Hmmm – fall seems to have snuck up when I wasn’t looking. Its gotten chilly at night now, along with the fog rolling into the valleys below us (and occasionally coming up the hill to envelope us). I have this long list of things I wanted to get done around the house/property before ‘winter’ and now I feel like I’m going to be scrambling the next month to get it all done (note: its not like real winter or anything – mostly, its a matter of ‘before the rains start coming again and its consistently too cold to do stuff like paint outdoors).
We went to a couple feed & farm supply stores today to get food for the horse/sheep/goats and a variety of new feeders to put out in the pastures. With luck, they should work better than the ad-hoc ‘toss the hay on the ground’ approach. Its healthier for the critters anyway, since they won’t be eating as much dirt with their food. Did you know that sheep/goats/horses can’t throw up when the eat something bad? Yea, its gotta go all the way thru and stuff like dirt in quantity does them no good.
Anyway, in the middle of setting up the new feeders late this afternoon, one of the neighbors swung by to visit (Lester). I’ve never met him in person, though we’ve had plenty of exchanges in email and he’s a pretty cool guy. He and his fiance’ live in a house (some might say ‘mansion’ he built a couple years ago on the ridge above us. He’s a pretty cool guy – originally from Wisconsin, so he’s a cheese-head 🙂 He seems to really enjoy life up here in the boonies, but his fiance’ isn’t quite so enamoured with the area. Guess she is more of a city girl and kinda hates wildlife and such. Could have something to do with the number of snakes they keep finding getting into their house. Dunno… they also seem to have many more issues with the wind than we do – one of the downsides on living on the top of the ridge – although they must have a really nice view, they can’t seem to have much planted up there that survives the wind. Maybe thats why the ridge was barren when they first bought the property to build on…
Tomorrow its power tool time – renting a jackhammer to break up the concrete and rock that is in the way of finishing up some of the trenching work I started last weekend.
NOTE FROM LISA:
Art is being conservative in what Lester said about his fiance….and I quote….
“Kimmy HATES it up here, she absolutely hates nature”. She’s from Saigon, a total city girl born and raised. He kept looking at me as I was cleaning up Art’s tools that he had left scattered around, cutting up cardboard/binding it up and generaly cleaning up crap and kept shaking his head saying “Wow, you are amazing.” Guess Kimmy is loathe to even step foot outside the mansion, little less help Lester around the property. One time he got her to go outside and plant some tomatoes, and the deer promptly came by and destroyed what he worked so hard to get her to dol. He actually asked me “Shouldn’t you be out shopping for purses and shoes or something like that???” to which I laughed and answered “Oh, I do, you have NO IDEA, I definitely do” He smiled and said “Yeah, I can’t STAND that..mutter mutter mutter.” I feel bad for him. Living up here for Art and I is a joint venture, we each want it just as much as the other. When we first saw this place, we could talk about nothing else. There was no hesitation for either of us in making the decision to buy this place and move up here. I feel bad for Lester, he might be better off marrying someone who has the same goals as he does, and who would love this place as much as he does.
Sigh.