We set the mouse traps with peanut butter last night, placing one of them in the kitchen sink. Sure enough, when we got up this morning there was a dead mouse in the trap. I think we may have more mice, so the traps are going out again and again until weeks go by without catching any mice.
It was like summer here at Mist Cottage today! Attila spent the day removing the old roof vent on Iris the trailer, and installing a new one. It was a long, painstaking procedure, as each step needed to be done very carefully to ensure a good seal. While Attila worked on Iris, I raked pine cones from the front yard. The pine tree in our front yard is shedding a lot of pine cones this year, so it was a big job.
It was nice to be out of doors for the day. One of the things I enjoy about our little neighbourhood here at Mist Cottage is chatting with the neighbours. I stopped my raking twice to chat with friendly neighbours, learning more about their lives and interests.
It was disappointing to hear our neighbour two doors down, a retired gentleman who is very fussy about his yard, dressing down the young father who lives next door to us. The young couple next door have their own way of looking at things, and they are often a bit messy about the yard. They do make some effort, the husband was out raking his back yard yesterday. But that was not good enough the young man’s other neighbour. We could hear the older man loudly criticizing the young man, who responded that he had done yard work yesterday. The fact that the young man offered a relatively polite response speaks well of his character; he owed the older man no response at all. It was sad to hear such silliness going on. Attila and I made a point of being friendly with the young couple a few hours later, when they were getting their sons into the car to go out somewhere.
We also managed to hang out a large load of laundry this morning, which dried completely by early evening. It makes for a lot less clutter in a small house when the drying lines are outside instead of inside.
And… we had the windows open for the first time this spring!
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Worldly Distractions
Weather
16°C (our thermometer read 22C)
Date: 5:00 PM EDT Sunday 17 April 2016
Condition: Partly Cloudy
Pressure: 102.8 kPa
Tendency: falling
Visibility: 24 km
Temperature: 16.4°C
Dewpoint: 2.5°C
Humidity: 39%
Wind: S 20 km/h
Quote
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”
Lewis Carroll
1832 – 1898
And sometimes not knowing where you are going is a good thing, because you will take roads that you wouldn’t ordinarily take, and may find unexpected adventures down them! I like your quote today.
They say the more pine cones that come down, the harder winter you’ll have. Or something like that… we have a big old pine beside our porch that drops cones all over the place, but it’s the two large old oak trees that drive me nuts, one near the driveway on our neighbor’s property and one beside our house on ours, and acorns abound here!
Bex, it sounds like you would have a lot of squirrels around Crow Cottage. The pine cones all came down since the snow left, I wonder if that counts for predicting next winter’s weather. Time will tell. There are still a lot of pine cones left up on the tree, I suppose we are going to need to spend another day gathering those up, in a few weeks time.
Unexpected adventures are my favourite kind of adventures!
Saturday we spent cleaning up storm damage from the ice storm some 10 days ago. It’d been too cold before that. DH actually climbed our large pine tree, taking a ladder up and then walking out on the branches to cut down 2 broken branches while I kind of spotted him from below. I definitely got out of the way when the branches were coming down, though. They were about 10-15 ft long and the large diameter was about 8 inches on both! I couldn’t even move them to drag them away.
We’re also having lots of cones from, I think, 2 years ago falling. The cones that are less than a year old are still young and unopened. They’re not falling.
Amazingly, it was warm enough over the weekend that our pine tree was dripping sap!! Oh, what a mess. Both dogs got sap in their fur. 🙁
We also got some creeping thyme planted in the front yard. We had alyssum there before but replaced it with the perennial thyme.
Looks like our temps are going to take a good drop tonight and become more normal for this time of year, rather than summer-like. I’m glad. The change over was just too sudden. The gradual warm up is so much easier on the body.
Ice storms do a lot of damage, pines and evergreens seem particularly susceptible. We notice that a lot of pines have broken crowns, with branches below the crown growing up to form two “trunks”. It was a pine tree that came down and destroyed my little Argosy Airstream trailer.
The weekend was very summery. Sap on dog fur, it sounds very uncomfortable, and messy.
Creeping thyme sounds wonderful, I will look into it when we begin to landscape the yard at Mist Cottage, if we ever get around to landscaping, things are fine as they are, but there is always room for improvement.
I’m with you, preferring seasonal temperatures. It was lovely to have warm weather to replace the roof vent, but now that job is done, so it can get cold out there if it wants to. Colder weather should beat back the mosquitoes a bit.
LeeAnn/CrochetLady passed away, yesterday…
Thanks for passing on the news Teri. Lee Ann will be missed. Condolences to her family.
I knew LeeAnn and her family for more than 45 years. I was the only one on her blog who knew Lee in real life. And I was the only one who had been in their home to see it so filled with anger and tension over and over again that I couldn’t handle the stress myself and had to leave their house.
I lived some of what she lived and, from the things she said on her blog and on the phone, I truly believed that she couldn’t survive much longer under such extreme stress as it was undermining her health. She had auto-immune problems that were increased by stress.
Anyhow, I’ll miss her. I wish her life had been different. Though she loved her family dearly she deserved so much more, so much better, than she received.
Teri, I feel for you having lost a good friend. Lee Ann’s circumstances sound very sad, that was a side of her life she chose not to share here.
I know she loved her family, and I remember that she wrote a comment here, after her retirement and move, about baking cookies with her Granddaughter, and how much that happy experience meant to her. Lee Ann was positive, supportive, and upbeat in her online life, a wonderful spirit. I wish her a safe journey.
I don’t remember if you ever read her journalscape.com blog. It talked a lot about her husband having Borderline Personality Disorder and how he would gaslight her, making her wonder if she was losing her mind. She also joined the BPD board I was following (trying to get some idea on how to work with SD15’s mom) and she talked a lot with them over there.
Yes, over here on your board- a couple of years after she pretty much gave up talking about it all – she would just talk mostly about general things, about superficial things. There’s no doubt, though, that she doted on her granddaughter for good reason. Lauren is a sweet, intelligent, talented girl who loves her family.
I wish Lee had so much more time to spend with Lauren, but I’m pretty sure she went back into the hospital just after she posted about that – and I don’t think she went home after that. I remember her saying she was posting from the hospital.
It’s interesting that you would see her as upbeat. I seldom saw that in her due to all she went through, but she was definitely happy to be back in Illinois with her daughter, granddaughter, and her church friends who made life better for her.
Teri, a person’s problems may be downbeat, but that does not mean the person dealing with them has a downbeat approach to life. Lee Ann maintained her kind and gentle spirit, which is a commendable acocmplishment, and that is why I perceived her as upbeat, she rose above, she found a safe and pleasant place to spend time, for herself, for her Granddaughter, and for us.
Then again, when you only post a single vignette from your life, something you cherish and nothing more, it’s easy to sound that way.
I guess I sound like a downer since I have a tendency to bring almost anything from my life into a conversation, even the negative, and then analyze it. One of the pitfalls of having few people to talk to, I guess.