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!

Alright, back in business

Though considering how hardware impaired I've been lately, I plugged my new SD card reader in with great trepidation.
Luckily I haven't blown it up yet, so here's a couple of quick pictures, while I've got them.

I'm actually using the wayback machine for these - they were taken back in March, but I was lazy and didn't offload them to the computer.  That'll learn me.
A large male pheasant moved into the barns last fall, and has spent the entire winter there, entertaining the pigs and sharing their food.  (Hopefully they don't begrudge him the corn.  At least they haven't said anything about it, so we presume it was okay with them.)
He moves from one barn to another at will, so there's no knowing where he'll turn up next.
One day back in March, we opened the front door and discovered this:

Actually, when we opened the door, he was headed down the steps, but by the time I got back with the camera, he was already facing back up them.  (The house is earth-sheltered, so the front porch is actually below ground level.)
Our theory is that he'd gotten bored with exploring the barns and wanted to check out the house.

The pictures are taken through the storm door, so they're a little bit fuzzy.  (I wish I'd been better able to capture his plumage, because he's flat-out gorgeous!)
We weren't leaving the storm door closed to keep him out;  the real reason was this:.

Seriously, that picture is blurry because he was so excited, he was actually vibrating.
"Birrrrrrd...   Big birrrrrrd...  Want birrrrrrd...."

Though considering Mr Pheasant is way bigger than the cat, I'd have a hard time placing a bet...

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.

Two steps forward, one step back...

We've had a relapse in the weather department.

We were down to bare ground on Friday.  Saturday I woke up to that.

My lavender is clearly Not Happy:

 And here's the view through my big rosebush:

Rosehips with frosting:

It rained later in the day, and washed most of the nasty white stuff away.  But who knows what tomorrow will bring?

(It was particularly disheartening when I went to transfer these images from the camera's memory card - the photos were right next to the azalea shots I took in Florida...)

(And to anyone who was worried - no, I wasn't eaten by weasels.  No further sightings of the little fella, though we did find a mousetrap, sprung and sans mouse, bait still intact, pulled back under the stove...)

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.