Category Archives: Beware of Leopard

Today’s Images

Howdy, folks.

Going to go with pictures for the time being, since I’m too busy for most things.

We got out to California for a week last month, and got to see all the family that we haven’t since well before the covid struck. A really nice visit with everyone, bracketed by terrible long travel days with layovers longer than flight times.

Before traveling, we got the boat out of the water and put it in for the assorted minor warranty issues that surface during our first season with the watercraft. On our last weekend of fishing, Marcia and I both caught good-size bass:

Once back in town, work and assorted Fall chores started lining up, so we’re leaving the boat out until next Spring.

More when there’s more. Be well.

Another Month

And so it goes. The best intentions and all that, but in the split between life, work, chores, fun on the boat, etc … I’ve not posted here. Sorry-ish. So what’s been going on…

August was a fairly wet month up here, compared to the first couple of months of Summer. I know you Californians will hate us for this, but just this morning, we had 1.25 inches of rain, bringing the month’s total up close to a nearly normal 3″. The weather is about to turn, though. The first night below 50F should be this week… Down in MD, that would have been a mid- to late-October event.

Work has been okay, but seriously busy. Busy is far better than the alternative, but requires a bit of a balancing act to prevent sliding onto the burnout train.

We’ve been out on the boat once or twice a week all summer, doing lots of fishing and a wee bit of catching of bass and other species of fish. Good fun, that, but there are a couple of issues to be addressed when we put the boat in for first service, next month.

We put a couple of tomato plants into the front garden where they flourished until the ground squirrels discovered how much they like tomatoes. We also learned that you need to treat our particular variety of peach tree with an antifungal … far too late to do anything about most of the fruit this season. Marcia did put up a dozen jars of preserves, but not the many quarts of preserved peaches we’d been hoping for. She also “canned” pickles and beets this year, so she has plenty of those (neither are in my list of preferred foods).

Georgia Aileen, the american bully mix rescue dog, has continued on her slow, slow path to becoming a civilized mutt. She’s still a real handful on a leash around other dogs, but even there, her behavior is so much improved over the start of her life with us… we’re very proud of her.

Be well, take care of each other, and get the new booster for covid variants as soon as you can, which may be as early as next week!

Busy

We’ve been pretty busy, and when that’s done, we’re pretty relaxed. Here’s some of what relaxed looks like:

Some Life in Maine

A few pictures to illustrate the good bits…

And Flowers…

Our yard through spring so far has been a cornucopia of flowers, here’s some more of them…

So, yeah, plenty of pleasant surprises from the yard that Lorraine gifted to us when she sold us the house.

Have a great week…

A Sad Day

A sad day for Texas. Another sad day for a world in which the right answer for anyone is to go shoot a bunch of kids. Breaks my heart.

Fishing

We got out on the boat on Saturday. Marcia caught the first fish, before she ran out of steam, on a warm day out on the water. I went back out and caught two more, the biggest being this 1lb 11oz monster small mouth bass. A purposeful catch, too – I saw a spawning bed, knew at this time of year a fish was likely right nearby. I cast a small worm past the bed and dragged it slowly across, tricking with wily fish. Brought it in quickly, weighed, picture, and right back in the water to finish the business of making more bass…

It was a fun day out. Sunday was mostly chores around the house, and a bit of visiting with Nancy…

On the Water

This weekend, we celebrated my birthday a few weeks late. Marcia had been unwell (no Covid, but no fun, either) and she’s now mostly much better, thanks for asking. The best part is that in the interval between birthday actual and birthday celebrated, we took delivery on our AlumaCraft 165S boat. We got it into the water on Friday, and took it out for some fishing both Saturday and Sunday. Note that I said fishing, and not catching – it’s pretty early in the season here yet, and we have lots to learn about fishing techniques/baits that vary with the seasons up here. I think that I had fish on the hook maybe three times, and boated approximately none of them. Marcia did a bit of fishing, but spent time re-rigging and getting gear setup for future trips. That’s time I should probably take, too… Here’s Marcia enjoying our new mode of transportation over the weekend:

It’s been asked, what will we name this boat. Not sure that I need to name a boat, if I’m going to be mocked for naming cars (which I totally didn’t do). But while “Bob” and “Baldrick”, and perhaps even “I have a cunning plan” are on the list, I’m voting for holding off on a naming ceremony for the first year, after which, if the fishing was good, we can name it nicely. If, however, a boat of our own that doesn’t improve our fishing capabilities is found to have been the result, then perhaps just “UPoS” on the transom will be sufficient (“Useless Piece of —-“).

Spring has (finally) sprung

The weather has finally reached the point where we can call is Spring. It’s been greening up for a while, and the daffodils have been up and out for a while. But the trees and shrubs are finally starting to leaf, the tulips are in bloom, and I’m going to have to mow the lawn for the first time this year, real soon now.

The bit of lawn visible behind that flower bed doesn’t seem so bad, but other patches of the lawn have been unevenly fertilized by the dog over the last three months, such that the front yard now looks much like the result of an old man shaving: splotchy and uneven. My initial goal will be to make it flat.

Springing

In the last few days I managed a variety of outdoor chores around the new homestead. This includes stuff that should have been done during the Fall cleanup, but weren’t since Lorraine was getting ready to move out, and we were not in, yet. By the time I got settled enough to do a small amount of yardwork, there was a tiny window of time before the snows started. So all I managed was to get the bulk of the leaves off the lawns, then.

Now a couple of the front beds have been raked out, and the leaves blown off into a holding area. Then yesterday, I raked out some more leaves around back, and fired up the Cub Cadet for the first time. Works like a champ. The chain-driven leaf collector does a sufficient job at picking up most of large piles of leaves, then I could drive them down to where I stockpiled the Fall accumulation. Eventually I’ll turn that stack over a few times a year and compost them.

In and around that, I did some more lower-garage cleanup and organization, as well as gluing up another bit of the table saw assembly that needed repair after the move. This one was sort of on me, as I had not fully disassembled a bracket from the top, and of course they moved it bracket-down, breaking out the end of the edge. It’ll be fine, though, once re-assembled.

Georgia likes napping in the sun, in my home office. But she’d rather not be disturbed by being photographed while in the act of napping.

Friday the Thirteenth

Friday the thirteenth falls on a Sunday this month. Sorry for the lag in posts, but settling into a new house and getting a new rescue mutt makes for a busy time.

Georgia is settling in pretty well. She’s testing a lot of boundaries, and it’ll be a few months of getting her expectations aligned with actual reality, we’re sure. We are doing formal training with this dog, as Marcia can’t walk her right now – Georgia would pull her over right away. But it’ll all work out. Hardest thing at the moment: finding her toys that she can’t destroy quickly that won’t instead destroy her teeth and gums.

Georgia and I took a walk up to the nearby (retired?) quarry last week. She had fun sniffing everything and trying to pull me over. I had fun looking at the rusty old gear, and trying to keep my feet on a mostly ice-based walking surface.

Chores

Maine remains a chore-filled place. Today, for example… Due to extraordinarily good planning on my part, I had to be up at 0630 on the morning of Daylight Stealing Time, to do production OS patching at work. Following that, I did the following activities today:

• The bi-weekly cleaning of the pellet stove and the wood stove.
• Shoveled the driveway by hand, since we only got about 2.5″ of snow yesterday afternoon into evening. The downside of not shoveling a light fall is that it partly melts, then turns into an ice rink. So it’s better to clear it quickly. And it’s faster by shovel than by machine, with a light fall.
• Roasted coffee (the second pound of a tasty Guatemalan from Sweet Maria’s Coffee)
• Fabricated a new wood rack for near the basement wood stove, to make it easier to manage for Marcia when she’s downstairs sewing, etc.
• Used wedge and sledge to split some more of the large split wood into smaller split wood – more appropriate sizes for Marcia and our particular woodstove.

We’re about halfway through our regular stock of pellets for the stove. I’ll have to go out and pick up another load in about a week and a half. That batch might carry us right through into the warm (though I doubt it). I buy (25) forty pound bags of pellets at a time, and stock them into the upper garage, bringing a bag in to the house as needed. Here’s what three and a half weeks of heating for the house looks like in the back of the truck:

As we start to ramp our days back up into 40+ degree Fahrenheit temperatures, the pellet stove shuts itself off for several hours in the middle of the day, so our consumption of pellets should go down by twenty or twenty five percent over the next month.

That’s all I’ve got for you at the moment. Time to go grab a shower, and get ready to start another week… Be well.