Bob Appreciation Post #2

Bob's been busy! Look what he did to the far corner of his studio... added a new window. It makes the whole space not only brighter, but look so much bigger. This was a dark and lonely-looking corner; sort of remote and Bob stored things he didn't need too often there. But now, it feels so much usable. And he has a nice view of our back swamp. Bob also relates that he has a resident chipmunk that lives beneath the window. Free entertainment!

And the grapes have been lovingly tended to. Bob saw a video that recommended placing sandwich bags over the newly forming clusters of grapes to protect them from birds and the weather. This particular vine- a white Niagara- is making something like 17 clusters! We'll have quite a harvest. People who have used this method of grape protection have mentioned that the ripen more sweetly.

And here's a shot of one corner of the vegetable kingdom. Bob has (as usual) done a bang-up job of planting, thinning, transplanting and housing the seedlings in the vegetable garden. And we're already reaping the rewards in the form of delicious tender salads.
I'm kind of behind in the garden world. I'm still planting and trying to figure out what to put into several holes that have appeared. Not to mention that I have weeds and haven't edged yet. Bb tolerates my presence in the vegetable garden where I have an unruly cut flower area... I try!

A Few Persistent Problems as Projects Accomplished

Despite extraordinary complications involving Windows 10 (and my Yahoo email!) I blog on. And I am happy to report that household projects are being resolved! F'rinstance, we had noisome, noxious, noisy European starlings (an invasive species to boot) nesting in a hole in the side of the house. The hole was in the wall next to where the computer resides and every Facebook adventure or web search was accompanied by the loud chortling of hungry baby birds. Bob and I realized we had been living with this for months; they must have delivered a multitude of litters of chicks before Bob devised a clever bird flap, that allowed the birds to exit, but not re-enter. It worked (with no birds hurt) and we can reclaim the wall. Bob has patched the hole with aluminum, visible in the picture above. We had tried the owl featured below, but he only served to scare our friends, as he was only five feet off the ground. Huzzahs to Bob!

The next project completed was skylights! Oooohhh! I am so happy. Thanks to Bob and our good friend Joe, I can now vent the hot air that collected in the ceiling and with the insulation that Bob and Joe added a few months past, the studio is an altogether nicer, cooler place to do business. (The business of art, that is!)

And here's yet another ongoing dilemma fixed: we had a quite large sink hole that formed in our yard. It had probably come from where roots were rotting from a tree removed long ago. But it kept getting deeper and was downright weird. When you went to mow the lawn, you sank waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down and when it rained, water pooled there. That's lil' Robin the Good, posing for scale.

First we added rocks (plenty of those left over from gardening!), then we added dirt and left over soil (from when we excavated to do the Mosaic Walkway), and then Bob (in an industrious burst) added sods left over from edging the vegetable garden. Watered in and !POOF! Instant level, grassed yard repair!

 

 Bob also went up on our roof and patched several areas with tar; we're ready if it ever rains again. (Sort of like California. I think we need rain!) He also cleaned the chimney. Bob's been busy and gets my appreciation and a big gold star!!

Our Little Scholar

Puppy Class didn't go off quite as planned. For one thing, poor Lil' Robin the Good hates the car- this sad fact probably due to the eight hour drive she initially took to get to us. (Not only does she associate the car with a traumatic event (separation from siblings, a life she knew etc etc), but she gets physically very sick.) So her initial response to confronting a ride in the car was "NOOO!!!!" and after a struggle, I lifted her into the back seat, where she immediately began salivating and turning green. Fortunately, the drive to the Puppy Class was only about seven minutes.
The facility is close, but I drew a rough map and was pretty sure where it was, in a mixed residential and industrial park area, over by the local airport. As we approached the approximate vicinity, I saw a sign with a large paw print and turned into the driveway, telling a very ill Robin, "Looks like we're here!" I'm glad that Lil' Robin can't read as the closer I got to the building it became apparent that the building in question was a pet crematorium. Yikes. Wrong turn!
But just one road away, there it was and there was a stream of happy puppies and owners (actually, the all looked sort of grim! Hmmm...) issuing out from Puppy Pre-school and trotting in to our "Family Manners" class. The class is quite small- only five dogs total, but what a mixed group!
There is a humongous black Lab named Sassy, who was built like a tank and had one of those metal prong pinch collars. Her owner, a slight woman in her seventies, was obviously overwhelmed by the size and strength of her charge. This "puppy" was only a bit older than Robin! The poor woman spent the hour of class trying to restrain her HumVee of a puppy by standing on her leash, with limited success.
Then there was another enormous dog, this one a Bernese Mountain Dog named Riley and at least seven members of her human family. I mean, they took up half the chairs and described various atrocities committed by Riley including eating walls. People do like their large pets!
Next up was the biggest Husky I have ever seen. He possessed prodigious fur in giant fluffy tufted tail and thigh applications, but I suspect that under all that fur, he had really was just plain big. And loud. He howled, squeaked, barked and erupted for nearly half the class, making hearing the instructor Frank very hard. (Almost told Frank that we had had a dog named Frank but thought to wait until I know him better.) Anyway, Fluffy Husky (whose name escapes me) got squirted with a squirt bottle several times to shut him up, also with mixed results. He did manage to wrap his leash around the plastic chair his owner was sitting in and knock her over, causing much havoc and consternation... class was anything but calming!*
The last participant (beside Robin) was a small (thank goodness!) beagle rescue dog named Ulysses who was bouncy, but at least of a size where that wasn't life threatening. He and Robin hit it off and touched noses but poor Robin quickly became overwhelmed and shut down, curling up in a ball at my feet, only occasionally glancing up to look at me with reproachful eyes as if to say, "Why me? What did I do?" I was wondering that myself as saintly Robin and I seemed the only manageable members of class.
 After class, several people commended me on how "good" Robin was, but I assured them she was simply in shock. Can't wait 'til next week!

*A quick footnote here: Robin was the only "exotic" in class. That is, all the other participants were definitely "pure bred", recognizable breeds. Several people asked me, "What is she?" And I could see from the assortment of breeds represented that people closely follow those "most popular lists". One wonders why. For example, the elderly woman who had that giant Black Lab? In size and strength alone- setting aside all that youthful energy- it was a bad match! She certainly would have been better off with a smaller, and probably full grown dog!

Good Fences make Good Neighbors

Bob and I spent what was a really pleasant afternoon erecting part of our ongoing fence project. While we like our neighbors, we don't always want to share driveway moments; I'm sure they feel the same way! We have been fortunate that a good pile of reusable, older stockade fencing came with the house. It was installed in peculiar places, but it was still serviceable and we moved it and used it to block off a good stretch of our property line. Bob recently purchased several new section and while the digging wasn't always easy (roots, rocks, tight spaces) we got three new post in and four sections up. At least the weather cooperated, with no humidity and nice temperatures. But there is a good deal of pollen around to prevent jobs like this from being altogether fun.

 A mix of old and new! This section of fencing goes behind Bob's "show room", where he has a bunch of garden supports and gates and arbors for sale. The new fence will allow the rusted metal work to stand out more, as will the idea of using white sand as a base. Right now the old leaves suppress grass and weeds and keep the metal work clean, but the tomato cages and peony rings do blend in.  We've been planning on doing this fence for a while, so it was good to get to it. There's another couple of panels to set up at this end, and further down the line in the opposite direction we need another four (maybe five) to complete our privacy wall. It also serves to keep the bears out and the dog in. (Yes, there was a bear and her off spring in a neighbor's yard recently. Yikes.)

And what does one eat in preparation for fence installation? Doesn't this look All-American? We've been nursing the remains of a package of (holistic, organic, free-range) turkey hot dogs from Memorial Day, and I think I'm ready to say good bye to them! Today we ran out of rolls and we had to improvise hot dogs surrounds. Bob used a tortilla wrap and I cobbled together slices of hot dog and sauerkraut on a Triscuit. Peculiar but we seemed fortified sufficiently to get the job done.

The Hell of Windows 10

Here's a truly awful blog posting for you to mull over! No pictures, no access to any of our personal files and we seem to have been transported to a specific ring of Hell reserved for those who attempt to install and run Windows 10!
We downloaded Windows 10 a while ago, and while we weren't thrilled (some programs seem to not work, we could only upload one picture at a time from the camera etc etc) we were able to function somewhat normally. But yesterday morning, a very strange thing happened: we turned on the computer and it took a million years to come on and when it did, our desktop was all re-arranged and half of our icons were gone. When I tried to access files- like for documents or photos, they weren't there. All of our book marks and passwords and saved information was gone, too, when we tried to sign onto the Internet, as if our identities and profiles had all been lost.
So last night, after I got home form work, I sat on the phone for a couple of hours while a Microsoft technician rearranged our lives. (That's what it felt like. Remember the movie, "Being John Malkovich"? Where a portal allowed people to walk around inside his head? Very odd!) This technician was moving our cursor and opening things remotely... and she found all of our stuff! But she couldn't/didn't explain WHERE it all had gone. But she re-made desk top icons and re-populated our programs and seemed to do a great job. It took several hours overnight, when we were instructed to simply leave the computer to do its internal work. I woke up at 2:00 am and checked on the computer and it worked fine. I was excited. But you know as well as I do that that was not to be...
This morning, I turned the computer on and it had reverted to the weird world of Microsoft dominion. I was told (in a message that appeared and disappeared so quickly that I couldn't read all of it) that we were "granted a temporary ID" and I still cannot access any files! What a nightmare!
My sister Beatrice will recognize this; she told me a similar story the other day. Somehow, her computer downloaded this disaster while they were off dancing and stuff had just vanished. For some unknown reason, ours didn't vanish all at once. There's good news for my sister: if the download happened less than 30 days ago, they'll allow you to reload Windows 8. Our lives are made trickier by the fact that some part of the Windows 10 monster downloaded a month and a half ago, and the rest only yesterday. Which puts us in Windows 8 limbo...
Do I really want to spend another half a day on the phone with a Microsoft technician??!?!!?!?!? As I told her, all I want is my computer to be my computer. It's a tool. I don't need- or care!- how it all operates. I just need it to work!

Sleep Deprived

I now join the ranks of those people- like CIA black site prisoners and new parents- who lust after a good, long old fashioned eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. I guess we are "new parents" of a sort (although I constantly maintain that I am not a "fur mother" and that our puppy is a chosen friend, not a child. I think the bond between dog and "owner" is a powerful one expressly because we are different species and speak a different language and think in different band widths. On the other hand, the case could be made that children are a very different species...) In any event, our dog is delighted to awaken us a 5:00 am or even 4:45 am. I am nostalgic for the ringing of the alarm clock.
Not that Bob and I were ever in danger of being accused of being slug-a-beds. Our alarm is typically set for six and we often wake up several minutes before it goes off. But lil' Robin the Good's internal timer is hard wired to be alert as soon as the sun starts to offer even the palest glow in the eastern sky. I calculated the other day (no mean feat for me at the best of times, but doing math when exhausted is really hard for me!) that Bob and I are surviving on about 6 hours of sleep a night... not nearly enough! It's ironic that when Jules died, I couldn't sleep and even if I did fall asleep, I'd wake up at 1:00, unable to return to sleep. At least I fall asleep just fine now, but certainly I still need more.
Robin, conversely, has her own rather attractive schedule. Wake Rita and Bob up- HELLOO!! and immediately begin prancing around, chewing socks and shoes and jumping on the bed in an enthusiastic embrace of being alive. She dances outside (with me as her foggy half dead retinue) where she enjoys a lengthy pee and a giant poop. Then she gallops inside to devour a hearty bowl of gourmet dog crunchies, plays hard with her various enormous collection of "toys" (some are primitive and some are partially deconstructed) and then collapses with her head on my stomach to sleep off the mornings excitement. I have just now managed to swallow a half a cup of coffee and she's already back to REM sleep. Bob and I have debated selecting a very pointy stick with which to poke and prod Mistress Mutt as she drifts off to sleep and keeping her awake, much as she does to us. You have to admire the zeal of the young. Every thing is new and thrilling.
Entirely unrelated is the picture of Maggie grazing, wearing her fly mask. I had promised Maggie that she'd appear in my next post and despite being an exhausted person not firing on all cylinders, I remembered to snap her picture. But it was a pleasant day!

Dogs Jumping Over the Moon and Other Subjects

Yes, Robin the Good jumps over the moon in her dreams! Impossible to actually photograph the lil' dickens in action as she moves waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too fast, so I opt for the Photoshop version when she sleeps. A baseball made a fine moon. But I promised Maggie that she will star in her own blog post soon as lil' Robin has been hogging the limelight! (Remember Maggie? The Mexican Pony? See? I have been neglecting her!)
So this blog posting will simply serve to get us all up to speed. Spring is relentlessly a busy time here at the BobnRita Ranch (aka The BauHaus Chicken Coop) as there's art shows and spring planting and  friends visiting and it all seems to happen at once.
Bob's been super busy since the New York Botanical Garden bought a slew of his peony rings. They're carrying them in their gift shop and discerning customers are driving up from New Jersey and elsewhere to purchase them. He even shipped peony rings to Minnesota! Maybe they'll start buying his sculpture. I keep telling Bob: that's how it happens. Get well known for one thing and your art work will follow.

Here's another fun project. If you recall the story about seeded Concord grapes, you will know that I abandoned the search. But my intrepid sister Beatrice went searching far and wide for the elusive Concord with seeds and scored one for Bob's birthday. Kudos for her tenacity!  The little cutting is happily ensconced near a window, warm and moist, and producing diminutive grape clusters that Bob is diligently plucking off. A stick and a leaf and it wants to produce grapes! (The will to live and reproduce... more on that subject later. Dangerous topics ahead!)
Anyway, we persist and spring is springing.

And okay: as a preview to a future dogcentric posting, I present Robin upside down flying through space (again). I kid her that we've had so many boy dogs that come equipped with "balls and bat" (ie: testicles and penis) that when Robin is belly up, it looks like "something is missing". There's like... blank space. She thinks we're weird. (Probably right.)