I Need Me Some Squirrels!! Pronto!!

I live in a very nutty place. There is a delicious irony to this, as anyone who has known me for very long will surely appreciate, and certainly there is more than one way to interpret that first sentence - but I am being literal here. There are nuts here. LOTS and LOTS of nuts.

To start with, we have a modest filbert orchard. Modest like over a hundred trees I think. That isn't so modest when you have to clean up after them, but as filbert growers go we are several notches beneath modest. Anyway, to start with I am still figuring out what to call them. I had frankly never heard of a filbert before moving to Oregon. Or actually I had, but I thought it was some kind of candy or cookie thing. I HAD heard of hazelnuts, and I guess that is part of the issue. At some point after moving here, and hearing of filberts, and asking what in tar they were, I was told that technically "filbert" refers to the tree and "hazelnuts" are what grow on them, which seems a little confusing. More recently, after visiting with some growers at an Octoberfest booth, it would appear that there has been consensus to go by the name "hazelnut growers", not in small part because people have heard of hazelnuts.

It was this grower who had some branches of trees with nuts attached that led me to discovering that my old orchard still works. Once I knew what I was looking for, they were all over the place. On the ground, in the trees, everywhere, bazillions of them. I was pretty darn excited about this. Ridiculously so, as a matter of fact. I couldn't wait to pick them all up. That lasted about 4 trees, and after my back started making itself heard I realized there was going to have to be (a)considerable cleanup in the orchard department and (b) a better way of getting these silly nuts off the ground and into wherever they had to go to be processed. Which is another whole story we will get to in a minute.

In an attempt to address (b) above - because (a) was way more time and effort than I had available at the moment - I took to driving the tractor into the orchard and just filling up the front-end loader and driving it back down to the house and dumping them. This is a pretty good advancement in the transportation end of things but I still have to pick them up to drop them into the front-end loader. Part of the problem is that there is so much debris (leaves, bits of dead wood, the last ten years' worth of hazlenut bodies in varying stages of decomposition) all over the orchard floor it is hard to discern quickly and accurately which ones to pick up, so you keep picking up empty ones, which is a waste of a bendover. Don't want to waste your time pointlessly bending over when bending over is not as easy as it used to be! But this brings us back to point (a) above, and the fact that I didn't have time to address that right now.

But even assuming I had a pristine orchard (maybe next year) and efficiently harvested them all (or better yet procured large numbers of happily underpaid teenagers to do so), I am then faced with just how I am supposed to handle them after that. The problem with agricultural enterprises is that there is just so much to learn!!! As I have said before, unless you come out of the womb knowing combines from cucumbers because everyone in your family for the last hundred years has farmed something, this is a surefire way to be humbled into an admission of mass ignorance.

SO in addition to the entire orchard full of hazelnuts, there are walnut trees everywhere. I happen to love walnuts (I can actually take or leave hazelnuts, but that doesn't matter a bit because apparently nine billion people in China love them and cannot grow them there, which makes it a very nice thing to grow some of!) and was pretty stoked to figure out that these green tennis balls dropping on my head as I drove the tractor or fed the horses were walnuts. They sort of smelled like walnuts, but I just wasn't sure. So I gather a few, picked them off the trees as a matter of fact, and tried picking the green part off. Then tried cutting the green part off. Then tried smashing the damn thing to get the green part off. Finally I forgot all about them for about 3 weeks and discovered them all over the ground with the green part rotting off leaving lots of lovely walnut-looking walnuts to just pick up off the ground. Lesson there about leaving Mother Nature to do her thing, and getting out of the way. ANYWAY, so now I have several thousand walnuts littering the ground.

I also happen to have this historic nut-drying barn, to which all the local nut growers back in the day brought their filberts or whatever. If I could only figure out how in the heck to stoke it back into operational status, I would try using it. But I have not a clue, and would probably burn it down or explode something if I tried. I do, however, also have about a thousand nut-drying screens. I figured to put them to good use, and spread the nuts out on them and washed the rotted-off hull debris off, and left them to dry. The filberts I just spread out on the screens and left in the barn, figuring even without a lovely trip through the drying closet they would eventually sort of dry out in the air.

The filberts are behaving themselves rather well. They eventually fall out of their little green feathery capes and look like self-respecting hazelnuts. Nothing too funky going on with them. The walnuts are an entirely different story. After "drying" for a couple weeks, they were not the least bit dry and in fact looked like they were trying to mold. I asked around, and it seemed one was supposed to spread them out on a cookie sheet and let them hang out in a low oven for a while. "A while" was about as specific as I could get. Seems there is some despicable little creature that lays some sort of eggs in the walnut husks and will start to make webs or something if the nuts are left in their natural state. Sounds way too much like spiders to me, and I am all for baking those out of existence, so into the oven went 5 trays of nuts today. I put the oven nice and low (between 200, the lowest number on my dial, and "off") for like an hour.

My kitchen smelled wonderful, like fresh-baked yumminess itself. I took the nuts out and dumped them all in a big produce box, and some of them were a little cracked apart. I thought this was a good thing, because they were easy to open without a nutcracker, which I am still lacking. So I pried one apart looking forward to enjoying my first home-grown walnut tidbit - and it was mush. Rubbery, nasty mush. Well, CRAP.

So I can't wash them, I can't leave them to air dry, I can't apparently low-roast them without killing them. What in tarnation AM I supposed to do with them? HEEELLLLLLLPPPP.

Am I going to have to go back to school for this? Is there an online degree at University of Phoenix perhaps, in nut-farming??? Jeezum. My head is going to implode from the simple mismatch between the quantity of agricultural how-to required and the emptiness of my brain. I will look like one of those walnuts in a minute.

So if anyone out there has a clue how to restore an old nut-drying barn to functional status, or how to process hazelnuts or walnuts without resorting to million-dollar technology, please do tell. I mean, people have been growing and eating these things for centuries, right? What did they do back then? I'm hoping fire is involved, fire is way cheaper than electricity or contractors. I can do fire.

Let the information flow, or I will be forced to commandeer large numbers of squirrels to take care of this mess.

Let the Infestations Begin!

Remember being little, and how cute you thought ladybugs were, and how it was good luck to have one on your finger, and you wanted to be one for Halloween? Remember? Yeah, I remember too. I was sooooo bamboozled. I think they do that on purpose, they come across as all benign and adorable, because they know that one day they are simply TAKING OVER YOUR HOUSE.

I had seen this phenomenon once before, in the Smoky Mountains. We rented a cabin there one Mardi Gras weekend (it was amazing how many fellow Louisiana refugees I saw in Tennessee that weekend, escapees from the madness, but I digress) - and when we settled in there were literally heaps of dead ladybugs all over the cabin. There was a little sign explaining that a couple times a year the ladybugs make their way inside presumably to get warm. I don't know whether they make little ladybug love inside the house and that's why there are bazillions of them or if that many really managed to wiggle through whatever tiny openings there must have been in the cabin. The agency came and cleaned them up, so it wasn't all that big a deal, but I did find it highly unusual. I mean, in my experience insect infestations were things like locusts or cockroaches, things you already felt really good about hating. A ladybug infestation was a little ambiguous.

I have lived in Oregon three years, and not in a vastly different locale than my current one, either - we literally moved down the road, about 2 miles, to take up residence on the farm. In all my time here, no one has mentioned nor have I seen a ladybug infestation. Maybe it was just waiting for me.

So I painted my bedroom the loveliest shade of pale robin's egg blue. It is very serene. Serene is very good in a bedroom, don't you think? Shouldn't your bedroom be a place of sanctuary, full of things that lower your blood pressure at the end of a stressful day? Ahhhhhh. Well apparently my lovely blue bedroom looks like the sky and is very appealing - to BUGS. Allllll kinds of bugs. I came in one lovely day of late and went into my lovely serene sanctuary, and the pale blue walls were brown and moving. Literally, there were that many of them.

Now we all know my propensity for screaming, but I was a model of restraint here, even though I WAS instantly put in mind of a story told by a good friend in medical school. He had spent some time in some hideous tropical locale in less than 4-star accomodations, and woke in the night to the illusion that his ceiling was moving. No illusion. The ceiling was ALIVE, blanketed in tarantulas. I would have expired on the spot. SO here were my living walls, carpeted in an assortment of creatures but predominantly ladybugs. Who knew?? What do you DO about it?

My husband - well, we all know HIS propensity for solving problems with a vacuum cleaner, and that is what he did. Sucked them up in big swaths. I will confess to throwing back my covers and beating them prodigiously just in case there were any hangers-on, but the place was clean by bedtime. Next morning, still clean as a whistle. It was my morning to sleep in, which I was really enjoying, until a lot of buzzing caught my attention. Bad memories. There was a yellow jacket making the rounds of my room, and he had brought reinforcements. When I surveyed the room, I saw that sometime in the last hour (since I was last awakened by something) the ladybug infestation was on its second wave. This time, I figured - if they can come IN through the windows (no screens) they can go OUT, so I just left the windows up and hoped for the best. Amazingly, they left by dark. This is quite mysterious behavior to me, but hey, whatever works.

So the ladybugs still show up in the corners of windows and sills, but I can live with it, and figure it is self-limited. The yellow jackets are lots nastier but aren't coming inside in great numbers, and I am a REALLY good shot with a towel. You do not want to cross me while freshly out of the shower, I can HURT you with a rolled up towel. I am a thwacker par excellence.

So the infestation that is really chapping me are the FRUIT FLIES. Where the bloody hell do these things come from? I mean, I never see them outside. Ever. I do not know where they live and reproduce. But leave out a little fresh fruit, or slice some raw veggies and leave them on the counter, and out of nowhere you have CLOUDS of them. It is just beyond annoying. I have been told lots of ways to get rid of them - dishes of vinegar, wine, all sorts of things that DO NOT WORK. They are relentless. And having spent a rather long period of years in science, including research, I know that the generation time of fruit flies is like a microsecond. You blink and there are orders of magnitude more of them. NO ONE can have sex that fast.

SO I am enjoying the fruits of my farm, but unfortunately so are the bugs. If anyone knows a SUREFIRE way to get rid of the little buggers, or what I am doing wrong to get them in the first place, please do tell. My wrist is getting sore from all that thwapping.

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Oh, and just in case you need something to distract you from the notion that your dear life partner is occasionally dumb as a rock, let me put all that in a little perspective.

Remember the stump full of yellow jackets? Angry, angry yellow jackets, that my husband tried to burn out, and then tried to suck up in a shop vac?

I got a good deal on some bamboo poles at a garage sale, bought about 30 of them to use in the garden, and they are standing up against the side of the garage. Unfortunately close to the stump. Close enough that my husband was able to see them and the stump within the same field of vision and have a really idiotic idea. So, I guess he just wasn't really convinced they were gone, but that being the case it was a REALLY idiotic idea. I mean if you think they might still be in there, why would you want to poke them? WHYYY? And if you don't think they are in there, why would it occur to you to try to poke what isn't there? WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO STICK A LONG BAMBOO POLE IN A STUMP FULL OF YELLOW JACKETS AND WIGGLE IT AROUND???? But. He did. And when he sort of had a lucky hit, and found the spot, and they started making some noise and flying out of there, he had the most insanely little boy oh-this-is-so-cool-I-wonder-if-they-could-really-hurt-me-oh-brother-Mom-better-never-find-out look on his face. The power of the Y chromosome.

Yup, there are still some yellow jackets in that stump. And yup, they will come after you. But that man can DANCE, I tell you, he spun and leaped right out of the way, it was rather impressive really. And no harm, no foul. But I do really wonder where our children got their supreme intelligence.

Cannon Fodder

First off, thank you so much to those of you who emailed to tell me you missed my blog. It really meant a lot! I have been a little under the weather (great joke about that later) and slammed to boot. I think I know what people were up to long about last January! (I am an OBGYN people, think about it)

Anyway, here we are again. This entry may sound just a wee bit like a crab session, but so be it.

So, to the eternal embarrassment of certain of my children and the dismay of fellow rural dwellers, I simply do not like guns. I will admit to liking target shooting, in certain highly controlled circumstances, but guns on the loose, guns going off in my vicinity that I did not fire, things like that - well they just either make me nervous or mad as you know what.

So, a week or so ago I had a friend over for coffee and treats, and we decided to walk the property since she hadn't seen it yet. I love taking people for a walk up to my upper field, it has a really nice view of the coast range, Willamette Valley, and Cascades. So we are just strolling around the fields and the shooting starts. The most disconcerting thing about it was that I simply could not tell where it was coming from. It seemed to be close, it seemed to move, and it was FREAKING ME OUT. I felt like one of those ridiculous characters in Westerns with someone firing at their feet and saying "Dance, Podner!". Like I was going to have to start dancing, or running, or perhaps dying in a pool of blood in a row of burned out kohlrabi or something. I just wanted to get my little party safely across the frontier to HOME without encountering the hostile natives.

Instead, I went to my default mode of SCREAMING. This was not random, high-pitched wailing, but quite definite and quite insistent and quite inordinately pissed off English. "STOP SHOOTING! NOW!" These people must have been my long lost children, because they paid no attention to me whatsoever. The shooting just went on.

It went on for days. Weeks. It is still going on. At one point, my husband thought it sounded like shotguns (like I could tell a shotgun boom from a rifle boom from a handgun boom from a tractor backfiring), but thought whoever it was must be a lousy shot because of the frequency and pattern of the shots. He thought they must be shooting at birds and missing a lot. We did think perhaps it was deer season, as another recent guest had shot a deer the morning of their visit (I decided to like him anyway since his wife is a friend). There are a lot of deer on this property. I LIKE deer. I forgive them eating my plants, so long as they will continue to grace my pastures and pond with their ineffably lovely presence. So the thought that persons unknown were up in them thar hills shooting at the deer didn't please me.

In addition, it was growing incredibly tiresome being awakened daily by gunshots. Did I mention that I am an OBGYN? Do you know there is no more sleep-deprived occupation on the planet except perhaps President of the United States? Sleep is a holy shrine, to which I like to repair on a daily basis, at unfortunately random times of day, basically whenever I can. So to be, finally, after a long night of being awakened every 30 minutes and going in to the hospital at 4AM to do a C-section, to be finally blissfully snoring away and then roused abruptly to consciousness by the sound of guns in your bedroom (that's what it sounds like) - this did not make me a happy camper.

One night I got home well after dark and the guns were still going off. IN THE DARK. Either these people were incredibly gifted in the night vision department, had special forces goggles of some kind, or were hunting by flashlight. Seriously, people! After DARK??

Finally I took the easiest recourse - I bitched about it on Facebook. And to my surprise, and OK a little embarrassment, it would appear that no one is hunting Bambi in my woods. No one is an incredibly lousy shot at migrating geese. They are "cannons." Some weird kind of "fake guns" that are set to shoot off frequently and randomly in the vineyards. To keep the birds off the grapes that are ripening. Ahhhh. This makes sense, and I am no longer in fear for my life, or that of the wildlife hereabouts. And I do like wine. And I do understand the economic vicissitudes of dependance on a crop.

But. BUT. I am sorry, but THIS IS GETTING OLD. Harvest the grapes already. Mine are ripe, aren't yours?? Can't the grapes be covered with netting or something? When I suggested this to a friend, they told me that the "premium" vines are covered but not the others. Soooooo - you don't care enough about them to cover them but I am supposed to care enough about them to listen to cannons for weeks on end?? This does not seem quite reasonable.

Now, I know, I am going to get hate mail from vineyard owners. I have friends who are vineyard owners. I may even get hate mail from them. So here is what I propose.

You know who you are. I do not know who you are, I do know WHERE you are, but I am not going to walk onto your vineyards and up to your house and say "Howdy. Can you turn off the damn cannons, pretty please?" But if you are reading this, you know who I am so you know if you are one of the "guilty" parties. If you are, send me two bottles of your best cabernet and all will be forgiven. I can drink it to sleep through the gunfire next year!

Oh yeah - the promised joke. This is courtesy of my country guy friend Bill. The sheep guy. The one without a tranquilizing gun. Remember him? So, apparently neutered boy sheep are called wethers. Do not ask me why, I do not know. Personally, I think it is a little dumb, but there you go. So, one sheep breeder is talking to another sheep breeder, and comments "I just don't understand why all your ewes are pregnant and mine aren't!" (I didn't say he was a GOOD sheep breeder). Anyway, the other guy responds "Because back in the summer when my ewes were under a ram, yours were under the wether!"

Well, I thought it was funny!

Lance-y Pants

OK, this evening I digress. This is not a farm-related blog, but hey. Get over it! I spent the weekend away and it was - interesting!

So my husband, daughter and I joined my bestie and her hubby for a weekend outing down by the Mackenzie River. We had rented mountain bikes and were supposed to be shuttled up to a point where we rode back, a total of 26 miles. I was totally up for this. Or I thought I was. Or I did until Friday when I tore my knee out AGAIN and had it tightly wrapped all day. But by Saturday, it was tolerable and I figured I could make do with it, so off we went.

This was advertised as appropriate for all experience levels. Indeed, when we got there and were checking in there was a mom and her son, who looked to be about 9-10, getting their bikes too. Admittedly, the mom looked like she was related to Mr Pilates himself but I figured if a 9 or 10 year old kid could do it, I could. What he had on me in youthful exuberance and fitness I figured I could outdo with good old fashioned experience and fortitude. Hah!

The first hint of maaayyybe this wasn't the best idea ever came when the proprietor told us we would NOT be dropped off at the top, but in the middle. That the top 13 miles was just for experienced mountain bikers. Which we clearly were not! Alright, so that's reasonable. Not offended, thanks. Not a comment on our lack of youthful exuberance or indeed youthful anything, since mom and kiddo were also being dropped off in the middle.

The second hint should have been the second I sat on this bike to try it out in the parking lot. Like a leopard print dress for your daughter's wedding, some things you should just recognize immediately as a poor fit. There was no way to make the size right - if I raised the seat enough my knees were not so flexed I felt like I was pedaling in a kindergarten chair, then I couldn't reach the ground easily enough to stop myself from falling when balance became dicey. If I could reach the ground, my knees were uber-scrunched while pedaling, which beyond the basic discomfort of the position was acutely painful to my already damaged knee. But hey, I am a good sport and too persistent for my own good, so I just went with the flow.

So we piled into the vehicles and headed out. We parked Bubba at the end point and then rode in the shuttle bus to the start point. The proprietor gave us some basic info about the bikes, about avoiding roots and rocks and not breaking anything, and that there was no cell reception and no driver available so if something did get broken or we were in trouble, we were sort of on our own. Just so we knew what we were getting into, he said. OK, this is like the third point at which we might have taken the hint from the gods of bad ideas, but noooooo.

SO mom and son take off down the trail and are history. Our party is a little slower and a lot more wobbly. We had gone, I swear to you, less than fifty feet when people stopped in front of me, and in trying to stop while simultaneously avoiding two rocks, a root, and a rut (the new 3 Rs), I just lost my balance. And of course, could not reach the ground with my foot to stave off total disaster. So over I went, and I mean almost literally OVER, since another fifty feet down the trail the left edge was a precipice. As it was, I tumbled downhill a short ways, bike on top of me, bike got tangled in branches and vines, and multiple sharp things were poking me. I was beached. Totally stuck.

My friend and hubby hoisted the bike off of me and helped me to my feet. I turned around to pick up the bike and my friend said "ohhhhhh noooo." Then I think she started laughing. I am not sure, but in HINDSIGHT (pun intended) I do think she laughed. My pants were ripped totally asunder. I mean, like down the middle in the back and clear around and down my right leg to below the knee. Grand. At this point, I was done, kaput, with riding on this trail. Seriously, this was NOT a trail for beginners, very rough, narrow, obstacle-riddled, with washouts and precipices. We are fifty feet down the trail and there are like 12 miles of this.

So we started walking the bikes. This is not like walking your Schwinn down the sidewalk in your cute little pedal-pushers with your sweater tied around your shoulders. This is trying to walk on 12 inches of sandy dirt while essentially half-carrying a mountain bike off to one side. The body mechanics of this are not comfortable. I did have a sweater tied, though - around my waist, to keep my Hind out of Sight to those coming up behind us on the trail.

So that was the thing. LOTS and LOTS of people came up behind us on the trail. It was a veritable Interstate of bikes. Every few minutes it seemed, someone would come up behind us, we would have to struggle off the trail holding our bikes out of the way, letting them pass, while asking how many more were behind them. My husband and daughter were faring OK and went on, my friends husband took a bad spill and decided to walk with us. So we trudged on and on and ON AND ON. All the while being passed by a succession of bikers who clearly knew what they were about.

And let me tell you, people, these were not middle-aged frumpy bikers like yours truly. No they were not. They were Greek Gods. One after another after another. Jaw-droppingly nicely put together males of the species. Impossibly fit, impossibly tan, impossibly gorgeous. I mean SERIOUSLY!!! GUYS!! Can't you just run over me so I can look at you a while longer while you perform first aid?? Please???

And it did not escape my notice, although I certainly hope it escaped theirs, that they were approaching us from behind, and mine was flapping in the breeze, partially concealed by my friends little white sweater.

Finally after nearly 3 miles, we crossed the river and came to the first side road by which we could connect to the main road. My friend and I had elected to do this, to ride down Highway 126 back to the truck, then we could come back and retrieve her husband, while John and Kate rode on. I had torn living heck out of my knee maneuvering the bike down the bridge steps after the river crossing, and wasn't exactly looking forward to pedaling, but here's the deal. When you are at point A and you have no cell service, are pathologically opposed to hitching rides in the best of circumstance and definitely not while partially unclothed, and you have to get to point B, then you better just man up and do it. SO we set off.

Did I mention that this bike was UNCOMFORTABLE???? I am a very persistent person, and do not tire easily, so while my friend got tired of pedaling I just HURT from pedaling. And the seat! My friend was commenting on how it was starting to go where it really ought not, and I said TRY DOING IT IN YOUR UNDERWEAR!!! Seriously. Hell has a new definition and it involves NINE FREAKING MILES on a mountain bike, in the rain, on a busy highway, with a bad knee you can't stop using, and a seat that keeps finding new and creative ways to invade your space.

I nearly kissed my truck when I got to it.

I am eternally grateful that guy did not deem us good candidates for the full meal deal and drop us off 13 miles further away, such that we were hauling bikes through the lava fields. You fall in that stuff and it is serious business! So, I learned that either I am just not a mountain biker, or I need a vastly different kind of bike, or to start on a much more reasonable trail. I did also learn that I am still capable of toughing it out when I have to. And then I got to go back to the cabin and watch LSU beat West Virginia, so the day was not a total loss.

And I have newfound respect for Lance Armstrong. But hey, it really WAS all about the bike. And the pants.

There's an App for That....

So I had an accident today. There was a fatality. It wasn't me (obviously) - it was my iPhone.
You gotta understand I sort of have a history in that department - I have dealt more death blows to small electronic devices than a normal person. (I also should not be trusted with office machines - especially fax machines, very bad karma with fax machines.) In the course of one month in medical school I dropped not one but THREE pagers into the toilet. Deader than doornails. My first iPhone, I sent through the washer. I tried all kinds of creative solutions - I packed it in rice, put it in a low oven, nothing. Dead. Then we had our one hot week that August, like 115 degrees one day, and I happened to leave my poor dead phone in the truck, where it was probably more like 150 degrees. When I got in my truck after office that day, voila! The iPhone sprang to life! Not having learned my lesson whatsoever, I managed to soak the stupid phone while watering the lawn and went through the whole thing all over again.

Today, however, my techno-destructive tendencies reached new and creative heights. I was just out enjoying the day on my tractor. I had the idea that I could use the front end loader as a receptacle for harvesting the filberts, and it was actually working nicely. Plus I just really enjoy taking the ole Kubota out for a spin around the firelanes. But maneuvering the tractor into and through the orchard is a tad tricky - not only are there low hanging branches and narrow lanes, but there are lots of blackberry vines. If one of those big gnarly ones catches on the front end loader it can thwap the poor hapless driver with nasty thorny force before it catches on the rollbar. So I was going slow and trying to gingerly grab hold of the larger vines and guide them up and over the rollbar behind me before they could thwap me.

One particularly large, purple, heavy branch caught me unawares, and I quickly twisted out of the way. In so doing, I apparently knocked my iPhone off the tractor. I know, I know - what was it doing on the tractor you idiot? Well, in my defense, I have it in a rubbery case precisely because it adheres to things, like the console of my truck, and it was staying put quite nicely up to that point. The trouble was, I didn't even miss it until some time later when I was cruising around the edge of our upper field which had been burned. I reached for the phone to take a photo and - no phone. Not in pocket, not on tractor. I remembered that big branch and figured it had to have fallen there somewhere.

So back to the orchard I went, turned off the tractor and hopped down to tromp through the underbrush. I was so thrilled when I saw it finally, and was feeling rather smug about how I didn't have to tell my husband I had dropped my iPhone and nearly lost it, when I actually picked it up. Pushed the button and - nothing. Lifeless. How can this be? The rubbery case has saved it from disaster in many a fall onto hard surfaces, and this was springy grassy undergrowth. Was my battery just dead?

Ohhh no, MUCH worse. It was BENT. MY iPHONE WAS BENT!!! I clearly drove over it with the tractor. Seriously, people, how can I drive over my own phone with a tractor??? It was very sad looking. So I made a rush trip into Salem to the AT&T store and found I was eligible for an upgrade and got a new one for 49 bucks. But the lovely pumpkin field photos I had not yet uploaded to my computer - gone. My new LSU Football App - gone. This is going to be a pain to restore.

But the upside of the evening was that the front end loader was indeed a very spiffy receptacle, and just in the span of 4 trees I half filled it with filberts, then drove down to the lower meadow and filled it up with apples, pears, and purple plums. And a few walnuts too. And this was a teeny tiny fraction of what there is to be harvested. The phrase "an embarrassment of riches" comes to mind. I think I need to borrow several teenagers, perhaps an entire high school class.

Anyone want to come pick fruit and nuts??

Flame on

Um, Houston, we have a problem.

Remember the nice little bonfire from the other night? The one that supposedly incinerated the dwelling place of the hornets in my stump? Welllll - not so much. The next morning, they were right there. They didn't even seem bothered by the apparent home invasion of the night before. It's like nothing happened.

How is this possible? I mean, it was the Fires of Hell in that stump! Flames 3 feet in the air, and so hot that even after the flames were extinguished I continued to stream water in there for a VERY long time and still sparks flew up and steam hissed. Like I said, Brimstone City.

So how is it that these stupid hornets return to the scene of the crime and fly right in and act as if nothing was torched? This morning, my husband asked me to come listen to something. I did not much like the sound of that request, and I was right. Out we go to the stump, which appears to be quiescent, and I reluctantly bent over and listened. You have no idea how much I did not want to do that. I could not see much good coming from it - either there was nothing there in which case why did I have to listen anyway, and I might fall in (it is a big hollow stump), or there IS something there in which case I most decidedly do not want to be leaning over the damn thing. But, what the heck. Everybody has to die of something, right?

My bravery did not go unrewarded (or unpunished, depending on your point of view). There was, emanating from the stump, a reeeaaallllly nasty low rumbling buzz. The buzz of a very large quantity of things, low in the ground. Coming. This. Way.

They did not actually appear (obviously, or I would not be writing this, I would be somewhere in Kansas by now still running) but the noise was most unattractive. The best I can figure, there is a large side channel down in there somewhere, like where a root went or something, and the flames simply did not go that way. So it was more like setting fire to the porch than bombing the compound. Marginally irritating, but survivable.

Options are being discussed. Option one: dump it full of dirt and plant something in it like I wanted to in the first place (my idea). Option two: fill it up with a mixture of diesel fuel and gasoline. My husband's idea. I asked him if he was going for the Olympic Torch motif. Besides the explosive risk, seems like a colossal waste of fuel to me - we could run the tractor for a month on the amount of diesel it would take to fill that stump! Mostly, however, I have no desire to see a crater where the garage used to be.

We are a little concerned there is another point of ingress/egress to the hornet colony. It would be more than a little disturbing to get all smug about having trapped/burned/pillaged the thing only to see a column of sociopathic hornets emerging from another spot on the grounds and heading our way bent on revenge.

What to do?! Too bad we no longer have Kate's snake collection in the garbage can, we could try putting them all down in there. Maybe a fire extinguisher? The foam could expand out in all directions and smother them. Plain old water? Drown them? CONCRETE! How about concrete? Ideas, people, I need ideas.

So, when I need ideas, I turn to that fount of all knowledge -- Google. It is very interesting what one comes up with when one Googles "how to get rid of hornets in the ground". Lots of people espouse some variant of the diesel/gasoline option. Smoke bombs. Soapy water. Plain water. Placing a glass vase upside down over the entrance hole (these people obviously have MUCH smaller hornets nests that I do! A bushel basket would not cover the hole in this stump!) Various poisons in spray or powder form. There are helpful suggestions like covering your flashlight with a red filter so you don't attract them. REALLY? Who tested hornets color night vision anyway?? There are horror stories, like a guy stepping off his tractor into a yellow jacket nest and being killed by thousands of stings. But far and away, here is my favorite suggestion:

Make them watch a Michigan game - they will be so bored they will kill themselves!

The things you can find on the internet.

Oh, Joy

Today you get a "twofer" - something funny and something heartfelt. First, the fun.

So, in the seemingly endless saga of pesky creatures, many of whom have a propensity towards buzzing and stinging, we have a new chapter. Let me just say, I am NOT the girl who kicked the hornet's nest. My husband on the other hand...

We have a hollow stump in the flower bed next to our garage. It is rather picturesque, and in the first couple weeks we lived here I contemplated planting flowers in it. So I went over and had a look, bent over the stump and peered in. It was surprisingly deep, and also - inhabited. There was a hornet's nest or something like it, of a pretty good size. But not a lot of bees or whatever they were, so I thought maybe they had moved on. Oh contraire, Pierre. It was just evening, and apparently they are restful in the evening. The rest of the time, they became increasingly active and irritable. I walked out a couple nights ago and was surrounded by 8-10 of them swirling around my head, following me. NOT GOOD. We have covered this before. Definitely. Not. Good.

So my husband put a screen over the top of the stump during their "quiet time" that night. Predictably, the next morning, yesterday, they were PISSED OFF. BIG TIME. So, in a burst of complete and total irrationality, my husband REMOVED THE SCREEN. This is supposed to make them happier? They will forgive all and we all live happily ever after? Noooooo.

So, not knowing about the screen removal, I was in the house showering and heard my husband outside in the back (the stump is in the front) getting the grill going. I stepped out of the shower a few minutes later and heard other, stranger, noises emanating from the backyard. It couldn't be. It was. THE SHOP VAC.

Now, you have to understand there is a story that is part of the lore of my husband's family, that I head many more times than once over the years. In this story, his father, my otherwise pretty sensible and level-headed father in law, decided to remedy the problem of hornets or bees in the attic by attempting to suck them all up in the vacuum cleaner. Suffice it to say, this was less than a resounding success. There was personal injury involved, and not to the persons of the bees.

So why, I ask, why in the name of all that is holy, would my husband - who is UBER-reasonable under normal circumstances - even consider trying anything similar? But, he did. He is out there waving the nozzle of the shop vac all around the BBQ grill sucking up hornets right and left and soundly annoying the ones he missed. I yell out the window, something calming, something on the order of, say, "WHAT IN THE BLOODY HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?" I can't honestly say this improved the situation, but he did stop sucking them up a few minutes later, with no apparent loss of personal well-being. I guess it was just a small contingent, not the whole population of the stump, which would have been terrible to behold.

A few minutes later he comes in the house and announces he has a new problem. There are lots of very much alive hornets inside the shop vac. He had been, apparently, counting on the vortex tearing their wings off and killing them. Nope. Wings still on. Coated heavily in the dust adherent to the filter, but very much alive. I think they escaped when he opened the vac and took out the filter. Don't even start me on how brilliant THAT plan was.

Anyway, some hours later, we had again achieved the quiet time of the nest and were trying to decided how to "take care of it." When I saw hubby heading that way with a little aerosol spray can of wasp and hornet spray, I put that plan down straight away. I could not see holding a spray can down inside the stump stirring up trouble. I was more in favor of, shall we say - "Shock and Awe." So a combination of diesel fuel and a little gasoline was poured into the stump and a match tossed in.

Nice bonfire. Very effective. Burned a good little while. And not a single hornet came out. SO now we are wondering if they overheard us talking and all removed to another location in the hours between the Shop Vac Incident and the Bombing of Berlin. I figure we will find out unexpectedly, at the worst possible time. Sigh. Stay tuned.

----

Now for the heartfelt.

So we reeeeeaaaalllly love living here. We do not own it, we have a lease purchase arrangement, and have just been hoping we could find a way to actually grow something we can make a little money with, to help us eventually buy this farm. There are a lot of blackberries, we thought about that. We have considered beef cattle on a small scale. We have an old filbert orchard, but we didn't think it was producing, and while I was hoping we could encourage those trees to do something I was afraid it was going to be a long, difficult, and expensive process.

This morning I took a walk to pick berries. The blackberry season won't last a lot longer, I want to enjoy them, and hopefully get some jams made. So I started up a path alongside the pastures, with berry vines along the other side of the path. Picking my way along the bushes, suddenly there were apples. LOTS of apples. It was an unexpected bonus, and just when I was marveling at the bounty of fruit on this place, I reached the orchard. And looking down as I set the berry bucket on the path, there were filberts. EVERYWHERE. I was so excited I could hardly stand it. The ground was littered and the trees laden. It was like a revelation, that maybe, just maybe, we can make this old place work. And as I stood there in the row of filbert trees counting my blessings, I looked down the row and there was a large doe, still as a statue and breathtakingly perfect.

When you find yourself weeping with joy in the middle of an overgrown filbert orchard at 8 in the morning, you know you have found your life. Now I just have to figure out how to keep it.

But I think it just may work. And I am sooooooo looking forward to it.
Thanks for reading.