Friday Adventures

I've been living in an adventure-free zone lately, but today I had two.
The less interesting one was driving around town in a dumptruck with my dad, with a pallet of sweet corn and a dead alpaca in the back.   (Sometimes life is just weird)
The more interesting adventure was meeting one of my long-time imaginary friends and finding out she's not imaginary at all!
I'd long suspected that she is a thoroughly delightful person, and damned if I wasn't absolutely right.
And now I'm kicking myself, because though I brought my camera, I had total camnesia.  Really really would have liked having a picture of the two of us, thus proving imaginary friends are real...

Gnawed!

Hurray hurray!  I got all the Ohio stars sewn together today.

And once more, with feet!

Well, a foot, anyway.
Now I can set it aside for a little well-deserved dithering about the borders.  (And a name.  I'm still trying to come up with something involving storms and rainbows and Ohio stars.  "After the Storm"?  "Stormy Ohio"? "We're not in Ohio anymore, Toto"?)   At present it measures 39 x 45, which to me is too big for a wall hanging and too small for a lap quilt.  So, a border or two is going to make it the perfect size.  For something.  I have no idea what I'm going to do with it - I just wanted to join the RSC, and the next thing I knew I had this quilt top.  Odd, right?

Speaking of joining in, clue 4 for Allietare came out today and I managed to get a couple of the knotless-bowtie/funky-hourglass units done.

I have no idea where this quilt is going.  It's a really weird feeling to be working on something without knowing what it's going to look like.  I think I'm starting to see now why people like doing mystery quilts.  It's a bit unbalancing, but in a good way.  We'll see what I think at the end of this whole process.

Oh, the post title?  Well, let me tell you a little story.
Last time my wonderful daughter visited here from Vermont, she brought me a Lake Champlain Chocolate Factory chocolate bar.  Dark chocolate.  One of my Holy Grails of chocolate.  Recently I decided to take it down to the studio with me, grabbed it on the way out the door, dropped it into the pocket on the car door, and forgot about it.  Well, forgot until yesterday, when I remembered to grab it as I was getting out of the car.
However.
Some vile little despicable nasty thieving mouse had found it in the interim and had gnawed right through the wrapper in multiple places and had eaten vast quantities of my chocolate.  My lovely Lake Champlain chocolate.  My. chocolate.  Mine.
I was so mad.  "You damn mouse!  You ruined my chocolate!  You &*%#$((& mouse!"  And I took the chocolate in and threw it away, so now neither one of us had any chocolate.
Damn mouse.
And I thought that was the end of it.
Until I got into the car today, that is.  When I pulled on the seat belt to buckle up, I encountered resistance.  I tugged harder, then harder.  It wasn't like when the belt locks up when the brakes have been applied - it felt like there was something interfering with it.
As it finally freed itself up, I looked back at it to see what the problem was.

WTF?

I guess Mr Mouse decided that if I wasn't going to let him have chocolate, then he'd just have to kill me by gnawing through my seatbelt.
I'd never really thought of mice as vengeful creatures, but this has really opened my eyes!
Chocolate-thieving murderous little monsters, the lot of them, I tell ya.




I'll be linking with So Scrappy for Scrap Happy Saturday!  Come see what we're all doing to wrap up RSC2015!

If it wasn't for the wildlife, I'd have no life at all...

Earlier this week, I was getting ready to get ready for work when I heard a tap-tapping noise.  I listened for a bit, then heard it again.  Tap tap tappity tap.  It seemed to be coming from our bedroom.
"Now what?"  I thought.  (I may have also sighed.  It's becoming a habit.)
I went to stand in the bedroom, waiting for a repetition.  Silence.  Then tap tap tap.  I was looking around trying to trace the source when a movement at the window caught my eye.
There was a male goldfinch trying to come in the window.  Through the glass.  The tapping noise was his beak hitting the window pane, as he tried to push his way through whatever strange force field was holding him back.  Tap tap tap.  Tap tappity tap.  He'd drop back and rest for a bit on a branch of the lilac bush just outside the window, then fly up and back at it.
Tap tap.  Tap tappity tap.  Tap tap tap tap tap.
Persistent little devil.
He kept it up for two hours.
He must have had a hellacious headache by that time.  I considered texting Madman, who was already at work, but thought "Oh, no, he'll never believe this one..."   I did tell him about it that night when I got home, and he just grinned and shook his head.  Me and my exotic friends.

This morning, Mr Goldfinch was back.  At 6:15am.  This time Madman saw him, too, so it's not just me and my strange encounters.
Silly bird was still at it when we left for work.

I wonder if the weasel told him what a nice place we have...

You know your life has gone pear-shaped when...

you have to do a google image search for 'weasel poop'.
Because of something you found in your kitchen.
Now, I have nothing against Weird, per se.  Weird is fine.  Weird makes life interesting.
But when you have to get a new Hav-a-Heart trap (because the old one is too big and still full of skunkiness), and set it up in the living room, life has become a wee bit too interesting.
And it's going to have to be a two-step process.  Step one is to set a baited mousetrap in the Hav-a-Heart, in order to catch a mouse, which will become the bait for the weasel.
Maybe I'll just pretend there's no weasel.  Everything is Perfectly Normal, here.
Or maybe I'll just accept that it's good to have a creature in the house who catches mice.  Our cat used to catch mice.  Nothing Weird about that.  There's just a tiny little invisible ferrety thing catching mice now, just like a cat.  Perfectly Normal.
Yeah.

 I swear, if Rod Serling shows up at the door, I'm going to slam it in his face.

I could have sworn I drew a line somewhere...

As you all have probably guessed, I really like animals.  We have sheep, and rabbits, and turkeys, and chickens.  We're discussing getting some ducks, as well.  And maybe a couple of geese while we're at it, since once you've starting collecting feathered folk, where do you stop?
And that's just the outdoor critters.  Inside, I have a Siamese Beta fish and Madman has a pet rat.  We used to have a little cat, my beloved Ursula, whom we haven't replaced.  (Though we certainly miss her - especially with the mouse population explosion we've experienced this year.  Madman and his mousetraps just can't keep up.)
Just so we're clear, with certain exceptions (like the occasional house chicken) (and hatchlings) (oh, and the baby bunnies) (hmm...), outside critters are supposed to stay outside, and inside critters stay inside.  The sheep don't get to come in and play Katamari Damacy on the Playstation, the turkeys don't get to play Freecell while eating pretzels.  Outside, outside; inside, inside.

So okay.

This afternoon I was in the bathroom, sitting you-can-guess-where, minding my own business, when I heard a skitter of little feet on tile.  I looked over just in time to see a little white ferret-y thing with a black-tipped tail dash across the bathroom floor and jump through the access hatch on the side of our whirlpool tub.
"Hey!"  I said, no slouch at the quick witticism. 

It's an ermine.

Which is a weasel.

There's a weasel in my house.  A weasel.  In my house.

Now, granted, he's a cute little weasel.  Little button eyes and nose.  Inquisitive little face.

There's still a weasel in my house.

We're guessing that he got in by squeezing through one of the holes where the plumbing pipes go through the floor.  The access hatch on the tub is open because the door came loose a while back and we haven't gotten around to fixing it.  (There are always so many other things to do - like fixing sheep fence and catching errant poultry, for instance - that it's a job that has lingered near the bottom of the To Do list.)   Hopefully, that was his way in, and he's gone back out.
Because the room he came running out of when I saw him was our bedroom.  I'm trying not to think of little creepy weasels under the bed.  Or on the bed.  At night.  Because they're nocturnal.  And I'm not.

I think fixing that access hatch is going to get moved up on the To Do list.

And me without my camera...

Sorry, y'all.  Because it would have made a great picture.

I was on evening chores tonight, since Madman did them this morning.  Everything went smoothly, especially considering it was snowing hard, with high winds.  (It was raining when I left for work this morning, then the temperature plummeted and it was snowing when I was coming home.  Because it's Vermont, and that's how we do things up here.)
Smoothly, that is, until I got to the chickens.  I filled their feeder, then was excited when I found two eggs in the nest boxes.  (We've only been getting one egg lately, so two was just great!)  I held them in my left hand while I checked the waterer.
Madman had given them a full one this morning, but hadn't pulled the other one, so both waterers were in the coop.  Since we'd need one for the morning, and there was no sense leaving both of them to freeze overnight, I decided to grab the one that was sitting on the roost and head for the house.
Unfortunately, there was a sleeping turkey perched on top of it.  Now, in hindsight, I probably should have grabbed hold of the turkey with both hands and set her on the roost, then picked up the waterer.  But I had one hand full of eggs, so I just reached up and tried to nudge the turkey off with my right forearm, figuring she would just step back onto the roost.
Wrong.
I've mentioned that turkeys are pretty mellow.  Just 'everything's hunky-dory' sort of critters.  But apparently that's not the case when you wake them up out of a sound sleep, while wearing a headlamp that's shining brightly in their eyes, and start pushing them off their perch.  She went just the other side of bonkers and jumped up onto my forearm, while flapping wildly.  It was sort of like having a falcon on your arm, if the falcon weighed 15 pounds with a 4-foot wingspan and was having hysterics.  She kept whacking me on the head and shoulder with her wings and wouldn't Just. Let. Go.  I was trying to encourage her to step off onto the roost, but she wasn't having any of that.  It was somewhere along this point that I put my thumb through one of the eggs.
So now I've got an hysterical flapping turkey on one hand, and a dripping mess of busted egg in the other.

And me without my camera...

Madman to the Rescue! (As Always...)

I had to go to work this morning, because retail and weekends-off have nothing in common.  Madman graciously started my car for me as he was out doing chores, letting it warm up while I finished getting ready.
Now, I seldom bother to zip my coat.  It's uncomfortable to drive with it zipped up, and since it's a quick dash from the house to the car, I usually just hold it closed for the 30 seconds necessary.
But this morning it was cold and, with a windchill firmly in the negative, I took the precaution of zipping up and donning gloves, knowing I was going to have to clean ice off the car before I headed out.
I chipped and scraped and grumbled the icy crust off, then hopped into the relative warmth of the car, reaching for the coat zipper as I sat down.  After fumbling for a moment, I took my glove off for better dexterity, and fumbled some more.
The zipper pull was missing.
I believe I said some bad words at this point.
I tried tugging on the zippy-runner thingy to no avail.  I tried pulling the top of the coat apart, hoping the zippy-runner thingy would just slide down on its own.
Nope.
There were a few more bad words.  They were louder, too.
I finally located the zipper pull in my lap, but it was too bent to stay in the little hole where it belonged.  I managed to pull the zipper open about 2 inches, but it wouldn't go further.  I needed 3 hands - two to hold the zipper above and below the pull, for leverage, and one to tug with.
I was short a hand.  Luckily Madman has some, so I trudged back through the snow and went in the house.

"Sweetie?"  I called from the door.  "Can you help me a minute?"
"Sure," he replied.  "What do you need?" he asked as he came toward me.
"Will you please get me out of my coat?  I'm stuck."
He had the good grace to only laugh once.  Love that guy.
He promptly zipped it up, losing the precious 2 inches I'd gained out in the car.  I'd been figuring that, worst case scenario, I could (with his help) pull the coat off over my head, but with it zipped all the way up, I was going to lose some skin off my chin.
While I tried to keep tension on the zipper, he tugged and re-inserted the pull and tugged and re-inserted the pull and tugged, until finally finally it zipped all the way down.
By this time, I was courting being late for work, so a big "Thank you!  Thank you!", a quick kiss, and I dashed out the door and out to the car.
I arrived with zero time to spare, instead of the comfortable 5-10 minutes I try for.
I'm still trying to figure what would have been said if I'd been late and my only excuse was "Sorry.  I got stuck in my coat."