Spring means baby mammals....

It's been a mammal-rific weekend around these parts. Wild fuzzy animals are everywhere. It started with an odd stray dog/hyena thing in our driveway. Later, a raccoon (a big, fat, ugly one) was caught in the act of trying to eat our baby turkeys. We were out for evening poultry chores and, when we went into the garage to check on the turks, we saw a striped fuzzy tail slink away from the brooding box and into a corner.

Boo.

The chicks are all ok. The raccoon is not. Predator defense is not fun.

But look! A baby bunny!

Later that same evening...Bill (at the insistent urging of Sugar Pie) discovered a momma opossum and her SEVEN babies in our garage. We've had opossums around for a while without any harm to the birds, but they are known to eat baby birds, steal eggs and sometimes attack mature hens. To the momma opossum's great benefit, her babies were adorable and Bill is a softy. We spent nearly an hour gathering them all up in a garbage can and then transported them back to our woods. They were given a stern talking-to and told that there would be some serious trouble if they messed with our birds.

As the momma opossum headed off into the woods with 7 babies clinging to her back, Bill swears she turned back toward him - tear in her eye - to ask why she was being thrown out on the streets, a single mom with 7 mouths to feed.

But look! A baby bunny!

This little bundle was spared a dramatic end in the chicken pen. Bill was out scything the tall grass in the pen (rather than using a weedwacker or lawn mower) when he found the baby bunny. We made him pose for some photos, contemplated keeping him, but eventually let him go.

Adorable.

But he's been warned. Before we let him go, he was given a demonstration of what might happen if we caught him snooping around our garden:

Animal cuteness

We spent much of today splitting and stacking the wood we had delivered a few weeks ago. Sugar spend much of today trying to dig through the wood pile. We thought a red squirrel was the cause of her single-minded pursuit.

Turns out it was this guy:

See him in the middle? You may remember Pablo "The Baby Opossum" Stinky Pants from our garbage can a few nights ago. On garbage night Bill took the cans down to the road and Pablo took the ride. He kept scurrying to the top of the bags and then running back down. We were a little worried he would end up a flat opossum at the garbage dump, but he apparently found a new, (though still temporary) home.

And this is all of our mammals begging for turkey. Bill smoked a yummo bird last weekend and we made some plum chutney that was awesome with it. The cats just cared about the turkey.

Fall photos

We haven't been doing much work lately, but I hope you enjoy some photos of fall.




Anne-Marie visited last weekend and dyed some yarn with kool-aid for a Sunday Market Shawl.


And Bill's DNA scarf is polymerizing:

Stripping wallpaper

Our bathrooms are scary. SCARE-REE. Two weeks ago we started removing the wallpaper in the upstairs bathroom.

Why remove this layer of history from our house, you ask???

This is why:

(If I could make this flash black and white with the psycho sound, it would really add to the effect, don't you think?)

The removal is going surprisingly easy - perhaps the house is glad to give up this terrible, terrible excuse for a wall covering?

The foil peels off in big chunks, and then we spray a little concoction of water and vinegar (thanks, mom!) on the backing paper that remains, dissolving the glue. The white backing then lifts right off.

We were super excited to find this older paper underneath:

The older stuff is only on two walls and parts of it are really grimy. Also, there are gigantic chunks missing. We are going to try to work with it...some cleaning and carefully placed towel racks should help. If we get really ambitious, we might try to paint in the missing design....or something. Bill suggested simply painting "insert missing wallpaper here." Funny guy.

We have syrup!

Here are some photos of syrup day, which was last Friday. We started with 36 gallons of sap that had been collected since February, and ended with just under a gallon of syrup. It took 10 hours, a lot of wood, stirring and beer, but was well worth it.

Our syrup is just a touch thinner than the commercial stuff and is super yumm-o.

Gallons waiting to be boiled:

Intense supervision of the boiling sap is necessary:

This is what the pans looked like at the end of the day. The boys had a two pan system - cold sap went into the staging area in the front pan, which was difficult to keep at a boil. When it was sufficiently warmed, it was transferred by a kitchen pot to the back pan, which was kept good and hot by the fire all day. You can see how dark the near-syrup is after 10 hours of boiling, compared to the newly poured sap. Incredible!

Things I didn't do

I've had the flu, which sucks. So I haven't been doing much around the house, but we have had some progress. Our garage door was caved in on the top, which was great for the raccoons, but not so great for us.

So, we got a new one! The day after this was installed we saw confused smammal tracks in the snow leading up to the door.

We're up to about 30 gallons of maple sap. Our plan is to boil it down in two weeks.

We had some help from back east two weekends ago. Scraping paint:

Standing around in the basement, doing man things:

And installing a new thermostat. This is the wicked cool old one. Notice it is set to 60 degrees. That's normal and probably why I got the flu.

We now have lots of mercury to play with if anyone has any experiments in mind.

And the new, programmable thermostat!!! Modeled by Bill in his new glasses: