We went into town today and after our errand, checked out the beach. I don’t think I’ve been to the beach at this time day. The tide was quite a bit lower than I usually see it. That meant we could see more of the opposite shore than usual.
The land looks like it’s floating!
The low water meant there was lots to look for on the beach.
Including some pretty, but unfortunate, things.
To the right, you can see a little cluster of tiny zebra mussels. A couple have attached themselves to the shell on the left. We were seeing little bunches like this all over. Not long ago, some sections of beach had so many zebra mussels wash up on shore that the shoreline was completely covered with glass-sharp shells, several inches deep.
Zebra mussels are an invasive species that showed up here about 5 years ago, likely introduced through the ballast of someone’s boat that was used in infected water, elsewhere (pdf). They grow very quickly, and cause all sorts of problems with the local ecology, boats and infrastructure. The infestation has gotten so bad, some are seriously proposing killing the entire lake off to combat them! This is one of the top 10 largest freshwater lakes in the world, so it gives an idea of how bad the situation has gotten, and how desperate people are getting.
Yet they look so harmless, in their little clusters on the beach.
Beep Beep and her Tuxedo were around the house yesterday evening, so I decided to get a bit more aggressive about this whole luring of kittens thing.
I brought out the cat nip and the cat treats.
They ignored the cat nip.
They went nuts over the cat treats! Beep Beep was after them to the point that she would eat what I gave her, then find the one I gave to her kitten and eat that one, before he even figured out where it was. She’d even push him away!
We have a house guest for the next while, and she and my daughter came out to help, and to play with the cats. By the time they came back in, Rolando Moon, Teeny Tabby, Butterscotch and one of the calicos made a showing, too.
We did actually get to pet the tuxedo. He’d jump a bit and look, but would quickly return to hunting treats. He’d even try and take them out of my hand, sometimes, but he was slower about it and his mother would usually push her way in and take it first, no matter how we tried to distract her with others, so on the ground they went.
While in the area, I paused to take a look at my mother’s white roses. They have the darkest rose hips! So deep a read, they are almost black.
They are also not exactly intelligent creatures, though I know some breeds are smarter than others.
I was sitting in my office when I started to hear the sound of cows, mooing nearby. I realize the renter has cycled his cows back to our quarter section, and they are nearby. Happily, I go outside to see them.
The cows are spread out around the barn, including some in the old hay yard.
The hay yard is now cluttered with a number of abandoned vehicles and equipment. Including several old snowmobiles, I’m told are being kept for their parts.
Hearing an odd sound, I look in between various items.
Can you see the cow’s nose in there?
It took me a few moments to see that the noise I was hearing was of that cow, trying to eat the snowmobile.
To be more specific, the remains of the seat on the snowmobile.
I ended up going through the barn to the hay yard, to get them away from the snowmobiles. Which turned out to be a good thing, since I found the door to the lean to was open. There is a tree growing near it that blocks us from seeing it from the house, so who knows how long it was open!
This is what the cow was chewing on and licking. In the second video, you could see the cow going for something on the far side of the seat, too. That would likely be the foam from the seat that it was trying to get at.
Afterwards, I went out the back door of the barn. Some cows were around where an old shed had collapsed, and I could hear them getting into the metal roofing material that’s in there, so I wanted to check on things.
This is what greeted me out the back door.
Most of the cows and their calves avoided me, but these two were curious enough to stick around.
I then made my way over to the junk pile, starting to pick up and move over sheets of metal that had been blown over by the winds we’ve been having in the last while. As I get around the back side of the collapsed shed, I see…
Yeah. That black cow with its butt facing me is right on the junk. There is no grass or weeds there, so I have no idea what she’s after.
I really look forward to when we can get rid of this pile of junk!!
I continue around, which convinces the one cow to get off the junk. Some move away from me, while others come closer to check me out. I pick up and re-stack some of the sheets of metal siding, finding things to put on top of the pile to hopefully keep it from blowing over again, and make my way around between the pile and the shed.
One of the cows is braver than the others, and starts coming closer to me, watching what I’m doing.
I quickly realized that she was not chewing on grass, nor her cud.
She was chewing on a foreign object.
You might need to turn your volume up to hear this…
Now, this is concerning, because as far as I can tell, based on what’s lying around, she might be chewing on either wood or metal.
I tried to come closer to her, little by little, hoping to be able to see what she’s chewing on.
That’s one heck of a side-eye she’s giving me!
I kept trying to move around and get closer, without chasing her away, still trying to look into her mouth and see what she’s chewing on.
After a while, I start getting really concerned, because she’s got foam around her mouth from the chewing, and every now and then looked to be in some discomfort.
Then the object fell out of her mouth.
That, my dear friends, is a bone.
A beef bone.
I can’t say I was all that surprised. This is not the first time I’ve seen a cow chewing on a beef bone. When I was a kid, I remember walking past one of our cows and seeing her chewing with her head extended weirdly. She was familiar enough with me that I could walk up to her and reach into her mouth, where I pulled out one of the dogs’ beef bones. It was not as thoroughly chewed up as this one, though!
I have no idea where she found it, but I wouldn’t let her pick it up again.
She was displeased with that.
Ooh, this girl had attitude!
I proceed to kick the piece of bone away until I got it to the junk pile.
Once I was away, she started looking for it.
She wanted that bone back! She just kept snuffling and snuffling the area.
At this point, I decided it was time to head out and went back around the junk pile to go to the barn. Where I found…
This was not here, the last time I tried to clean up around the pile. In fact, I don’t remember seeing it just a few minutes before, when I went past here to go around the pile and found the cow standing right on the junk.
It is, I believe, from one of the snowmobiles.
I took it into the barn when I went in and closed up the doors again.
As I come out the front doors of the barn, I look back and see…
Can you believe it? That cow, with company, actually found where I’d kicked the piece of bone!
I’m hoping she wasn’t able to get it out, but she seems quite determined!
I know it’s a running joke that goats will eat anything.
It wasn’t unusual for me to be out and about, several times a day, and to spend a fair bit of time just sitting in it, waiting for a daughter to get off work or some such.
So I made it my happy place.
I decorated the dash with all sorts of bling; mostly using white “pearl” stick-ons from the scrapbooking supplies section, in lines and swirls and patterns. I also had things like glow in the dark “rocks” and numerous creatures, held in place with FunTac. Dinosaurs. Fish. Turtles and tortoises. Glow in the dark insects. At Christmas, I would add in a miniature Christmas tree or two, complete with miniature, battery operated lights.
When that van died and we got our new one, I salvaged all but the sticker gems, intending to start over on the dash of our new vehicle.
I started to do it, but quickly discovered that the vinyl was not the same, and the adhesive on the sticker decorations, as well as the FunTac, didn’t stick.
So I stopped. At some point, I want to continue. Maybe.
Until then, I enjoy the few that I have up.
My mother, however, hates them.
For some reason, she believes that if these things are on my dash, that means I worship them. I should have statues of Jesus on my dash, not frogs or turtles.
We’ve had some… *ahem* … discussions about this.
The night I picked up my mother to drive her to the airport, as she settled into her seat, she suddenly told me to “not look”, reached out and grabbed…
… my turtle with the wiggly legs.
Much to my surprise, considering it’s held in place with nothing but old FunTac, it wouldn’t budge.
My turtle won the battle, and remains on my dash, watching me as I drive, nodding its head, wiggling its legs, and putting a smile on my face.
While doing my evening walk around the yard, I decided to go into the storage house and look around a bit.
When my parents first got the house and had it moved into our yard, it was intended to be here only temporarily. As the different sections of the farm were to go to each of the boys, they thought that the house would eventually be moved to one of these sections, placed over a basement instead of on cinder blocks, and one of my brothers would be living in it.
That never happened.
We did, however, use the place. I spent many hours playing in here, holding sleepovers with my friends on the second floor. The younger of my brothers held parties in it.
Somehow, in all that time, I never really noticed this.
An outlet mounted this high up is odd enough, but to mount one in between two windows like this? How very strange.
These windows are in the kitchen of the old house.
I glanced in the cupboards and drawers. In one cupboard, I found an old text book.
“Biology Investigations” seems an appropriate title, when looking down.
The dead critter is one thing (rat? squirrel?). Then there’s that mystery pile of whatever, that looks like it might be a nest of some kind.
Getting this place cleaned up might need a haz mat team!
Empty beer cans are not the only interesting things I’ve been finding in the spruce grove!
I’ve found a few different seating arrangements that use logs as the supports.
I’m at a loss as to why these bricks and… a can? are here. That they have been here long enough to grow moss on them likely means probably no one alive has any idea, anymore!
The remains a of a wasps nest still hang from a branch.
The dark grey section underneath is actually a sort of ball, hanging down from the rest of the nest above.
I won’t be able to continue cleaning up the perimeter of the spruce grove for a while, yet, but this evening, I decided to walk through it, check things out and take some photos of what it looks like now, so I can go over them later and plan ahead for when I work in the area next year.
Mostly, though, I wanted to go along the fence line I plan to work on soon, and especially check on the fence where I knew a tree fell on it.
Here’s a look at what I’ll be working on in that area.
In this first photo, you’re actually seeing the tops of two trees. In the foreground, to the right, is the top of a tree that fell some time ago. On the other side of the fence is the top of the tree my brother had cut off, to get its weight off the barbed wire to the right of the fence post.
Here, you can see the mess of dead branches, and the section of barbed wire that was damaged by the fallen tree.
All along the fence line, I am seeing trees that have sown themselves on the outside of the fence. In the section of fence line going in the other direction, some have been there so long, they are full sized, mature trees. I’ll just have to clean them up and leave them. However, going towards the gate, the self-sown trees are still quite little, and I want to clean them out while it’s still easy to do. This had not been done between the fence and ditch on the far side of the gate. It’s not just overgrown, but practically a forest. This affects ditch drainage and, of course, visibility.
I have no plans at this point for clearing that out, except perhaps what needs to be done for visibility. For now, I need to just focus on the inner yard.
The first of the above photos shows the two, quite large, trees that have come down, with one of them landing on the fence. A third tree is caught up in the mess, too.
I found this interesting…
The damaged barbed wire is propped up with a stick! I’m guessing my older brother did this, after cutting the tree loose from the wire.
Also, that pile on the other side of the stick?
That’s an ant hill. Red ants like to build big nests like that, using spruce needles.
I did not try to get close enough to see if it’s an active nest. Yet.
Oh, look. Another Bud Light can.
I’ve found a number of beer cans around the place. I think my late brother was the only one to drink that brand of beer. Since he died in the early summer of 2010, that means these have been sitting around for a minimum of about 9 years. It looks like no one has gone through here to clean things up in at least that amount of time, too.
This is why the tree came down. Ant damage. From the freshness of the exposed wood, I’d say this tree fell within the past year, year and a half, at most.
The other tree came down for the same reason, though quite a while ago, from how much the wood is weathered.
This makes at least three large spruces that have come down after being weakened by ants, that I have found. While there were many other downed trees scattered about the spruce grove, there are also a significant number of dead spruces still standing. And there’s no real way to see if any of them have ant damage, just by looking at them.
Which is why I look forward to having the tools to start cutting them down, before they fall and cause more damage.
This undergrowth will be kept, after we clean the dead trees off of it. I think it’s a type of juniper.
There is an area full of wild roses, closer to the house, that will be cleaned up, but also kept.
I took quite a few more photos, though less than I would have, were it were not so difficult to wrestle my way through the undergrowth and dead trees and branches.
Cleaning up this area is going to be a huge job. I’m hoping by the time we get to it, we’ll not only have a full size chain saw, but some sort of large wagon or small trailer we can use to help haul things away more easily. All the work done in the maple grove was downright easy compared to what is going to need doing in here!! I would not be surprised if it takes me a couple of summers to finish, at least.
At least I’ve got some idea of what we’ll be facing in there!
What a night it was last night! A night when we really appreciated what we can accomplish with our modern communications technology!
Late last night, I drove my mother to meet a family member that was supposed to arrive shortly after midnight.
Earlier in the day, I had been in contact with his daughter through a messenger app, where she had informed me that his flight left 2 hours late. We even exchanged photos, so he would know what I looked like, and we would know what he looked like.
Before leaving for the airport, I checked his connecting flight to see that it was running on time. Not hearing from his daughter to let me know if he missed his connection, we figured he caught his flight and off we went.
Shortly after arriving, she and I started messaging each other. More photos were shared.
My older brother started texting me. He and his wife were at the airport as a surprise, and looking for us.
We took a group selfie to send out.
Then I get another message, this time from my sister, who lives in the boonies, much like I do. She had just received a phone call from our relative. He had missed his connecting flight, and the airline got him set up for another flight, but not until 8am. Once we realized he would not be on the flight we were waiting for, we found a place to have some drinks. My brother started looking up flight information on his phone, while I continued to communicate with both the daughter in Europe, and my sister out of town.
In no time at all, we had all the information we needed, were assured our relative was spending the night in a hotel, and since the new arrival time conflicted with my schedule, arranged alternative transportation. While all this was going on, I got another message from my husband; unsure if she would reach me, my sister had phoned the land line and let him know about the missed connection and new times, and he was passing it on to me.
Six people. Two continents. Two provinces. Seven time zones.
Gosh, I love technology!
To top it all off, though we missed picking up our family last night, the four of us had a great visit with each other at the airport, and my drive in and out with my mother was absolutely amazing. She was having one of her good days, which was so wonderful! During the drive back, at 2am, she started telling me things she remembered from her childhood, including a couple of stories from WWII, when her village was taken control of by the Nazis, as part of a strategic route to Russia, the border of which was just a few kilometers from her village at the time. She was only about 10 yrs old at the time, but she still remembers quite a bit. She has lived through some pretty amazing experiences, and it was good to hear about some of them.
Late last night, I drove my mother to meet a family member that was supposed to arrive shortly after midnight.
