As The Butter Churns

November 17th So Peaceful Here

(Doe a deer - a female deer)

    I got a note the other day from an old friend that said, “Denise, I heard you and your family are living on a farm, how nice– that must be so calm.” I chuckled when I read her words. Calm? I don’t think anyone who’s spent time on a farm thinks of it as calm. Peaceful? Yes. Calm? Not so much.

    I thought of her words again as I spoke to the game warden, Dave Jones. He told me the cat we saw the other night sounded, from my description, like an adult. Which he felt was a blessing, as that would mean it was smart enough to stay away from people. I told him I was new at guessing the size and weight of a cougar and he'd have to figure in a pretty large margin for error and allow for the darkness and, of course, the adrenaline. He said he completely understood, but felt sure by its manner that it was an adult. We discussed cats in general - their habits, the differences and similarities between lions and cougars generally and in their hunting practices.

    “They’ll just walk their trap line, which could be anywhere from five to fifty miles depending on the deer population.With your 40 acres, the state ten you surround, the empty 40 acres adjacent to yours and the wilderness behind you, you're in the middle of their territory,” Dave informed me
(We have seen a tremendous increase in the deer population coming through the property - perhaps it's Irish being confined)

    “Last year I never saw any cougar prints, but we did have a lot of coyotes. I haven’t seen the coyotes since last winter. Would they leave if a top predator moved into the area?”

    “Absolutely. The absence of coyotes suggests the cougar. And, you know, I wouldn’t say you’re infested with cats in your area but, let’s face it, you back up to wilderness.
(plenty of habitat)

    I'd  say you have a very healthy cougar population. We did have a problem with one going into a carport on Mosquito Lake Road the other day and had to shoot it. It was sick though – feline leukemia.”

    “I’m nervous just walking out to my car at night now. I don’t want to lose any of my animals. Should I do anything in addition to my current precautions?”

    “No, you’re getting them in at dusk,” Dave said. “The bells are good. You have the air horns. You could get pepper spray.”

    “By the time pepper spray would be useful, I’d have already had a heart attack.”

    “I can understand that.”

    “What about my geese? I hate to keep them penned in all day.”

    “To be honest, cougar don’t really eat geese. Coyotes do, maybe an owl, but not cougar. It’s not worth it. They don’t know your geese don’t fly too much. They’d rather take down two deer a week.”

    “So I should be grateful to Karen – she’s protecting the geese.”

    “Karen? That’s what my son named her.”

    “It seems you guys are fine up there if you’re naming them. Let me know when you see her again.”

    “It’s pretty breathtaking to see. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather see her from the inside of my van, but it’s amazing.”

    “I get that. I love ‘em, too.”

    Coincidentally, I got a call a few minutes later from my neighbor, Kristie. She was just checking to see how we were doing, when Tom was coming up and life in general. And, oh yeah, she wanted to let me know her neighbors saw a brown bear with her three cubs - and, as if that wasn’t enough, Stan saw some black bears in their yard.

    “Wow! Brown bear? Grizzly? Really? I had heard there was a release program, but I never thought they'd come down out of the Cascades.”

    “Darlin’, you’re in the Cascades. And it’s the cool summer we had. It was nice down here, but the berries didn’t ripen in the upper elevations and so they came down here for food. They're headin’ back up now as it gets colder.”

    Bear. I’d love to see a bear, but I’d hate to meet a Grizzly. I’m not sure which is more terrifying - the cougar or the Grizzly.

    On the way home from school today, Henry and I stopped by the North Fork of the Nooksack River. We looked around and were enjoying the view when we saw them. They’re back. The eagles have landed. It was amazing looking at them look at us. They truly are majestic. We joked about seeing these thieves stealing salmon from a seagull next week. They’re such terrible hunters. A top predator I’m not frightened of, but we’d better keep a close eye on Bruno. (Hmm. let's see, it's a dove, it's a turkey, it's a scavanger -)

   We chatted on the way home about our upcoming stakeout and the dead bear we saw on the side of the highway, which reinforced Kristie’s sightings. Both Henry and I wished we could get some sort of night vision camera or monocular. We’d at least need another flashlight. (Wally's current project)

    It had gotten dark quickly and, once we pulled in, I told Henry to take in the groceries and practice his scales while I fed the animals. As I headed for the barn, my radar went up. I felt as though I were being watched. I looked and was sure I saw an animal. I stood there looking at it. And it stood there looking back. I knew for sure it wasn't big enough to be a brown bear, but could it be a bear? Was it a cougar? Or just a deer? I thought, "It's probably just a deer," but I wondered why it wasn't running away. I realized I had my camera and flashed a shot, thinking either it would be frightened or I’d get a better look at it.
(looks like a deer now - from the comfort of my kitchen)
Neither occurred. So I stood there as darkness fell, not knowing which way to turn – to the barn or back toward the house? Just then, Irish barked fiercely. I turned my head in his direction and then back toward my companion. Whatever it was – was gone. For now.

    I walked calmly to the barn.

September 21st A Good Thing

 

  Baking Soda. Baking soda is the answer to my laundry woes and it’s necessary for the goats to have it to keep all their stomachs functioning properly. We leave a bowl of it in their pen and they nibble on it at will. Not exactly my idea of a snack but they seem to really like it. And as if that weren’t enough of a reason to keep it on hand, if you mix it with water and make a paste, it relieves the pain of “stinging nettles”.

    For these reasons, I already buy baking soda in bulk. As I was pouring some out for the goats this morning I remembered putting a box in the refrigerator when I was growing up and thought of the odor issue. I found my dime store reading glasses because being part of the over-forty-crowd I can no longer just look down and read. Sure enough, just as Mama used to say, baking soda is the odor eliminator. I buy it in very large quantities at Home Depot™ or Costco™. It’s cheap too.

September 18th Skeeters

   

    Dan Quayle is not the only one who can’t spell. Mosquito closely related to the word potato in structure is apparently equally difficult to spell. In the short time that I have lived on Mosquito Lake Rd, I have seen and heard mosquito spelled at least twenty-two different ways. The most common seems to be “misqeeto” followed by “maskieto”. I’ve also seen “miskito” as well as “mysceto” and the less used “muskeatoe”. Some people are just completely lost without spell check I guess. What’s more, they don’t necessarily ask you if they’ve spelled it correctly. Can they feel so certain they know what they’re doing when they write something so incorrectly? As I often stand there peering over the counter, I can plainly see they’ve written it wrong, but unless there’s a delivery involved, I don’t bother to correct them. I figure I don’t need to single handedly teach the world about their inability to name a small insect. After this, I feel the world was a little unfair with their ridicule of Mr. Quail. He simply had an additional “e” while society at large isn’t even in the ballpark. It seems clear to me, the word mosquito should be on every national spelling bee.

Mosquito Magnet™

August 16th In The Navy

 I bought a new outfit last week and it’s become my uniform - navy coveralls. Monochromatic has always been a good look for me; I’m only 5’2”.  In fact, it’s very slimming and it takes all the decision out of what to wear to do chores around the place.  I don’t have to do endless loads of muddy laundry. Everyone around here is laughing at me, but I love it. Lisa says all I need is a bandanna to look like Rosie the Riveter.

    I think I’ll even wear it to pick Tom up from the airport along with my new, but nicely muddied work boots that complete my ensemble. Remember when you were a kid and you’d get brand-new white tennis shoes that you had to step on so they didn’t look too new? It’s the same thing with work boots. You just look like a rookie so you definitely have to get them dirty right away. Besides, if they weren’t dirty, Tom would notice right away. He notices everything, except when I get my haircut. Go figure.

    Tom - I call him Pea. It’s because he has professed he has a brain the size of a pea. Actually, he’s quite the opposite, but sometimes he forgets to think due to testosterone poisoning, a condition there seems to be no cure.



    Tom knows me better than anyone else (perhaps even my sister) and he still likes me. Something I find amazing and scary at the same time. We agree on just about everything from what to eat for dinner to where we want to live. We find the same things funny and ridicule each other about our differences. We laugh a lot. He frustrates me, I bug him, and it works wonderfully.
When I give some long-winded, convoluted explanation about why we have to paint the dining room purple he understands, or just says, “I like what you like.” (My sister always wanted to marry a man who cared about their china pattern. Bad decision. He still wants to decorate and keeps buying her pottery HE likes.) Tom is thoughtful, a perfectionist, an amazing artist, a tremendous cook and the funniest person I know aside from my sister. He's tweaked in a farm-kind-of-way he’ll even find the navy coveralls sexy.  

August 14th Dream House?

 Bill, my wisecracking contractor, came today to look things over and see what needed to be done and in what order we should do it. This experience is a little like selling your house.  Realtors and contractors see your house through some sort of magnifying glass. Things you can live with like a broken brick on your fireplace or a damaged piece of molding suddenly are completely unacceptable. With this in mind, you can only begin to understand the emotional and financial trauma I felt as Bill and his clipboard moved through my new house.       




    It’s hard to overstate the problems. The house was apparently built in phases by the people who lived here and by members of their church. I don’t think they knew about building codes, or if they did, they didn’t care. Don’t get me wrong; the house has amazing potential. The floors are wide-plank pine and I’m sure they will look great once I get them refinished.



    The house in its current state makes Myrna Loy and Cary Grant’s woes in “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” seem insignificant. Even the pictures I’m taking don’t really convey the problems. It feels closed in, yet there are so many doors that lead to strange places. There are flies living in the walls, the sunroom’s hardwood floor was painted white and then red duct tape was put down to create a gingham pattern. The electrical panel was; put in upside down; there is no heat upstairs; and then there’s the creepy crib built into the cabinet in the master bedroom;





and it rains in my kitchen whenever someone takes a shower in the upstairs bathroom. There are two-count-them-two dishwashers and neither works. But the most remarkable feature, the one feature every single person makes a comment about is the red light fixture in the kitchen. It should be hanging over the counter in a burger joint. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve already heard, “Do I get fries with that?”

    There are about forty-seven different wallpapers. Now this sounds as if I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. In each room there are no less than three different wallpaper patterns and some have many more. Someone spent a great deal of time and effort to select coordinating and companion papers and painstakingly put them all up. The problem is that this was done instead of finishing the drywall, so now I’m looking at having to redo the walls just to paint.











    My father’s apartment (shown in the picture above and the ones below) is beyond depressing, dark and rundown with extremely narrow stairs that might keep his weight in check and are definitely a fire hazzard .  

Everything in the kitchen is cracking, There is no shower.

The ceilinging is very low.

I think it is especially difficult for him, coming from the bright sunny guesthouse on Califa surrounded by fruit trees and flowers. We’ve decided to brighten it up a bit by adding a few skylights and taking out the wall dividing the room to make it an open studio with a nice wood-burning stove in the center. We put down hardwood for my dad on Califa, but that was a mistake, as he didn’t take care of it at all. Truly we should put down cement with a drain in the middle, but I don’t think that‘s socially acceptable. No matter how practical for my bachelor father and various dogs.

    Back to Bill, who has been writing and tallying as he goes through the house. Bill is a guy’s guy, direct and to the point. He drives a big truck, has a pretty wife and loves to fish. He is practical and so, when he told me he could solve my mosquito problem, I listened. I thought mosquitoes were something you just had to live with. A real downside to moving here, but the price you pay for the lush green of the Northwest. Until Bill told me about the Mosquito Magnet™.

    When Bill left, I went on the Internet and began researching the Mosquito Magnet™ and how it worked. I am now a mosquito aficionado. I know more about the mosquito than one would imagine. I somehow suspected that there are two types of mosquitoes. Having lived in Minnesota, I felt that the mosquitoes here were much smaller with a bite that does not itch nearly as long. Apparently, I’m some sort of a mosquito savant. The mosquitoes in the Midwest and the East are attracted to your skin whereas the mosquitoes in the West are attracted to your CO2 plume. Still with me? Using this knowledge, Mosquito Magnet™ mimics the appropriate attractant, luring the female mosquito, the biter, into a net from which there is no escape. Once there she lingers until the slow death sentence she deserves is carried out. I am not a member of PETA.

    I read the testimonials, checked to see if I was missing something, and desperate as someone can be who lives on Mosquito Lake Road, I ordered three.

August 4th The Big Tidy Up

 Huzzah! All our containers have arrived. The unloading is another thing entirely.

    Team Donaldson came out for a workday. You’ve just got to love family. Chris changed into overalls and work boots he’d bought at Kmart™ and commenced to cleaning up the place. He worked like a field hand. He tore down the dilapidated chicken coop. (I’m afraid of chickens so I have no plans to get any.) Then he tossed out all the junk from the “loafing shed” He took out computers and fishing poles, old shovels and a ton of other random stuff. I call it a loafing shed, because that’s the way the real estate listing described.  Who or what is loafing there a mystery. I’ve searched the Internet and I can’t find a definition anywhere. All I know is that it is the three-sided barn down the hill, in the pasture.



    While Mr. Overalls was outside - all 6’4” of him, Lisa, Mike and I were inside shelf-papering the kitchen. We all agreed there was too much rat pee and greasy sludge in the shelves to ever get them clean enough. But we tried. With safety goggles, rubber gloves and surgical masks we scoured the inside of each cupboard with the grease-cutting-wonder Zep™ from Home Depot™. It was slow going as it must have been years since anyone had cleaned this kitchen. I could describe it in noxious detail but, until you’ve had a mixture of rat scat, pee and gunk of uncertain origin running down your gloved arm while you make that lip-curled-back-just-bit-into-a-lemon face, you really can’t know just how revolting it all was.




Pictures don't even reveal the truth. The shelves are deep and strangely shaped with odd bends and juts so you have to lean way in to get at all the accumulated crud. Of course each piece of shelf paper had to be custom cut. The cupboards were obviously salvaged from different places. When you opened a door you never knew what you would to find. Inside we found varmints, recipes for fruit salad, jars filled with ominous things that looked like the forgotten of one of Mr. Hyde’s evil projects, things that could only be analyzed by forensic labs and one beautiful shiny copper rabbit cookie cutter from Williams Sonoma - perfect for Easter.



    As the evening progressed, Chris came inside complaining of mosquitoes. The kids did not want to go outside either. So everyone came in. I thought we were all done for the day, but Chris whipped out a can of white paint and started attacking the mud-stained laundry room. He was then bent on getting the sofa bed into the family room as the “piece de resistance”. He worked a miracle. I can’t believe how much he did for me today. He said he thought it would help my outlook. It has.
   
    A month without furniture in a broken down dirty house, bankers saying, “NO,” Tom calling to see what I’d accomplished and my 63 itchy mosquito bites had been wearing on my mood. The cavalry had arrived and I am eternally grateful .