Go-fer
Scribbled by Art on February 21, 2010 11:41 pm
I have something in common with Bill Murray – no, its not grey hair… its pesky gophers. We seem to have a bumper crop of ‘em in the fields this year.
I didn’t have much luck with the water hose down the hole trick in the past few months, plus its hard to do far out in the fields. But the gophers are now causing problems for the horses due to the large/deep holes. So, the tools I have at hand are:
and:
The pups show great enthusiasm about getting the gophers:
They are more like inefficient badgers in terms of the dirt flingin’ around (but far friendlier than your average badgers).
For now, I’m sticking with the traps since they are starting to be successful. I need to get some help from a neighbor to get some gopher poison pellets (the type that won’t be harmful to the horses, cats, birds, etc).
Happy Birthday Lisa!
Scribbled by Art on February 14, 2010 11:34 amWe had a b’day party here for Lisa yesterday with a bunch of our friends. Lisa made all her favorite comfort foods (lime-jalapeno fried chicken, multi-cheese mac-n-cheese, BBQ short ribs, swiss chard). I got her a chocolate chocolate chocolate cake and the bakery was able to put a picture of the top:
They use a inkjet printer with edible ink on sugar paper… kinda neat.
After dinner and cake, we watched Zombieland (great movie) and “Yor, Hunter from the Future” – some campy 1980s flick that was never released in the US – it had commentary ala MST3K, but sans the robots. It was the only part that made it watchable.
Scenes of February
Scribbled by Art on February 11, 2010 12:18 amNo real theme to this post – just random days this month so far. In between working on a new startup idea (that doesn’t seem to be panning out 
), I’ve been doing a variety of stuff around the yard/house to keep busy and get caught up.
Still collecting firewood from the pastures (and along the park road after some of the recent storms):
The chickens enjoy having some fresh hay to break up the monotony of winter mud. Plus, it keeps them busy by giving them something to peck around searching for food.
Dee Dee trying to show Darby how to dig for gophers while I was working on firewood. Unfortunately, Darby has the attention span of a gnat:
Dretti in his usual posture:
Been installing all sorts of outdoor security lights. The driveway is now very well lit between the house and barn, much to the displeasure of the barn cats.
So, we traded one of our barn cats for a (temporary?) indoor/outdoor cat from a cat rescue group. Lisa named him Hef – he doesn’t really Meow as much as just says “hef”. He’s cool with the dogs, but they aren’t sure they like an indoor cat. Particularly not one that wants to share the couch, bed, etc with them:
I walked down the park road the other day rather than having Rob drive all the way to the house to give me a ride to the auto shop. Its actually really hard on the shins to hike down the road in hiking boots. Ouch. Next time, I’ll wear sneakers or something more compliant. Felt more burn than I ever did hiking down any of the Adirondack Mtns. I looked over the edge of the road in the really deep/steep ravine section. Its a long way down…
Final thoughts – doesn’t this seem like two events that just ought not share the same venue at the same time? Or is it just me…
Congrats Saints
Scribbled by Art on February 8, 2010 12:05 amCongrats to the New Orleans Saints on their victory today. I was rooting for ‘em to pull this out – really felt like they were the underdog and its just amazing to me that a team that has been such a perennial losing franchise finally got it together to go all the way. Nice to see an underdog win. Plus, I’m not a fan of the Colts or Manning, so that helped 
Wow – Clarkson Hockey sucks rocks this year
Scribbled by Art on February 5, 2010 6:34 pmRain, rain and more rain
Scribbled by Art on February 4, 2010 8:17 pmPlaying in the snow
Scribbled by Art on January 28, 2010 10:40 pmLast weekend Fraley and I headed up to the Sierra for the Cal4Wheel “Winter Fun Fest” which is an annual trek thru the snow in the high country. The trails aren’t what you’d consider as technical when they don’t have snow on them – most of them are merely forest service roads that just aren’t maintained. It reminded me of trying to get thru some of the backroads in the Adirondaks in the winter – except for the bitter cold. The temps in the Sierras all weekend were pretty mild, even at 7K ft – it was generally in the range of 30-40 the whole weekend.
We arrived Friday nite, but didn’t plan to do the night trail run, so we just stopped by the fairgrounds to see if we could register and get our trail info for the next day. We signed up for the Avalanche Express run which sounded cool, but the Sierra hadn’t had fresh snow for a couple weeks, so we were not anticipating any sliding snow
The run started about 15 miles outside of Grass Valley, just at the edge of where the snow line was. We had close to a full run (20+ Jeeps). From there we went up to the Tahoe National Forest, around Yuba Gap. After airing down, we headed down the trail, which went around Lake Valley Reservoir. About 10 of the drivers opted for the extreme part of the trail and split off into the deeper snow on a mostly unbroken trail. I think they spent most of their time getting each other unstuck. Not a big deal on such a sunny clear day. The snow was pretty icy on top and dense, so it packed pretty well.
A bunch of folks stopped at the top of the trail for lunch while Fraley, I and others headed further down the trail into some deeper snow – and a couple of us (including me) got stuck in a few places – it was actually worse in the tracks than cutting new trail as the tracks got pretty deep and with the dense crusted snow on top, the middle of the tracks started to hang up the rigs going thru. All was good after a few tugs with the tow straps and we were on our way.
The kids of a few folks made a couple snow forts at the top of the trail, which Fraley had to try out for size:
We wandered back to the fairgrounds early in the afternoon and hung out for the silent auction (I bid on and won a couple things I brought home for Lisa – like a digital torque wrench – just what every girl wants
We didn’t win anything in the raffle (again), so we signed up for the deep snow run scheduled for Sunday morning early and went back to the hotel to get some sleep.
We awoke Sunday to cold rain in Grass Valley, hoping that it was snow up higher and not more rain (the trails would be a slushfest if it were raining).
We ran the same trail as on Saturday, but with the plan to go further into the fresh snow than we did on Saturday. It was snowing when we got onto the trail and just go worse (better?) as the day went on. The guy in front of us with the yellow Jeep pickup pulled aside to let others break trail since his rig was really heavy and he didn’t want to get stuck where noone else was big enough or positioned right to get him out. We managed to get at least a couple miles down the trail, which was further than folks had ever gotten on this particular trail at this time of year. We finally decided to turn around when the snow was starting to really come down (we still had like 30+ miles to get out of the Sierra and get below the snow line). The trail out was really slippery due to the new snow and took us longer than expected to get out, but everyone made it safely (tho there were a couple folks doing 180-360 spins on the trail
I-80 – this was not a good place to spin out. Almost noone on the highway had chains on yet and we saw several vehicles go off the road:
Kitty is back
Scribbled by Art on January 23, 2010 1:38 amRain, rain and more rain
Scribbled by Art on January 22, 2010 12:29 amDid I mention rain? Its been raining here since Sunday. There’s been a series of storms stacked up out in the Pacific that have been like a train rolling thru here. Yesterday we had the worst of ‘em, with really high winds (near 70mph here at the house) and torrents of rain. Unfortunately in spite of trying to have everything nailed down, we did lose the lambing/horse shed out in the back pasture:
We had a bunch of tree limbs and debris on the road, but it was mostly moved out of the way by others before we got to it:
Welch Creek has been running pretty high all week for a change. Glad we are finally getting caught up on our water. Certainly all the trees and specifically the ferns love the water:
We’re due for a bit of a break on the weekend (at least on Saturday) and then more rain next week. The next couple nites might add a bit of snow to the mix just to keep things interesting. Speaking of snow, the Sierra was supposed to end up with another 10 ft of new snow. I can’t even fathom how to deal with that much white stuff.
Stuff in the mist
Scribbled by Art on January 19, 2010 12:24 amSorry for the long delay in posts. We have just been total slackers in updating the blog. We did in fact survive the spiders and other things in the mist, not to worry. The big thing with the tentacles was a little challenging, but it left us alone mostly.
Anyway
We had a fairly quiet Xmas this year – Laura and Jeff and their multitude of canines came down and joined our pack for a big doggy holiday. Lisa is still recovering from the surgery she had in early December (she’ll explain this more). We opted for a a small tree this year to make it easier to manage with all the dogs and such. I got a few pups to pose, but not all (we had a total of 10 dogs in the house for the holidays!)
Andretti is very good at posing:
Q was pretty good too:
And then things went down hill trying to get Darby to hold still:
The steamer trunk to the right of the tree is the one we found at a neat antique shop in Maine. Its a great piece.
