Memorial Weekend Camping – Day 1

On By stefrobrtsIn airstream, barclay, dave, navi3 Comments

We arrived in beautiful Trout Lake, WA, at the foot of Mt..hey, where’s the mountain?

This is our annual Memorial Weekend trip to meet our Airstream friends. This time we had about 10 trailers, which is a smaller party than usual. A lot of people had to cancel at the last minute. 

Many of the regulars were there as usual, and brought instruments, because it just isn’t a party until the music starts up.

We got our little trailer setup, along with the new ‘dog yard’! This really worked brilliantly. The dogs enjoyed having space to hang out and watch the goings-on.

When we were just hanging out in the trailer, it made the trailer seem bigger because the dogs could be outside enjoying the sunshine.

The weather was kind of crazy. Storms kept blowing through, and it was one of the coldest visits we’ve had there! It’s been a late spring all over in the NW, and this place felt like it could have snowed at any time!

Dave wanted to snap a picture of me and Barclay in front of the mountain. I tried to smile, I don’t know why it looks like a grimace!

We spent downtime hanging out in the trailer until the storms passed.

When the sun came back out we took the dogs for a walk to see the stream where it crossed the main road. It was really high and roaring!

We got a glimpse of the mountain at last.

 

We cooked potato-dish for the potluck and then hung around the campfire, catching up with friends.

Even though it was cold, the mountain rewarded us with a pretty show at sunset.

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Something killed a couple chicks :(

On By stefrobrtsIn 2011chicks1 Comment

I went into the coop this afternoon to gather eggs and found two of the mama hen’s chicks dead in the coop. It looked like something had bit their necks. This was one of the gold ones, and Speckles 😦 The blue chick was nowhere to be found, so I guess whatever killed them carried him away. There are just two nervous gold chicks remaining. This is the worst luck ever. I started with eight, and I’m down to two! First time we’ve had any predation in the coop too. I’ve lost a few hens to the local hawks, but this was clearly something that went into the coop and attacked them while they were sleeping.

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Rode a horse today!

On By stefrobrtsIn Uncategorized4 Comments

Today Dave and I worked in the yard for an hour or so, cutting down blackberries, fighting with the lawnmower, and using the new electric string trimmer. So my back was getting tired by the time I left for the barn in the afternoon.

I got to the barn and no one had cleaned the stalls yet, so I got to work on that. My back was aching a bit, but I just remembered to lift with my legs. Cleaning stalls is good exercise! I got the stalls done just as my boss came out and she started sweeping up while I did the water buckets – more heavy lifting.

We got the stalls all ready and were waiting for the kids to show up for afternoon riding, and since there were only going to be two kids, and they already knew how to ride, she said we could ride with them and we’d just do some follow-the-leader in the outdoor arena. At first I was like, oh, I don’t need to ride, but she encouraged me to give it a shot, so I said ‘which horse?’ She said I could use Ashley, because she is pretty big and stocky. Since I had been helping little tiny kids ride Ashley last weekend, I knew she was very mellow and well behaved, so I said ok. She said if Ashley senses you aren’t a skilled rider, she just goes slower, instead of taking off with you.

Well, the kids didn’t show up, so the four volunteers ended up just saddling up and heading out and riding around for about an hour. It was fun to just be free-riding around, doing figure eights and walking around the arena, watching the horses and cows out in the big pastures. I had to convince Ashley to trot, maybe she thought I wasn’t up to it! I’d say that’s good judgement on her part – I need a lot of work on riding a trot! But it was fun to try a little!

I took it pretty easy because the riding wasn’t much easier on my back than the rest of the day had been! It was great fun, that’s definitely a fringe benefit of helping out at the stables! When I’d had enough I let someone else ride Ashley and I took one of the other horses back to the barn and got her un-tacked and ready to go out for the night, then I helped bring in the horses who were going to spend the night indoors, and take food out to some of the ones that were staying outside. There’s always lots of work to do, but it’s fun too. All in all, a great day!

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Working on the car!

On By stefrobrtsIn mustang2 Comments

Working on my pony. I decided to stop ruining clothes every time I worked on it by buying the least flattering coveralls in the world. Well, what can you do, it’s hard to look glamorous when you’re up to your elbows in a greasy old engine! I do appreciate them when I have to crawl under the car though!

Today I got most of the hoses removed, along with the alternator. I got the fan shroud removed, but a hardline from the tranny to the radiator is holding up removing the actual radiator. I’m also still contemplating how to remove the power steering pump. I have the shop manuals for my car, but all the info on power steering says ‘all except mustang’ – that’s helpful!

If I can get the PS pump and the AC lines out of the way, I’ll be very close to being able to pull the engine. I’m thinking of pulling the engine separate from the tranny, leaving the tranny in place. My top secret goal would be to get the engine rebuilt and put it all back together enough to run and drive to the Mustang show at the end of July. Extremely unlikely, at my pace I won’t even have gotten the engine out by then, but a girl can dream!

Chicken update

On By stefrobrtsIn 2011chicks, chickens3 Comments

The little baby chicks I got in March are all grown up – half size, to be exact. Here they are in the back behind two of the full grown chickens.

Here’s a couple of them roosting next to an adult hen. The chicks are very sweet, and I can pick them up without much fuss. They are going to be nice birds. I’m tempted to keep the whole group and have a nice flock of Buff O’s next year for selling hatching eggs out of. Maybe I could put that giant incubator to work.

I finally captured Mama Hen’s babies and put them in the brooder. She had completely abandoned them, and they weren’t even feathered out yet! They were all huddling together out in the yard, getting rained on, and I decided enough was enough! I want to see these little girls (I hope) grow up, I’m particularly curious to see what ‘Speckles’ looks like.

About two weeks ago a friend gave me back a hen I gave her last year as a chick.

The hen is a Splash Orpington. My friend and I bought ten chicks last year to split, and I ended up giving mine to her as well. She raised them, had some trouble with coyotes, gave away the roos, and ended up with just this one splash hen left! Since she was switching her flock over to dark egglayers, she gave this girl to me.

The first day she was here, I got a call from the neighbors asking if I had lost a chicken. ‘Maybe’, I said, ‘what’s it look like’. ‘It’s white’. ‘Yeah, I’ll be right over’. Apparently the other girls had run her off, and she’d gone looking for greener pastures.

This morning I heard the dogs barking, and went out to see what was up, and she had jumped out of the chicken yard again, and apparently the dogs had chased her all over and finally cornered her under a bush. When I got out there Jack was watching, Navi was running in circles, and Barclay was barking at the poor chicken from about 6 inches away trying to get her to run so he could chase her some more! Her tail feathers were scattered all over! While I was rounding up dogs (calmly, and telling them how good they were for not eating her), Navi ran up to her and sniffed at her and ran away again. I was glad to see nobody was actually trying to kill her! Finally I got the dogs put away and got the chicken back in the yard where she belonged. She’s lucky all she lost was her tail! She could have been doggie breakfast!

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Little black kitchen ants

On By stefrobrtsIn nature3 Comments

Every spring our kitchen is invaded by little black ‘sugar ants’ – tiny little black ants that send their scouts in looking for any drops of sugary juice we may have left on the countertop. Usually these invasions are short, we wipe up the mess, keep the kitchen immaculately clean for a couple weeks, and when they can’t find any food they go away, and we can quit obsessively sweeping up crumbs. I believe in ‘live and let live’,  and the ants are really pretty harmless, so every spring I just wait them out until they move on to outdoor food sources.

But perhaps because of the long wet spring we’ve been having, the ants moved in to stay. They were here for over a month when we started to get really tired of them. They would find something to eat and lead the whole column back to devour it, or there would just be scouts crawling all over the place hoping to get lucky. We cleaned the kitchen several times, and they disappeared, only to turn up in the master bathroom – they had found an open bag of cough drops!

I got rid of the cough drops and cleaned the bathroom spic & span, and they moved back to the kitchen. There always seemed to be some little speck they would find in the sink or on the counter, and the invasion would commence once again. The final straw came when Dave brought home a milkshake and tossed the cup in the garbage, and the next morning the garbage was overrun with hundreds of them swarming all over the cup! Enough was enough!

So I looked up on the internet for ant remedies. I didn’t want to be putting poison down that the dogs might get into. I didn’t want to be spraying poison all over the place. I finally saw a remedy that looked pretty harmless – sugar and Borax. It said the ants would take it back to the hive and feed it to the queen, and that would be the end of the ant hive. Ok, I felt a little bad about that, but my kitchen was crawling with ants, and I occasionally spotted them in other parts of the house, just looking for more cough drops, and it was time to draw the line.

So I mixed 50/50 sugar and Borax in a small bowl, and sprinkled some on the ant highway behind the sink up against the backsplash, and put the rest in a tiny bowl under the cupboard by the garbage can. I never saw the ants go anywhere near either. However, the ant population in our kitchen dropped drastically and immediately. The next couple days I only saw an ant or two, and for the last week – not a single one! I would not have believed it would work so quickly or completely, and using stuff I actually had in the house. So, sorry ants, I hope it didn’t wipe out the whole bunch of them, but if they don’t come back next spring, it’s not like I’ll miss them!

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Jack came back!

On By stefrobrtsIn jack2 Comments

Jack was so depressed at his new home, despite the constant attention of a stay-at-home mom and visiting grandkids, and daily walks, and a woods to explore, that he stopped eating! So they called me up and said they didn’t know what else to do for him, he was so sad and mopey, and they just wanted him to be happy again. An hour later he was back at our house, bounding around and wagging his tail and playing with the eskies.

He’s a nice dog, so I can’t complain too much about him being back. I was really enjoying having only two dogs for a week there. One good thing is that I was finding I didn’t want to take one eskie and leave the other one at home alone, and now whichever one stays home will always have company.

But I’m still trying to figure out how to take these guys camping at the end of the month.

Bird fight!

On By stefrobrtsIn photography2 Comments

I was sitting outside with the dogs when I heard a commotion and spotted a big Red Tail Hawk heading in our direction from the trees south of us.

Then I noticed he was being tailed by a gutsy little crow

They fussed and cawed and screeched as the crow chased and dive bombed the big hawk, until the crow decided the hawk was far enough away. The crow turned and flew home, leaving the hawk to do a few lazy circles over our pasture before heading off towards the hills to the north.

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