More Cat Introductions

I'm continuing to let the cats out into the house while the dogs are outside during the day. Today I moved their food to the kitchen counter to get them used to the idea of eating in the kitchen, where the food will be long-term. (I'm taking back the kitchen counter from the mice!)

Here are some shots of the fun and games after I let the cats out this morning.

When Pancho hears the noise outside of Maggie trying to get in, he goes to investigate. Maggie is practicing all the loving she's going to give Pancho when they finally get to touch noses. (Ha ha, like it's really going to happen like that!)

Desmond wants to love up on Pancho too.

Maggie trying different ways to get in. Here she is on the porch railing.

Maggie Meets Pancho

My father had the idea to let the cats out of the guest room when I'm gone to let them get acquainted with the house (and the mice). I normally leave the dogs outside when I'm gone, so it's a reasonable thing to do, and they can stay separated for while longer.

Pancho is the more exploratory of the two cats. He made it all the way to the other end of the house before Sparky even got downstairs.

And met Maggie - again.

I can tell already that Pancho isn't going to take any guff from no dogs. When we left the house, he was sitting in this room watching Maggie throw herself against the door.

Pancho and Sparky

Pancho, on the left, and Sparky have been shut in the guest room since Friday afternoon. An accidental visit by Maggie set them off for a bit, but they've since calmed down. They'll stay here for a week or so before I slowly introduce them to the dogs. As old as Desmond is, he's extremely interested in them too.

The Lake After the Storm

Here's a picture of the lake from yesterday evening. It's been raining hard all morning, so I'm sure it's re-filling. You can compare this picture to the one a few posts ago, and see how much light those red pines were blocking.

Other random notes:

- Mr Repair Shop man has a bit more respect for my truck now. It magically started for him, too, without any keys. He says it's a good thing the tow truck driver had put it in neutral with the brake on. He thinks he knows what it is: underneath the relay box is a bunch of wires that the mice probably ate, and something is backfeeding to the ignition. At least it's an interesting problem!

- This has been the wettest July on record here. You'd have to go back to the 1800s to get the 2nd, 3rd and 4th wettest.

OK Mousies

Your days are numbered. If everything works out, by this time tomorrow the Blueberry Hills Homestead family will be two larger. Meet Spunky and Booba (Spunky in the orange and Booba wearing grey and white), currently residing at the Mohawk and Hudson River Humane Society.


I think I'm going to rename them Pancho and Lefty. Any other mouser-y names you can think of?

Rainstorm

We had about 6 inches of rain yesterday evening, causing some roads in the area to wash out (including a road between Albany and Pittsfield, MA that I sometimes use for my commute).

I woke up this morning to a major lake in the yard (I forgot my camera at work, so this is an old shot of this same lake. ) There are several inches more water now. All of the grass closest to me is underwater now. BTW - all the red pines you see here are gone, gone, gone. The house will see more sun this winter than in the past because these trees are down. Yay for that.

The lake this morning was much higher than in this picture. I see that my driveway trenches have an unintended consequence. This lake is draining through the trench to the driveway, then through the trench on the other side of the driveway into the front yard. I'm OK with that for now. It's pretty rare to get 6 inches of rain in a few hours, so this wouldn't happen very often. Plus, in that system, the driveway-center is the high spot, so this lake won't empty much farther before the high spot dries out.

We all Harvested Raspberries

Before all the nastiness with the truck last night, we all harvested raspberries! Maggie likes raspberries. She discovered them all by herself.

Now Desmond, I had to teach. He likes raspberries too. He's not as into the woods, so he lingers at the interface between the yard and the wild stuff.

It's so nice to have a family activity that we can all do together.

I Think it's Time to Get a Cat

Every time I've opened the hood of the truck in the last 2 weeks, I've seen something like this not-so-little critter. One time I opened the fuse box and saw 4 babies.

Yesterday I re-attached the battery cables in preparation for driving the truck to the shop this morning. Tried to start the truck and.... nothing. I canceled the rides I had set up and scheduled a tow truck for the morning.

After I had gone to bed, I was woken up by Maggie going nuts barking, and some strange sounds outside. I went to look, and saw that my truck was running, and the headlights and running lights were going on and off at random intervals.

I was TERRIFIED. I thought that someone was trying to steal the truck. Got dressed in the dark so not to alert the intruder. Worried about who was going to call 911 if I got hurt. Eventually (seemed like forever but was probably 2 minutes), I realized that the truck was empty.

It had started by itself - with no keys.

I made a halfhearted attempt to disconnect the battery cables before I decided that it was too dangerous. I tried putting the key in so that I could turn it on ... and then turn it off. Worried about an electrical fire, I called the insurance company to get it towed NOW, instead of in the morning.

The tow truck came at 1:30 am, about 1/2 hour after the truck stopped of its own accord. It had run for 2 hours. Now the truck is at the shop, where it belongs. Mr Shop Man is pretty unhappy that the problem is worse than I let on when I made the appointment two weeks ago. I'm unhappy about that too. If I were to use my incredibly strong root-cause anlysis skills, I think we should both blame the mice. I don't think this repair is going to be cheap.

I don't like poison or traps as options to get rid of the mice (which are in the house as well), because of the possibility that either or both of my dogs will get harmed. I think it's time to get a cat. A mouser.

Wind Economics - First Step

When I bought this house last year, I was really excited about the possibility of using a wind turbine for power. Before I even got my first electric bill, I had asked my town if it was OK for me to put up a tower. (They said that there's nothing in the regs preventing it, so go right ahead. They checked county and state regs too, for height restrictions. The results escape me now, since I had done some preliminary economic calculations by then.)

One of the first steps, even for people on mountains, is to determine how much wind is available. I bought a wireless weather center last fall, but stopped short of using it because I couldn't figure out how to mount the anemometer in a way that I could access it to change the batteries when necessary. On Sunday, I finally overcame the lengthy inertia, bought some galvanized piping and mounting pieces, and got the thing up yesterday (one of the rare times I've actually accomplished anything on a weeknight). This one is at 20 feet, which is technically too low to get a true reading of the wind (note the trees about 40 feet SE of the thing). But it would err on the low side, meaning if it's acceptable at this altitude, it would be great at 60 feet or higher. PS, I suspect I should ground it before too long...

(Warning, geeky engineering stuff follows.)

On the economic side, my stove and water heater are run by propane. My furnace is heating oil, and the rest is electric. My average electric use last year was 12-24 kwh per day, about 4300 kwh for the year (at a delivered cost of 11.6 cents per kwh, I spent about $500). If I converted the propane stuff to electric, it would about double this number. (I am aware of, but didn't take into account potential savings because my current water heater is old and inefficient.) The potential savings then is about $1000 per year at best, ignoring the heating oil usage. I estimate that I'll use about 300 gallons of heating oil (which is half what I used last winter - I learned a lot about that!). The kwh equivalent of that is 11,757 kwh, which in oil will cost me about $800.

In summary, a turbine to take care of my electricity only would deliver 4300 annual kwh. Adding propane, the turbine would deliver about 9,000 annual kwh. Adding heating oil would size the turbine to deliver 21,000 kwh a year. Installed cost for a turbine would run somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000, just to cover my electric use only! To cover all my uses, it would be north of $100,000. It's easy to see that there is no economic benefit to wind power.

That is, there is no economic benefit now, with my inefficient lifestyle, and wide open, windy house. When I make the house more air-tight, and get better at being efficient, I'll do the calculations again. It's likely that I would require a smaller size blade, and also likely that the technology will advance a bit and may be cheaper then. By then I'll have data on the available wind here too.

There is definitely a benefit to being off-grid though! So I'll keep at this thing and maybe the benefits will tip the scale over to the plus side in a few years.

Two Rabbits

Last night there were TWO rabbits taunting Maggie, just outside the invisible fence barrier. She can take it for a while, then goes through the woods on the right to see if she can get closer.

Maggie and the Rabbit

Well, the invisible fence works! There is a rabbit that comes out into the uphill road and eats most evenings, in front of Maggie. (It's a bit difficult to see the brown thing with long ears in the grassy center, to the right of the daisies.) Apparently both Maggie and the rabbit know that the rabbit is safe.

Blueberry Season Begins

The blueberries look like this now, some ripe, some not, and some in transition. I picked a bunch on Saturday from the upper blueberry hill.


There were a bunch down low (the plastic container is resting on the ground).
















There were a bunch up high (over my head).

















There are about 15-20 big bushes on the upper hill, and another 10-15 around the house and on the lower hill. I think there'll be enough for the bear and me to share!

Scat!

Warning for the faint of heart. There's a poop picture coming up!

Yesterday I walked to the southern border of my property, something I hadn't done before. There are a fair number of animal trails back there in the woods. I even saw an old concrete thing that may have been part of a structure, waaaay back in the woods.

On the way back to the house, I took a detour through the upper blueberry hill coming in the back way. It was there that I saw this poop.

After researching in my trusty animal tracking book that has lots and lots of poop pictures, I have come to the thought that it's black bear poop! Cool.

Chainsaw Thoughts

I've been thinking about my chainsaw this week, since I discovered that the hardware store sold me the smallest chainsaw they carry, and discovered that it's a light-duty saw, "ideal for jobs like pruning, lighter cutting tasks and hobby work."

According to specifications, this saw is only 10 pounds, which is good. However, the hardware store didn't carry any replacement chains "that short," until I visited them twice on Monday and they changed their minds. I have to remember to stop by again today to pick up my old chain, sharpened, and 2 new chains.

I'm not even thinking about how patronizing it was to have them assume that I wanted a "girly" saw when what I asked for was a saw I could use to cut a lot of wood. What I've been thinking about is that my problems with this saw all make sense now. The saw has a small gas tank, that's why it runs out of gas after 15 or so cuts. This saw has a short chain. That's why the chain dulls after about 3 tanks of gas. People I've been talking to about my problems don't have the same problems because they have bigger chainsaws!

If I had a bigger chainsaw I would get more wood cut with less work. That's what having the right tools does for you. Yes, it would be heavier, but that's weight that makes the saw go faster through the wood. A longer chain means each tooth contacts wood fewer times, keeping it sharper, longer. Oh brother - must have more tools!

First Harvest

This past Sunday I picked raspberries and the first of the blueberries and enjoyed some on ice cream. What a treat!

Planning the Raised Beds

Here's the first "draft" of my plan for raised beds taken from the 2nd floor window. I used pieces of wood from the old raised beds (about 20-40 feet past the new raised bed place) for this outline.

The idea here is to put raised beds just past the apple tree that you can see to the right, and have a small orchard in the open area past the beds. I want to have pears and apricots in addition to the apple and cherry that are already here. It's hard to see in this picture, but the dwarf cherry trees are along the left edge of this shot. I'm guessing there's room for maybe 6 trees here.

For the second draft of the raised bed plan, I'll move the beds closer together. Current dimensions of each bed are 4 x 12 and I'm planning to make the wood 16 inches deep (with 2 x 8 wood). I'm trying to strategically place beds over some big rocks. There's a bit of a rocky "spine" that goes left to right in the middle of the beds, meaning that to level the tops of the beds, I'll likely have to cut into the bottom edge of the bed frame because it will be impossible to dig down. There may end up being a 3rd draft of this plan!

The area immediately to the left of the round picnic table on its side is where a large red pine tree was until a month ago. I may have to get an excavator back in to smooth this area as well as the orchard area before I go much farther.

Time to Do Something About the Puddles

You're looking at a picture of my driveway, which is higher than the yard on both sides by several inches. As you can see, it's got fairly substantial ruts, resulting in mini lakes after any rain. The nearer lake still holds water even after 3-4 days of dry weather. Last winter, I parked on the grass to avoid these small frozen ponds, and managed to kill the grass where salty ice melted off my vehicles. The grass *still* hasn't fully recovered.

After many months of thinking about what would the best thing to do be (and getting seriously muddy thanks to my water dog), I got fed up last night and took action! This small trench took all of 3 minutes to dig, and it actually worked! The puddle is about 1/3 the size now than it was yesterday, only because the deepest part of the puddle is a little deeper than the trench.

I think tonight I'll deepen and/or widen the trench and put sand or small gravel in it and then put the grass back on top. Then I may tackle the other side where the trench will have to be longer to carry the water to a low spot in the yard. That's one way to make use of a dreary, rainy evening!

Anticipation

I've been curious all spring to see what this is. It looked different from all the weeds, so it escaped the weed killer.

It's getting close! Looks like I'll be able to look it up in the next week or so. Of course, if it's not a wildflower, it won't be in the wildflower book. Then I'm stuck. We'll see.

I've also been using this pink stuff liberally in bouquets. It lasts well in water and looks really good.

It's on the south side of the house, in the old raised bed area. It's about 5 feet tall. I briefly thought it was hollyhock, but now I think it's musk mallow. (Except musk mallow is 1-2 feet tall.) I think I want to keep this stuff coming back.

This is What I carried to Work this Morning

1. Some flowers to brighten up my desk.

2. The chainsaw, because I stopped at the hardware on the way to work. (The two replacement chains I bought last week *do.not.fit* Today I learned that somehow Ace sold me a chainsaw for which they do not carry chains. I also learned that this stoopid chainsaw is not common and nobody carries chains for it!)

3. Some pieces of wood to keep my spinning wheel upright in the back.

4. A folding chair because you never know when you'll need one.

Back to the chainsaw. I had absolutely no idea what I was asking for in November when I bought this thing. I did tell the man that I intended to cut "a lot of wood" with it. So now, when I'm looking online for replacement chains for it and read the description of this saw; "ideal for jobs like pruning, lighter cutting tasks and hobby work" I'm righteous. Did that man think I was a girly chainsaw person! Did he!

Pleasant Surprise

Raspberries!

A month ago I didn't even know I had raspberries, so bought and planted two small bushes.

Now I see there was no need for that. Raspberry season is at its peak now. I picked over two cups yesterday in various places around the homestead, plus all the berries I ate right off the stalk.

I can see the blackberries coming along, and the first blueberries are ready to eat. Walking by a blueberry bush yesterday, it smelled like blueberry pie.