Month: October 2021

November tomorrow and we’re still picking Pimientos de Padron and arugula from the garden. The kale will last til the snow flies and we still have carrots and beets below ground. We poked holes in the far corner and dropped fifty or so garlic bulbs in. We’ll cover them with mulch for the winter once the leaves decide to fall. And Peggi picked another batch of collard greens for Helena. She has no saturation point.

On our way back from the garden we ran into Jared who was trying to catch three of the biggest Koi in his pond. He had a big net resting on the bottom with some fish food in it and he was hoping to pull it up quickly if they went for the bait. He had already startled them and they were ignoring his net. The big guys were not only eating too much food they were pooping too much and dirtying the water.

While we were talking Miguel, a fellow walker who lives on the next street over, came up to us to ask if we had seen a young black lab. Apparently his neighbor’s dog had runaway. We told him we would keep an eye out and a few minutes later, the owner of the dog got out of her car and asked if we had seen her dog. She told us “Babe” was just a puppy and had never left home before. We told our neighbors to keep a look out.

We were curious if they ever found the dog so we came back from the lake via their street this morning. Miguel and his partner were out in front of their house. They were holding up their mailbox which had been run over last night. They pointed to the ground at all the shiny plastic car parts. They told us they had a party the night before and one of their guests ran into it.

We asked about the the black lab and they said lady across the street from them also has a black lab. Her mother is staying with them and she apparently let the missing black lab in to their house. Meanwhile their black lab was in the back yard.

You always think, “this will be the last nice day of the year” when we get a day like this (sunshine and somewhere in the seventies) in late October. I borrowed Jared’s chimney scrub brush yesterday and went up on the roof, our new metal roof. It is slippery and we decided not to get those bars that catch the snow before it slides off on top of you because they look ugly but they would provide something to hold onto if you’re sliding off. My Merrill walking shoes have a pretty good grip but I wasn’t prepared for the loose panel that slid out from under me when I stepped on it. I grabbed ahold of the sharp edge the next panel and cut my left hand. I was still able to play horseshoes.

I called the roofing company and they came right out to address it. I climbed up on top of the chimney, took the cap off and shoved the long pole down to the point where it reaches our flu. I was working it up and down, scraping the creosol off the inner walls, when I suddenly felt no resistance at all. The brush had come off the pole and it was stuck in our chimney. I was picturing what it would smell like if we started a fire and I looked toward my neighbors and saw Jared was doing something in his fish pond. I pulled the pole up and he got the picture. He suggested putting our pole saw down there and trying to grab on to it. An hour or so later I came up with the brush. Maybe we’ll have our first fire this weekend.

Our neighbor down the street likes to obsess over things. We obsessively watch him obsess and we listen when he wants to talk. He is always doing something in his garage or in his yard, often deep in thought, standing in one place looking down at the ground. As we walked by yesterday he invited us in to look at his lawn. It had been dug up by an animal during the night and he was pretty sure it was raccoons digging for grubs. He doesn’t like to use chemicals on his lawn and in fact he said he never had much of a lawn until this year when the gypsy moths ate all the leaves on his trees allowing extra light in.

He asked if he could borrow our Have-a-heart trap so I brought the wheelbarrow down to the garden (in Jared’s yard) where we keep the trap. We use it to catch groundhogs in the spring before they mow down a row of our lettuce. We’ve inadvertently caught possums and raccoons but just let them go. Jared let us borrow his trap too and he offered that it may be a skunk that is feasting on the grubs. Peggi and I wheeled the two traps down the road and explained how they worked. When we walked by later that day our trap was closed and there was a squirrel inside. The next day our neighbor caught a couple of raccoons. The town Animal Control will transport them to a Black Site.

I have some friends who are Yankees fans and I am sorry they lost last night, to their archival. We put our sports energy into watching LaLiga, three teams in particular, and last weekend’s matches went pretty quickly because two of those teams played each other, as they do two times every year. Atletico beat Barcelona, a very enjoyable match, and then it was fun in a twisted sort of way to see the first place team, Real Madrid, one of our favorites, lose to the new team in the league, Espanyol. That defeat moved Atletico (our No. 1) closer to the top. The league and we are on break now, the “International Break,” where players go back to play for their home countries in the World Cup qualifiers.