things. Let's hope that- Climate Change deniers aside!- the powers that be come to firm resolve about our environment and everyone gets on board!

Big Feet and Other Scary Stuff

(Well some how I screwed up (while attempting to multi-task) and I published this blog before I was even done) and someone even looked at it!).
Ahem! So Jules the Dog and I went out for our walk and had only just gotten to the car parking area of the dirt road when I saw the above track in the nice soft sand. That is a big foot print! We actually walked all the way back home to get the camera to document the print. And I compared it the listed mountain lion/bear/bobcat prints on the Internet and it looks just like Mountain Lion.
For scale, here's my hand next to it.

(Funny that other people did exactly the same thing for scale. You can google that.) Anyway, sort of freaks me out that there are these super large felines prowling around out there, ready to eat me and Jules. Yes, I suppose it might be a very large coyote but that would be bigger than most I've ever seen. And I took a shot of Jules' footprint in the same sand and it was no where near as deep or impressive and he weighs 55-60 pounds.
Here are a few other  things to be scared of:

Ahhhhhhhhh!!! Ben Carson AND George Bush! Or even worse:

 http://i.giphy.com/xTk9ZMvytLICEWw9bi.gif
Follow that link to get the full effect! Pretty scary stuff out there... and it's real!
Or how about this charmer:

What's terrifying is thinking of any one of them as president... give me mountain lions any day!

And it only gets weirder; just wait until next weeks debate. OOOOOOOOOOoooooo! You'd think every day is Halloween!

Insidious Piles

While the title of my blog could be referencing unfortunate fistulas, it is actually about heaps: heaps of everything. Newspapers, unopened mail, books... really, it is possible to construct piles from almost anything. I should know, as I am an inveterate piler-on.
I seem to be in a confessional mode and allowing one of those occasional glimpses of how we live here at the BauHaus Chicken Coop. Bob can be excused from this conversation, as he is much better than me at eliminating piles- sometimes by simply chucking everything in the offending pile into the garbage can. He is less tolerant than I am of clutter.

Piles evolve. They start as a single magazine or book and advance down that (literal) slippery slope towards deconstruction. I like a good tower in danger of avalanche-dom! It makes for fireworks and excitement when the pile finally lets go and everything comes whooshing down. Once the components of a pile are spilled onto the floor, a better assessment of the contents is possible and an edit can begin. Most of what is found in the pile are expired coupons, notes to one self about interesting books or music to check out (this becomes another auxiliary pile up near the computer) and the book that was due last week at the library.

This last heap is particularly noteworthy. It's what happens to a pile that gets moved because friends are coming to dinner. The pile that resided on the edge of the kitchen table now "hides" on the washing machine. This pile may be returned to the kitchen table intact, or allowed to age until the laundry needs doing. In truth, I probably wouldn't miss anything in this pile if someone came along and threw it away. But you never know.
And really? Our house isn't too bad. We clean up the worst of the dog fur and dust bunnies every few days and our bed is made and the dishes are done. It's just that piles happen.

Things to be Thankful For

I don't know about you, but I'm plenty thankful for lovely mushrooms like the ones above that are growing on a stump in our back yard. They look like constellations. Here's the whole group of them:

I think they're as nice as anything I could have planted.
So here's a bulleted list of reasons to be thankful this Thanksgiving season:

• For Bob! He's a great guy and a good cook. Plus, he and our good friend Joe finished my studio ceiling the other day. Yaaayyy!!!
• Jule the Dog; the perfect dog who's only psychotic like .09% of the time.
• Maggie the Mexican Pony who may have soundness issues of late, but is a very nice horse.
• My studio- with new ceiling or not, one of my absolute favorite places to spend my time.
• Good friends and family members. They don't vote republican and they're not total weasels.
• A car that got me home yesterday. Although it threatened to leave me screaming at the side of the road, it came through and made it into the yard.
• For Stop and Shop being open today, although it is Thanksgiving. Bob and I sort of didn't really plan ahead as our family wasn't celebrating until later in the week. So we didn't consider that maybe other people (like the ones that work at stores) should be with their families. We were able to purchase ingredients to make Quesadillas and pumpkin pie for tonight. (Frozen, on sale pumpkin but pie none the less!)

So there! That's my 2015 list. Happy Thanksgiving!

At Last... Insulation!

Insulation at last! Bob and Joe and I are in process, installing insulation and sheet rock the better to regulate the climate in my studio. You will remember that we had finished the majority of the hard work last fall, but still needed to get to the ceiling. Work began Friday...
I sort of like the tutti frutti two color confectionery fiberglass; looks like Easter colors. Of course, sheet rock is going up over it. And I should mention that a very generous and gracious client of Bob's gave us the insulation as she was having work done at her house in the attic. This prompted us to bring it home and use it!

But first here's a shot of the scaffolding that's making this all so much easier! (Not that it's not hard work. The fiberglass is nasty scratchy stuff. I cut it outside on a nifty jig that Bob made... so much faster! And the sheet rock- yes, called "ultra light" but believe me, it weighs plenty!)

Here's Bob and Joe. I'm sure they're delighted that I'm documenting their heroic efforts to finish my studio!

And hey presto! Sheet rock goes up, the insulation vanishes and I'm feeling snugger already. Tomorrow, when I return from "the salt mines" (as I affectionately call my place of work) the ceiling should look like... a ceiling!
(And I will mention: I wanted to make a blog posting earlier, but felt somehow not up to my usual silliness after the Paris terror attacks. Being concerned about the self indulgent or petty preoccupations of one's daily existence can seem so minor when confronting the bizarre realities of the world in which we live. I was so saddened and sickened by recent events that I couldn't even blog.)

Can It Get Any Weirder?

I'll tease with the above picture but start my dialog by saying, "You know how Bob and I have been having really bad luck with cars and trucks for the past few months?" Well, it only gets weirder so read on.
Our good friends Caltha and Jerry gave us their used Subaru Impreza. Gave it, as in "free"... very generous indeed! Gotta love friends like that! Thank you!!! By last Sunday, it was registered, legal and ours and in our yard, awaiting a muffler replacement, to be done by a friend of a friend (also named Bob). There were a few part-not-ordered mishaps (thanks to the AutoZone in the next town- don't get me going) but the parts were assembled and Car Bob installed the system. It only took an hour, we fired it up and it ran like a charm. I did some errands, exclaiming how wonderful it was to be a two-vehicle household again.
Monday morning I say to Bob, "Just think; I'll drive the car to work and the truck is here, ready to take you to the store or deliver a job you've finished... whatever you need to do!" Of course, nothing is that simple. The car exploded to life but proceeded to get louder and louder and wouldn't run without my foot on the gas. So I sat there thinking, "This is too much". Bob heard the car's commotion from all the way down in his studio and when I turned the car off (as there was no way I could drive it) it kept making this over-heated pinging noise and generally acted like it was going to explode. Needless to say, I took the truck.
So at lunch, I decided to drive up to the garage that had disposed of my Honda and get the $50 that scrapping the car had gotten (Pathetic). I got in the truck, looked ahead of me, saw a co-worker  standing in front of me, standing in front of his truck and I thought, "Oh, I'll never fit between him and the next car over. I'll just back up." The result is the damaged car, above.
You see, the truck is very high. When I looked out my back window, I didn't even see the Volkswagon Passat directly behind me. It gets worse.
I go into the building to find my victim, who turns out to be an elderly (and now irate) customer of the auction house who was there to consign merchandise. I sheepishly confess what I have done- really, I felt terrible (and stupid!) but hey! I wasn't trying to hit her (deep breath) brand new (as in she hasn't even had it a week) car. I mean, brand spanking new...
I will not go into the pitch of her fury or that she insisted I call the State Police, who told me that as I readily admitted that I'd hit her car and it was on private property and no one was hurt, they didn't really need to send a trooper. But she insisted; I think she was hoping the feds would haul me off in leg irons. The police officer who arrived was very nice, and I am sorry to say, entertained by how out for vengeance (or at least a pound of flesh) my victim was. He actually smiled benevolently at me and her and said, "Look: it was an accident. She (me) admits she hit your car. All you need to do is exchange information." My victim kept insisting that the police officer write up a report, treating it as a crime scene. He replied that they don't investigate or file reports on cases like this, as there was no case. She kept insisting that I be publicly stoned or taken to a labor camp or at least chained to a rock where Ford F 150's would back up into me all day long. Something, anything... she wanted justice.

(Insult to injury, absolutely nothing happened to our truck. I think that bulge in front of the license plate directly impacted her hood. Sorry!) The upshot was that she decided she didn't feel safe driving her car and would wait for a tow truck to drag her poor car all the way to Greenwich (although the police officer and a few of my sympathetic* co-workers assured her that absolutely nothing had happened to her engine, just her hood was smashed in and looked dramatically awful but it started and ran just fine.) Did I say I felt really bad? I did, several thousand times but she did her best to berate me, so much so that it got funny and even the police officer was laughing. (Discretely, but he was amused.) She actually waited for that tow truck all afternoon. Like until 4:00. We all took turns, looking out the window expressing disbelief that she was still there. Even the cop, who had kept a vigil with her finally left. (I bet she gets a bigger car next time she's in the market for a new ride.) I drove all the way home at twenty miles an hour and will only go forward from now on.
And the car? Car Bob came back out to check out what on earth had caused the Subaru to threaten to explode... but of course when Bob and Bob started it up and took it out for a test drive, it performed perfectly. Am I nuts? Did we need this? Bob and I can't believe our bad "kar-ma".

*Sympathetic to me as she really was a bitch. I mean, yes, I wrecked her brand new car and probably ruined the rest of her life but give me a break! I was very contrite! My co-workers all watched as she continued to harangue me.

Wildlife Tragedies and Mysteries

Last Sunday morning was truly awful. I fed Maggie and was on my way into the house to eat toast with Bob, when I spied Jules standing stock still over by the fence, staring intently at something. I say "something" as I wander around outside quite often with no contact lens in my good eye and I miss things. I had to get very close to Jules and I'm thinking he sees a squirrel or the neighbor's dog.. But then I realize, with my nose almost on the fence, that he's looking a grey think IN the fence. I think it's a leaf or a mushroom (I am half asleep) and I'm on top of the fence and Jules before it dawns on me that it's the hind end of a bunny, stuck at a really weird angle. I realized this poor bunny is stuck in the fence, and probably hurt. Poor Jules was very good and realized that I was upset as he followed me without a protest straight into the house.
I retrieved Bob, safety glasses, two pairs of heavy leather gloves and a pair of tin snips. Bob and I set to work, trying to free the obviously badly injured rabbit from the fence. When he was finally free, he slide in a pathetic little heap of bunny fur on the other side of the fence and Bob and I agreed that there was only one humane thing to do.
Bob went and got a sharp shovel and I carried the badly hurt rabbit to a clear spot on the other side of the fence and finished him off. At this point, I'm crying (it was very sad!) and it's raining and it couldn't have gotten more gloomy or tragic if we'd scripted it. I buried the bunny and put a small bouquet of late chrysanthemums and yellow amsonia leaves on his grave. So much for Sunday morning.

And today, the next Sunday (and a time change one at that: I'm confused, as usual about what time it REALLY is) I go outside with Jules to feed Maggie and there's another wildlife mystery. There's a large pile of some kind of poo in the yard, right by the long border. I almost stepped in it- isn't that what piles of shit are all about? Anyway, that's it in the picture. Obviously some wild thing as it looks nothing like neatly formed dog poops. This is someone messy who eats seeds and god knows what else... maybe a bear? I got a shovel and disposed of it (heavy!) and then realized that Maggie's fence is bent right by her water basin, like something heavy had climbed over it. Later I discovered another section of bent fencing. I have to deduce that some sizable beast scaled the fence, no doubt terrifying our horse in the mean time, and took a heroic dump on the yard. I hope they had fun!