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Monday, August 28, 2017

Journal: Skunks & Opossums & Bats & Mice, Oh My!

I was looking through some big plastic bins a few days ago in search of a ribbon for something or other, and paused to consider the miles and miles of lace I have, left over from the days when I sewed a whole lot of little girls’ dresses.  I have been saving a few pictures of quilts in which lace and ribbon and trims have been incorporated, and one of these days, I’m going to put something like this together.  ß
But... did you ever give old lace the ‘tug test’, and have it turn into confetti right in your hands?  I had a neighbor lady who thought she could pay me to sew her holes together with ancient sewing items from her barn.  Ugh.  The stuff she gave me was either 100 years old, or had been left out in the elements, because the lace I bought in the 80s and 90s is still in perfect condition.  Did I mention, ‘ugh’? 
Here’s Larry, ready to go on a bike ride, shining his light on the neighborhood skunk so I could see it through my viewfinder.  And there’s Tabby, heading over to see what he’s up to.
My father used to sing me a ditty when I was little, to the tune of It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’, No Mo’:
Little black and white animal
  Over in the woods;
Oh, me, but that cat’s purty!
Ah stepped right over
  To pick ’er up ----
PEEEEEUUWWW!
  She ain’t mah kind of a kitty!

Our kitties have coexisted all right with skunks, opossums, raccoons...  but they are definitely nervous when they hear foxes, coyotes, bobcats, hawks, eagles, or owls.  Teensy was quite indignant (and embarrassed) one night not too long ago when I laughed at him because he hit the deck while strolling through the living room when he heard an owl hoot outside. 
Recently, a friend told me that the food bank in her town stopped stocking things like dried pinto beans when they caught people tossing them in the dumpster outside the building.  Their excuse?  They don’t know how to cook them.  They only want things in a can, so that all they have to do is heat it up. 
That attitude is what gets a lot of people into their below-par situations in the first place.
I think dried beans in, oh, just any type of food are generally a whole lot better than canned beans.
One time my late sister-in-law brought us a big pot of scrumptious-smelling 15-bean soup.  I positioned it in the center of the table, ladled out dishes for everyone, passed them around.
So there was Hester, age three, pawing through her bowl with her spoon, like the cat with something disagreeable in his dish.
Then, in a plaintive little voice she said, said she, “Mine has more than 15 in it.”
On one of the online quilting groups, we were telling about various calamities, funny or not, that we’d had in sewing or quilting.  This tale is circa 1988 or thereabouts:
My dogs used to camp out at my feet while I sewed.  Ebony, our Black Lab, once chewed through my sewing machine cord.  There I was, sewing a loooong ruffle lickety-split, really going full bore.  It was the middle of the night, and not another creature was stirring, not even a mouse.  Neither, so I thought, was the dog, who, so I thought, was sound asleep under the table.
Wrong.
She was chewing the cord.
And then she chewed through it.
All at once, my sewing machine stopped in mid-seam, the light went off, the dog yelped, sprang straight up, and ka-blanged her head on the underside of the table.
I, who am not jumpy, went directly into the attic without benefit of a ladder.
It was right before Easter, and those little girls had to have their ruffled dresses.  Sooo… I awoke Larry and implored him to come repair my cord.  He clambered groggily out of bed, put on his slippers, went out into the garage to get his electrical box, came back in, and spliced the cord.
I thanked him profusely and went back to sewing. 
He replied, and I quote, “Grum grum grum.”  Yosemite Sam in person.
The dog did not again chew cords.  One of the children’s Bibles, yes.  Cords, no.
Tuesday evening, there was a scurrying, skidding commotion in the music room, and then a lot of high-pitched squeaks.  I went to investigate, and found Teensy playing with a small mouse.  He generally lets them go when I come around, evidently assuming I disapprove of him maiming mice the same way I disapprove of him capturing birds.  I couldn’t get to the rodent before it skedaddled off.  I turned and gave Teensy a reproving stare.  He squinted at me with his best ‘I’m being really good’ expression.
Late that night, I headed downstairs ---- and discovered a bat flip-flapping madly about.  My brain empties of all intelligence when that happens, and I run like a chicken with its head cut off.
After galloping pell-mell back up the stairs, I regathered myself and debated strategies.
Since it wasn’t raining, I decided to head out the back door, turn on the deck light, go down the deck stairs, and open the basement patio door.  Bats, knowing that insects gravitate toward lights, always go right out when I do that.
But!!! – there was not one, but two skunks under the deck, right in front of the patio door, scarfing down sunflower seeds!  The first skunk must’ve had such fun gobbling his way through the dropped seeds, he invited a friend to join him.  One, evidently a scaredy-cat, went scurrying off.  The other obviously thought, Yayy!!!  Now I can have it all!!!! and ate as fast as his little jaws could munch. 
Good thing I’d grabbed the flashlight and peered over the railing before I rushed down the deck stairs, eh?
I advanced to Plan #2:  I awoke Larry.
He groggily headed downstairs, tennis racket in hand, and commenced bat hunting, unsuccessfully.  Perhaps the bat is one we have previously caught and released, and the thing recognized Larry and his racket?  In any case, the furred flyer found himself a nook (or maybe a cranny), hid, and never came back out.
Larry returned to his nap.  I went to my recliner with my laptop.  A little while later, the young mouse Teensy had chased earlier went tearing through the kitchen and hallway.  I leaped up and went tearing after him.  I managed to trap him with the dustpan, but when I tried to scoop him up and hold him down with the whiskbroom, he escaped.  Aarrgghh.
I made sure a trap was set, and went to bed.
The next morning, the mouse was in the trap.  I emptied it outside and reset it.  So far, no other critter has investigated the peanut butter I put on the kablooey.  (The square wire that snaps down when a mouse puts pressure on the kablooey is called the splat.  The wire that holds down the splat is the spadroon, and the tension is effected via a sproing-oing.  The board itself is the suicide deck.)
It was a lovely day here Wednesday – 78°, bright and sunny.  I worked on my customer’s Six Star blue and purple quilt until time for church.  This hummingbird panto is one of the prettiest of all the ones I have. 
Larry didn’t get home from work in time to go to the service that night.  I took Ethan, Lyle, and Jeffrey to church with me, as Teddy was also late, and some of the littler ones had the flu.  On our way home, on the gravel road leading to their house, we saw a little red fox.
After I got back home, I went onto the deck and peered over the railing to see if the skunks were back.
A critter was indeed down there helping himself to the sunflower seeds, but it wasn’t the same one.  This one was a big ol’ ’possum!
Did you know a baby opossum is called a ‘joey’, just like babies of their Australian marsupial cousin, the kangaroo?  A group of opossums is called a ‘passel’.  A passel of possums. πŸ˜ƒ  
An opossum can have as many as 20 babies in one litter.  And they each have 50 teeth!  Well, the adults do, anyway.  A male opossum is called a ‘jack’; a female is called a ‘jill’.  That last part, I didn’t know.
An hour later, the opossum had waddled off, and a skunk had ambled back in.  And I had only the basement patio screen door between him at the sunflower seeds, and me at the quilting frame!  Eeek.  Skunks aren’t menacing, so long as nothing startles them.  But who is to say they won’t get startled, at any given moment??!  😲 😜 🀒
I made a few small noises so he would know I was there, but not threatening him, and then slowly pulled the glass door shut.  I left only the big window at the front of the basement open.  A little while later, I heard coyotes howling – first, low-pitched, long howls, then higher-pitched yelps and quavers.  The pups must be old enough that the parents are taking them out and teaching them to hunt (and to yelp and howl and quaver).  I wonder how many pups will learn about skunks the hard way?
Later, an owl was serenading us from a tall maple tree in the front yard.
After stopping with the quilting for the night, I told my quilting group of another sewing catastrophe I had:
Once upon a time, about 31 years ago, I was feverishly sewing Christmas dresses for Hannah and Dorcas, ages 5 and 4, the night before our Christmas program.  The fabric was a red silky stuff with a gold metallic thread running through it.  I sewed black lace on the multitudes of skirt ruffles and over-the-shoulder ruffles, set in a black chiffon yoke on the bodice, attached a black chiffon sash, and put in black chiffon sleeves.  Those dresses were adorable, if I do say so myself.  I took the last stitch, turned off my sewing machine, went to the iron, set the iron down on a sleeve – and the hungry thing ate it.  I mean, it gobbled a large, iron-shaped hole right out of the middle of that sleeve. 
I had neglected to press the Steam button before touching iron to fabric.
Luckily, I had just barely enough chiffon left to cut another sleeve.  I took out the old… put in the new… and finished (again) at 4:00 a.m.  Morning came pretty quickly, that day.
It usually doesn’t take as long to fix a mistake as my imagination tells me it will take.  When we were teenagers, I had a couple of friends who drove me berserk with their penchant for giving up and throwing things in a far, dark corner if the slightest little thing went wrong.  I preferred looking at it like this:  “Now I know how to do it right, and I will do it.”  I have always hated to admit defeat. 
I once sewed a very full, gathered sleeve into a dress, proud of myself because it went in perfectly the first time.
I held it up to admire it.
I had sewn the sleeve into the neckhole.
The child for whom I’d made it had to go to the chiropractor after wearing that dress.
 (That last line was a joke.  You can laugh now.) 
One time Larry’s sister and I were sewing together, making ourselves dresses for school.  We were using the same pattern, one with an inverted V at the high waistline.  Oh!  Here it is – I found it – Vintage Simplicity 5903.
Well, she got the front skirt pieces switched around, and didn’t notice until the thing was all put together and ready to be hemmed.  At that point, she discovered that the hemline went to an upside-down V right in the front, and the side seams did not match up.  Hearing her exclamations of dismay, I stopped what I was doing and went to see what had happened ------ too late.
She’d already grabbed the scissors and hacked off the rest of the skirt to match the shorter area in a none-too-straight line.
Bad solution. 
After that, she couldn’t take the dress apart and redo it, because it would have been much too short.  It was barely long enough as it was.  Plus, it never did hang quite right.
But I had lots of fun over that episode, because from then on, anytime she asked me any sort of sewing question, never mind what it was about, I told her with a careless shrug, “Oh, just hack it off.”  And then we’d both burst out laughing.
When the children were little, sometimes one or another of them would hand me a book and request, “Read it funny, Mama!  Read it funny!”  I would oblige:  I’d switch first letters of words around, and make the entire book a study in spoonerisms.  The faster I read, the harder they’d laugh.  Like this:
One day Licken Chittle was protting along the tath on her may to warket.  An iny taycorn handed on her led.  “Moe high, the fye is skalling!” said Licken Chittle.  “I gust moe and kill the teng.”

By this time, the older children would be yelping with laughter.  When Lydia was a wee thing, 1 ½ or 2, she looked on all this uproar reproachfully. 
“Isn’t it funny?” Hannah once asked her, and she replied in an offended tone, “It used to be a nice story.”
It was always hard enough to keep my composure long enough to plow through a story like that, without looking at Liddo Lydluh’s (as she called herself) funny little face, all fixed in disapproval.  😁
Thursday afternoon, I saw a little ruby-throated hummingbird flitting from hosta blossom to hosta blossom.  That was the very first hummingbird I’ve seen all year.  Maybe if I’d have had the feeder out... but most times, if I don’t see them, and put the feeder out anyway, it just sits there, unused.
I promptly pulled out a pan and the sugar, and whipped up some hummingbird nectar.  After cooling it in the refrigerator, I poured it into the feeder and hung it on the wire on the front porch.
A friend remarked, “You really do have a zoo.  You are very kind to all the critters letting them eat at the buffet like that.”
Well...  I don’t ‘let’ them all, you know.  Some of them just stroll (or fly) right in and do it!  Skunks are not often argued with.  As for the hummingbirds, I wish there were lots more, and I wish they’d stay around all year.
That evening, I finished my customer’s ‘Six Stars’ quilt and loaded the next one, called ‘Making Ends Meet’.  When I’m in my quilting studio (pretty fancy-schmancy terminology for a half-done room, heh), I can hear the washer and dryer directly overhead, know when they are done, and go switch things around or put away a dry load.  When I’m in my sewing room(s), farther back in the basement, I rarely hear them, and regularly forget all about them.
The skunk returned for another late-night snack, and this time I got pictures of him from the patio door, rather than overhead, looking down on him from the deck.  More photos:

I printed a few more pages of the Lotus pantograph I planned to use, and taped them together.  The last time I used it, it was for a smaller quilt.  When everything was in position and ready to start, I turned off my machine and all the lights, and headed upstairs.
Soon I was sitting in my recliner with the heating pad behind my back and a massaging/ heating collar around my neck (a gift from my brother), doing a bit of computer things (photo editing, emails, etc.).  I could hear thunder rumbling nearby, but AccuWeather didn’t think it would hit us.  AccuWeather is not always AccuRate. 
I sipped a piping hot cup of China Legends white tea, paid a bill or two, and then spent 18:48 minutes watching a youtube video about a TV journalist who quit his job to live on a boat and cruise the canals of the United Kingdom.  Every now and then, it’s fun to see how someone else lives – someone whose lifestyle is far and away different from ours.  I like adventure and traveling... but I don’t get to do it a whole lot.  Youtube to the rescue!  πŸ˜ƒ
Don’t believe I’ll be heading off to live on a boat anytime soon, though; it seems one must tattoo his or her arms from neck to fingertips and put a bone in his or her nose in order to fit in with the boat livers (snicker).  Ugh.  I think a nice go on the Elkhorn in Larry’s kayak one of these days will suit me just fine.  And it would suit me even finer if we could take it out on that pretty Molas Reservoir in the San Juan mountains south of Silverton again.
Rick Steves’, the well-known American travel writer, author, and host of the PBS travel documentary series, has a number of youtube videos, mostly from Europe, that are informative and interesting, but I always wonder just how inebriated he is at the end of each production.  It seems like he’s having a glass of wine, whiskey, or beer everywhere he goes.  I want him to show us explorations of the European countryside, not the local pubs!
Friday, I worked on my customer’s quilt.  The bat was somewhere back by the under-porch area, squeakity-squeaking away.  I left the patio door wide open most of the day in the hopes that he would notice the fresh air and, later, the evening bugs beginning to chirp and buzz, and head out.
No such luck.  But at least he stayed put most of the day, and didn’t come out to dive at my head. 
Nevertheless, I kept the tennis racket handy – and sure enough, when night fell and the bat doubtless wanted outside to catch insects, he let loose of his moorings and began flying.  Wouldn’t you know it, I’d just closed the patio door.
Aarrgghh.  I feel exactly like the Israelites must’ve felt in Nehemiah’s time, when they were building the wall of Jerusalem while their enemies lurked nearby:  they had tools for building in one hand, and their sword in the other.  
I opened the door so that I could possibly shoo the bat out – and discovered that the skunk was back. 
“What are you doing?” I said in a conversational tone.
It must’ve been the scaredy-cat polecat, because after giving me a doleful stare (“You interrupted my dinner!”), he waddled hurriedly off.
Deciding I’d have enough of all this hullaballoo (my back was protesting, in any case), I turned off my machine and all the lights and came upstairs, making sure to close the door behind me. 
That was the last I saw of (or heard from) the bat.  Either he finally found his way back out again, or he expired for lack of food and water (in which case I’ll soon know it 🀒).
Saturday, I was quilting away, when suddenly a drip landed on my head, splat.  Huh?
An overhead pipe was sweating!  This, because I’d left the tub faucet trickling a little while earlier when Teensy had begged for a drink.  He prefers running water, pΓ΄r fΔ…vΓΆr.  Well, when I came downstairs, I opened the patio door and the big front window, and it was warm and a bit humid outside – and the pipe was cold.
I dashed upstairs, turned off the faucet, and turned on the air conditioner.  The pipe quit dripping on my head. 
And no, it didn’t drip on the quilt I was quilting.  Some years back, Janice gave me some pieces of foam pipe insulation to put around those pipes directly over my quilting frame.  That has probably saved quilts from getting dripped on more often than I know.  I need to put a piece of that stuff on the small section of bare pipe that is right over my head when I am in one certain spot behind my quilting frame.
I finished quilting the ‘Making Ends Meet’ quilt, trimmed it, and got pictures of it outside just before the sun went down.
Upon seeing my photos, a lady wrote to say that she had never used a panto before, and she worried about staying on the lines. 
“Any tips?” she asked.
It just takes practice.  Work up a good rhythm... and maybe start with a panto that’s somewhat asymmetrical so it won’t be noticed if a loop is more loopy than another.  πŸ˜‰  Diagonal lines are difficult; smaller curves are easier.  Not too small of curves, though.  For my first panto, I simply chose the one I thought was really pretty, and went along with the red, white, and blue fabric I was using.  It had ships wheels with lots of spokes, and detailed anchors.  Aiiiyiiiyiiieee.  My ships wheels looked like they’d been made before anyone invented the wheel.  πŸ™ƒπŸ˜¬
Sunday morning, Victoria sent a text inviting us for dinner. 
“Okay!” I replied.  “Want me to bring anything?  Frozen yogurt... broccoli...”
“Frozen yogurt!” responded Victoria.
“Any particular flavor?” I wrote back – and then, noticing the time, I thwacked my laptop shut and rushed off to stick feet in shoes and grab Bibles, purses, and Thermos (we like to have hot coffee to drink on the drive home).
Victoria answered, but I didn’t see it:  “Something fruit flavored maybe?”
After church, we stopped at the store for frozen yogurt, then decided to get sherbet instead, since we are spoiled on Schwan’s frozen yogurt, and think anything the store has to offer is bitter or sour, by comparison.  Ice cream gives me a stomachache; frozen yogurt and sherbet rarely does.  Larry chose Wild Strawberry sherbet.
So he guessed right, even though we hadn’t seen Victoria’s text.  😊
She fixed pork roast, potatoes, carrots, and onions for dinner (slow baked together from early morning), and made biscuits like those from KFC. 
A couple of days ago, a lady asked, “Have you finished last year’s crop of juicy peaches that were in such abundance?  Makes my mouth water, just thinking of them.”
Yep, we sure did.  They’re all gone.  And this year’s crop was very meager, as frost did a number on the blossoms.  But there was a small handful that I planned to pick.  I looked at them ... gave them a couple more days to ripen... went out to pick them...
They were gone.  Nary a one was left, not even the ones way up high in the tree.  Almost all the ones that had fallen from the tree were cleaned up slicker’n a whistle, too.  I saw a few bare pits; that was all.
I should’ve picked that small handful, and just let them ripen in the house!  I think I hosted a smΓΆrgΓ₯sbord for the local raccoons and opossums and skunks, that’s what I think.  Siggghhhh...
Ah, well.  There are Colorado peaches at the store, and they’re really good.  Plus, I don’t have to pick them.  However, they’re not free.  Nevertheless, I shall get some the next time I’m at the store.
Larry got the two Continental Gatorskin tires that he ordered after our nephew Nathan recommended them, upon hearing about Larry’s second flat in as many bike rides.  Sunday night, he put one on the rear of his bike, and headed off on a long bike ride.
Just as I was about to pick up my phone and call him to find out where he was, and if he was okay, he got home.  He’d gone to Genoa and back – 37 miles.  Took him two hours; he averaged 18.5 mph.  He burned up all of the dinner calories in one fell swoop, I do believe.  He saw a couple of deer.
This afternoon, three more quilts arrived from my Washington customer.  I’ll start on them tomorrow.  I went to the post office and mailed the finished three quilts back to her.
This is what I often have to step over, when I’m quilting:

And now Larry is home, and he’s firing up the Traeger grill in order to smoke some chicken.  I’m cooking pierogies, country gravy, and peas.  ((...drooool...))


,,,>^..^<,,,        Sarah Lynn        ,,,>^..^<,,,



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