GOT OUT for a blast on the iron piggy around 11 last night, just for nothing. I had the GoPro with me but I don’t ever use it enough to be handy with it. Although I did get some marvelous footage of my gas tank at speed.
Actual conversation this week: The bride’s trying to send me a photo folder from her office computer. She wants to send it to my Google Drive but something’s not working.
“It says I can zip it but I haven’t figured out how to zip it yet.”
“Babe, we’ve been together 50 years, I’m hip.”
And this one: The big fat groundhog that lives in the sideyard pops up out of its burrow. I see it from the kitchen window and say to the country girl, born in Alabama, raised in Maine, “Babe, if I shoot him, will you cook him?
“Ew! Who eats groundhogs?”
“Who eats groundhogs? Oh, I don’t know. Your people?”
In truth, only one of us has eaten groundhog and it wasn’t in the country, it was in West Philly, the meat in an Italian pasta sauce, bones and all, and if I know the cook the game hadn’t been shot, it was likely the victim of a traffic accident. Unless the cook was present at the time; then grocery-type accidents would generally happen on purpose.
Jenna and Jonny are in Nebraska this morning, on their way east in the travel van. Things change dramatically in Nebraska from one end to the other. In the west it’s empty, stark, semi-arid, you wonder how cattle manage to live on it, then everything greens up the farther east you go, there’s more water. Nebraska turns into corn and starts to feel more like the midwest. It might as well be Iowa.
D1D2 will be glad when Uncle Jonny gets home. I forget where he was off to last spring around this time. It was just before the little girl’s second birthday. It’s bedtime, she’s standing up in her crib calling down the stairs while her parents are trying to get chores done before they’re free to collapse for the day. You can hear the clothes dryer running.
Turn up the volume on your viewing device. See if you get the idea this is going to be a long night.
Jenna and Jonny were in Colorado for five or six days before heading east yesterday. One of them had snapped this pic of an ancient native redoubt.
Elk near one of their campsites…
A fox bedded down at elevation…
As for local wildlife, a few evenings ago I was getting something out of the storage tent when six deer walked by no more than 15 feet from where I stood. I heard them before I saw them; heard the snap of last year’s winter-dry knotweed canes.
Two deer saw me for sure, the first and the last, and likely one in the middle. They were led by the one-eared doe that’s been around here five or six years now. Watch for the moment she gets my scent and starts looking around.
There’s a ripple cut where I trimmed 2 or 3 minutes of nothing happening while I wait for the next deer to walk by.
In a month the deer will be well hidden. The canes you hear crunching are Japanese knotweed. It grows new every year from the ground up. The new growth quickly turns into a wall of green 10 feet high. It’s the closest thing New England has to jungle cover.
Glyphosate hardly fazes it, unless you paint the canes with a concentrated form of the herbicide immediately after cutting them off at ground level. Oh sure, you can get lymphoma from glyphosate but I’ve already got it so I’m all set.
That reminds me: Good news from my friend, Barbara. Five months later she’s fresh out of the chemo wringer and has had a clean scan, her lymphoma is officially in remission now, we can start growing our bald heads back.
Here’s Fabo when we were young wage slaves, ink-stained wretches scribbling news copy for our crust of daily bread.
Daughter #1 has been flying off on business travel quite a bit lately. She was in San Antonio four days this week, arrived home last evening. We had the urchins here overnight Friday to give Ryan a break from single-dad duty and his own full work schedule.
The girls helped make blueberry pancakes for breakfast yesterday. Little sister dumps in the blueberries…
Big sister stirs up the works…
After breakfast we went for a ride in the ’49 truck. At 7, D1D1 knows the H-pattern of the three-speed floor shifter. I work the clutch, she shifts the gears and randomly beeps the horn.
That’s about it, just regular life going on. Today I’m working on lawn and garden irrigation, replacing sprinkler heads that have had it. As of tomorrow I’ll be a free man on the Earth for seven days running.
All I plan to do is write. I’m not picking up a plaster knife, a paint brush, a nail gun, a ladder, a chainsaw, an ax, a spade, a rake, a wrench, not pushing a wheelbarrow, not putting anything together, not taking anything apart, not loading the truck, not unloading the truck.
I really need a solid, uninterrupted writing week to clear the mental workspace. Been looking forward to it for months.
Happy May Day, all.
Tony DePaul, May 1, 2022, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
Thanks for the update, Tony, glad to hear your getting a week to devote to writing. Hopefully you’ll find some time to devote to riding? Anyway, your grand-kids are cute as always, and I can tell you’re a doting pop-pop. Oh, I want to mention how cool it is your granddaughter is learning to drive stick-shift; I am beginning to think it is a lost art. I was 11 when my dad taught me on his ’53 Jeep station wagon. I was just reflecting yesterday that the old Ford Ranger I am currently driving is one of only 3 vehicles I owned that is manual trans (the other two were foreign cars: a Morris Minor and the other a Simca. Glad to hear your friend is in remission.
Good morning, Will. Good to hear from you. When my daughters got to driving age I insisted they learn on one of the 5-speed Saabs we had at the time. They hated it then but soon came to appreciate being able to get into any car, anywhere, and drive it. When Jenna and Jonny went to Ireland Jenna did all the driving, the rental car was a stick. She was working on a movie once where the driver had gone home early, leaving the “camera car” in a spot where it couldn’t remain overnight. The camera car’s not a car at all, it a 350-type truck with camera mounts on it. Jenna was the only person on set who could drive stick so she did the honors. She texted me and said thanks for not giving in when I was 16 and kept whining about needing an automatic to learn on. 🙂
Gonna try to get out for a night ride on the iron piggy this week. Will try to figure out the GoPro and bring it along.
Thanks for reading, Will.
Eastern Nebraska as well as western Iowa are getting a lot of rain. If we see the sun soon maybe things will dry up to the point that crops can be planted.
I’ve been enjoying your blog, Tony. Keep up all of the good work on the home, the health and family.
Matt
Adel, IA
Thanks, Matt. I appreciate you following the scribble all these many years. I’d like to get a few riding videos posted. Will look for an opportunity to do so asap. Ride safe if you’ve been out there on the road.
This morning we’re trying to figure out a covid arrangement. Daughter #1 has it, probably got it on the plane to or from San Antonio. I think we’ll have the granddaughters over here for the week since Pam and I have both had the second booster. Always something.
That cliff dwelling is definitely Mesa Verde National Park. I took that same photo from the same spot last year. Cool little park. Lots of dwellings, some of them huge. Some built well up the side of cliffs. Not the kind of homes where you stumble out of bed too far to take a whiz after a few beers. Huge first step.
Parkour was probably out, too. And no rooftop table tennis, no juggling, no unicycles…
Hi Tony, thanks for the post. Nice to see snippets of the DDs growing. Cheers, Brad
Thanks, Brad. They’re lots of fun. Time’s going way too fast. I get busy and feel as if I’m missing so much.
Enjoy your week of writing. What a nice break from all your construction work in Vt.
And how was that pasta sauce groundhog dish? Not that I want to have some, just curious.
Actually, it was very good, Ellie. We haven’t done much construction in Vermont yet this year, it’s all been here in RI, but VT is up next. The driveway’s in now. I have a photo the site engineer sent, should have included it.
Groundhog is probably good to eat, but it may be necessary to soak the meat in water for a day or two before cooking it, changing the water every day. That’s what’s necessary for beaver, as their scent gland permeates their body. I forget now, it’s been several years, but I think the scent gland produces an aspirin-like taste to their meat. They use this gland to mark their territory, after scooping up a little pile of sand, no bigger than an apple, and then giving it a squirt. When I moved here, beside the Gatineau River, in Quebec, I left for a week to visit my family for a week over Christmas, and when I returned, 20 of my trees were chewed down by beavers. Getting a dog, and wrapping chicken wire around the remaining trees wasn’t very effective, as when the snow is high, they can boost themselves above the chicken wire and chomp away. So, I hired a trapper, who taught me, and together we took out 13 beavers. Their meat is quite tender, softer than cheese. They kept coming back, nevertheless, as the kits are pushed out of the hut after two years, in March, and the parents won’t let them back in. So, they have to spread out, and find their own territory. But now, riverside has largely been divided up, houses built, and I don’t need to worry about my trees anymore, as they have moved elsewhere. Cody Bear traps are what’s used for beaver, and groundhogs, but if any dogs are around, you’d better not.
Good to know! Thanks, John. There must be something different to learn about handling a great many types of game. When Babudan skins out a waterbuck he never lets the outside of the skin touch the meat, so as not to transfer unpleasant scent gland secretions to the good parts. 🙂
Was that cliff dwelling in Mesa Verde?
Not sure, Jon. Jenna will write in to say one way or the other. I know they were going to Mesa Verde. I haven’t been there myself.