What I've Been up to Lately

Now that the snow is melted, it is time to get to work. Of course I'm seldom home, spending my days dashing from place to place working for others, but once in a while I get an evening or Sunday afternoon at home. Then I work like mad because I am racing the clock in a number of ways.

First is the simple fact that there are only a few months until winter starts again. Summer is a season of feverish activity in this country everywhere you look. Farmers give up on sleeping for a few months, the animal population tries to fit a lifetime of living in because if they don't get everything done by winter, they won't be living, and everyone bursts out of their houses to get as much sun and fun in as possible.

Besides the deadline of winter, I am racing a couple other natural processes. It is only going to get harder to get the property clean as the grass grows higher, hiding the trash and twining around the brush. The ticks will continue to proliferate and the mosquito population, which isn't too bad yet, will make being outside miserable without a portable dip of repellent. The grass has to stay mowed or the mosquitoes will be unbearable, but no one will mow my grass if it is full of booby traps. Another reason for my frenetic efforts is getting the trash pile hauled off to the dump as quickly as possible will deprive my basement skunks of their buffet. But that's a different post.

So we've been hauling trash. Things like water heaters, tires, fencing, microwaves, animal skeletons, pipes, lumber, well, you get the idea! The pile's starting to look pretty impressive and we aren't even done yet. Not even close.

I have lots of plants to put in the ground as soon as it's warm, so another of my projects had been to paint some on my house. What? You don't get the connection? I want to put a bed for my annuals on the east wall of the house, but it needed to be scraped and painted. If I waited to do that my plants might get damaged in the process. Ergo, I must paint to plant.


I ended up scraping the walls the day after a 3 day rain storm. The paint came off so easily it was like putting a hot knife through butter. There wasn't much white left on the walls by the time I cleaned them off, but we were supposed to have clear weather for a week or so, plenty of time for drying and priming before the next rain. Supposed to, but suddenly our forecast is filled with mostly rain clouds.


After getting the special dispensation from my all-wise father to put primer on early, I rushed home from picking Laura up and we got on the painting gear. It was somewhat akin to preparing for battle since the precursor for the storm has been high winds up to 45 mph. That is NOT good painting weather. When I stirred the paint bucket up it got whitecaps in it and the paint blew out in a spray. But we got the wall painted. Now it looks like a bird's egg, all white with brown dirt chunks all over it. Oh, well. It's only primer.

On an unrelated note, I finally have pictures of my muskrat baby. Somewhat of a misnomer, since he is neither mine nor a baby. He lives down the road in a pond, but since it's not our pond and he's causing us no problems, he has become somewhat of a pet of ours. Not that HE knows it, but that's beside the point.