Planetary Verbosity

As I’d mentioned in earlier entries, we’ve been planning to eventually get rid of much of the forsythia that has overrun our homestead. We finally got started on it this weekend, and it was all thanks to the sewer.

Yeah, really…sewer.

The township in which our homestead is located requires homeowners to have their sewers pumped every three years. It just happens that ours came due this year, so we had it pumped on Friday. During the course of their work, the sewer guys found that our pipes were full of roots! Had we been living there on a daily basis (instead of just going up on weekends), the sewer would’ve backed up into the house by now. Um. Ew.

Remember the episode of Dirty Jobs where Mike went with the disaster clean-up crew to clean a basement that had been flooded due to a sewer backup? Yeah, that could’ve been us, exploding toilet and all. Needless to say, the forsythia and small trees around the sewer will have to go.

See the dirt in the center of this pic…

That’s where the sewer is at. Now check out all of the plant life surrounding it. All of that will be history eventually.

Though it will take quite a while to clear everything out, we did get a decent start this weekend. We did most of the work on Saturday with the help of Dave’s Jeep and a tow chain. We started with the lopper and manual hedge trimmers and cut out a space large enough for me to crawl under and attach the chain around a forsythia plant. Dave then pulled with the Jeep. It didn’t really work at first, as the chain kept pulling up and off of the forsythia. After a few tries, we realized that wrapping the chain around the trunks twice worked much better, as the chain was able to bite into the branches as pressure was applied.

Here I am, climbing down under the monster forsythia to attach the chain. I felt like a tunnel rat down there, but it was kind of interesting. I now know why the barn cats love that area so much; there are ground-level “tunnels” all through it!

Pulling them out with the Jeep:

Dave also got down in the dirt to help dig out some of the roots that managed to make it through the pulling:

When we were finally finished on Saturday, we’d put a fair-sized dent in the out-of-control forsythia:

Today, we mainly spent time cleaning up. Dave moved the pile of forsythia over near the burning barrel (in the same spot where we’d had the huge brush pile before…heh), and I trimmed some of the other forsythia so that we’ll be able to bring the Jeep in from a different angle later. Here’s today’s partially reclaimed land, though the roots still need to be removed:

We have to be careful in that area, though. See the yellow and orange leaves in the lower right corner of the picture? Unfortunately, that’s poison ivy, and there’s a decent amount of it growing around there. Does anyone know of a safe and easy way to get rid of poison ivy without having to spray it with toxic chemicals? We have to be really careful not to get it in with the forsythia or other brush that we’re burning, as we definitely wouldn’t want to inhale the urushiol-laden smoke.

At this point, it’s already starting to look quite a bit better. It’s still going to take a long time, but it will be worth it when we have more backyard space…and less of a chance of an exploding toilet.

We’ve headed full-on into fall in southcentral PA, and it shows in the temperatures. We’ve been trying to avoid using the furnace, as it’s fueled by oil, and the prices are still outrageous. We invested in a couple of oil-filled electric radiator heaters and have been using those in the rooms in which we spend the most time. They’re doing a good job so far and we’ll probably get a few more. The extra expense on the electric bill will be pretty easy to cover compared to the fuel oil bills.

Saturday on the homestead consisted mostly of mowing, which was unusually uncomfortable for me, as I’d misplaced my earbuds. I had an el-cheapo pair up there, but they couldn’t compete with the noise from the mower. For awhile, I’d been looking for an alternative to foam earbuds, which work well for this purpose but have a tendency to shove wax down into the ear canal. I tried closed-ear headphones first, followed by clip-on headphones with earmuffs over them, but neither did a very good job. I think the earmuff thing may have worked out if I’d had a different setup, but the biggest problem with earmuffs is that the headband would prevent me from wearing my straw hat. So anyway, it’s back to the foam earbuds. I’m currently using JVC Marshmallows, but I’m also looking into similar alternatives. I did end up keeping the clip-ons to use with my PDA and occasionally with my laptop. They’re Koss KSC75s, and the sound is simply amazing, especially for clip-on headphones!

Anyway, after mowing, I checked out the wildlife trail going down to the creek and noticed quite a bit of deer rub on a few different trees. I guess it’s that time of year, and I’m hoping we’ll have more actual deer sightings this year.

On Sunday, we went back for a couple of hours to work on a few little things. Once again, the temperature wasn’t cold, but it was just chilly enough for a long-sleeved shirt. Dave did some reorganizing in the shed, while I tried to dig out some of the forsythia that we’re trying to thin. It proved to be a pretty daunting task, and I didn’t get very far, but I’ll probably try again this weekend. Anyone have any hints for removing forsythia? Apart from chaining it to the bumper of Dave’s Jeep, I mean…we are considering that.

I took an interesting photo from our homestead; if I zoom all the way in with my S3 IS, I can actually get a picture of the road we take to get over the mountain.

Also, do these berries/fruits look familiar to anyone out there? They’re on a small tree or shrub in the upper yard. I’ve never seen these before and am having a hard time finding any info. Though this tree is in the middle of a drainage ditch, we’re not planning to remove it (the water can still get around it), as we really like it. The insects seem to love it as well, as I’ve seen everything from carpenter bees to ladybugs to Japanese beetles on it. Anyway, here are the fruits that are currently on it - red with little white “dots”/bumps.

Back in early May, the tree had these blossoms on it. Hopefully this will help with getting an ID.

Ok, that’s all for now.

Ok, not really, but now that I have your attention…

This weekend was fairly uneventful on the homestead, as it was raining for a good part of the weekend. On Saturday, we weren’t able to do much because of the rain, but we still made the trip. We emptied out the burning barrel, and all of that wood and brush from last week was reduced to this small pile of ash!

By the time we went back up on Sunday, even more rain had fallen, and the creek was running higher than I’ve ever seen it, with the exception of the time it flooded back in March. Again, I used the alternate trails carved by nature (mostly deer), and I’m hoping to be able to expand the main trail a bit once the brush has thinned out. If this works, it’ll be so much easier to get down to the creek and back.

I also noticed something very interesting happening with the forsythia that Dave had trimmed a couple of weekends ago. It was apparently so thrilled with actually being cut back so far, because it’s flowering again! I kid you not. These aren’t old blossoms that somehow managed to survive the summer; several of the plants around the clearing are sporting tiny yellow buds.

Oh, and as for the fuzzy white caterpillars I mentioned in the title of this entry, I started seeing them within the last week or two. This week, they seemed to be nearly everywhere in and around the woods. With the help of various websites, I think I’ve identified them as the banded tussock moth caterpillar (Halysidota tessellaris).

I’ve never been a fan of caterpillars and get a little weirded out when I find one on me (when I was little, the neighbor kids held me down and threw caterpillars on me for fun), but these bits of fluff are actually kind of cute…in a caterpillar sort of way. As I took photos, I found that they’re very curious of the camera. More than once as I put the lens close enough to get a shot in super macro mode, I noticed that the caterpillar stretched up toward the camera as if trying to get a closer look.

Finally, as you can see from this upper yard vantage point, the leaves have been showing their beautiful fall colors for a few weeks now.

In what ended up being a rather chilly semi-staycation, we spent Thursday through Sunday on our homestead. We’d intended to camp outside at night, but with temps in the 40s, it didn’t really work out that way. We ended up coming back to our in-town house to sleep on Thursday night and Saturday night, and we slept in the shed on Friday night…brrrrrr! More about that later.

This wasn’t really much of a stay-at-home vacation, but we weren’t at our jobs, so it was still somewhat of a staycation. On Thursday, I did a good bit of the mowing, while Dave ran the weed eater and set up the tent. We wisely decided, though, that it was probably going to be too cold to camp out overnight, so we headed back to town and the warmth of our bed.

Our big task for Friday was setting up our new burning barrel and using it to get rid of a huge pile of brush from our nuisance tree purge earlier this year.

Now before anyone gives us a lecture about burning barrels and pollution, we’re not going to use it to burn things like plastics and other nasty trash surprises. We’re primarily going to use it for getting rid of trimmings from trees and bushes, as well as burning any unwanted papers that we’d rather not shred and put into regular trash - old credit card statements and the like.

Anyway, back to that brush pile. It originally started out as just a pile of old trees and bushes that we’d pulled earlier this year to get them out of the way. Eventually, we piled some more brush and trimmings on top of it, and it started taking on a life of its own. In recent weeks, it even grew its very own pokeweed, and it was hard for us to cut the grass around it, so it had turned into quite the monster. Here’s a before picture:

Yikes…wtf is that?! As you can see, it had even developed its own weed system.

So while Dave was finishing the mowing, I started feeding the fire with branches from the mutant brush pile. It was pretty hot and was a lot of hard work, but I put a decent dent in the pile by the time Dave came to help. Between the two of us, we actually managed to get rid of that entire pile!

Here are the “during” and “after” photos:

As you can see, we have an obvious discolored patch there, but it still beats having the huge brush pile! Btw, the stump was there when we bought the place, and the small pile of wood beside it was burned after I took the photo. We did save a bit of the wood for using in the firepit, but we never got to use it that weekend.

We decided to risk sleeping overnight in the shed and planned to use the oil-filled electric heater we’d bought at my workplace. Little did we realize that, though the shed is very sturdily built, the general drafty nature of the thing easily bested our heater and our sleeping bags. We got very little sleep, which sucked because we’d been planning to go to Altoona on Saturday. When I woke up at 7 on Saturday morning, this was the reading on the indoor/outdoor thermometer in the shed:

Yes, that does say it was 51 degrees inside! Needless to say, it was bitterly cold, but we still managed to get up and have a great breakfast at the restaurant before heading to Altoona.

We used one of our passes to get in to the Railroaders Memorial Museum and enjoyed the visit as usual. This time, the Jeep was safe and sound when we went back out to the parking lot. Since it was a nice day, we decided to also make the trip to Horseshoe Curve to do some train watching. To our surprise, we didn’t have to pay to get in, as the wristband from the RMM covered our admission!

We saw at least four or five trains at the Curve, and I got videos of two of them, which I’ll be uploading to YouTube soon! One is a full video of an intermodal that lasts a little over two minutes. The other was a really long intermodal - I got 6 minutes and 12 seconds of video before my card was full, and the train was still coming. I only missed taping the last ten or twelve cars, so it’s still a nice video of a really long train…it just cuts off abruptly.

Here’s a view of the reservoirs and mountains from the Horseshoe Curve steps:

Anyway, after a meal at the Sheetz “convenience restaurant,” a quick trip through the mall, and a stop at the Harbor Freight store, we headed back home. After the freezing night we’d had, we decided to once again go back into town to sleep.

We did go back up to the homestead on Sunday to do some more work and just hang out before doing our weekly grocery shopping. I went down to the creek and was delighted to find that there are still plenty of minnows in it. Now that the summer overgrowth is starting to thin out a bit, I was able to follow one of the deer trails back up from the creek. It’s not quite as steep as our usual trail, and we may be able to somehow extend it for our own use eventually. That won’t drive the deer away from using it, as they still use the other trails we use.

When we’re up there this weekend, I’ll probably explore the deer trails a bit more and see what I can find. We’re also planning to get rid of some more forsythia, especially now that it’s a bit easier to cut it.

It was pretty hot and humid this weekend, but we did spend a few hours at the homestead on Saturday, and we were fascinated by something in particular that happened there. We heard a tree fall in the forest…and since there were two of us there to hear it, it made quite a racket! I was sitting in a lawn chair in the shade of some trees when I heard a few small cracks, and then a slightly louder crack, and then a sort of “whooshing” sound as the tree fell, followed by the thud as it hit the ground.

Of course, I decided to go down one of the trails (the only one that is passable this time of year with the thick growth of the woods) to see if I could find the tree that fell. While I didn’t find it, I did see something fascinating down at the creek. By the time I got my camera out of the case, I was only able to get a blurry picture, but it’s just barely clear enough to make out a pair of raccoons swimming across the creek!

Also, as I was taking some pics of some flowers that I’ve tentatively identified as wild mint (although the leaves don’t smell at all like mint to me), I noticed a tiny spider peeking at me from the blooms. I took a pic of it, but I know some here don’t like spiders very much, so I’ll post it as a thumbnail and let you decide whether or not you want to see the full-size version. This is a northern crab spider, Misumenops asperatus.

I noticed that in an earlier picture I took of these flowers, before I realized there was a spider there, he was actually rearing back in a defensive posture with his four front legs up in the air…yikes! The photo linked above was taken after that, when he’d apparently decided the camera wasn’t a threat.

FWIW, I’m an arachnophobe, but the phobia is beginning to go away now that I’ve been exposed to so many of them on the homestead. I still get freaked out, though…one was crawling up my leg in the Jeep yesterday, and I couldn’t believe that I actually managed to toss it out the window before getting the heebie-jeebies.

In other news, I’m actually taking a couple of days off of work this week! The weather is going to be great, so we’re hoping to head up to the homestead on Thursday, and we’ll camp out there until Sunday. We may also take a day trip to Altoona for one of those days, so I’ll probably be posting some more railroad videos to my YouTube account.

Hopefully, it’ll be a lot better than the last time we visited Altoona. For those who weren’t reading my blog in 2006, here’s a pic of what happened during our last Altoona trip:

And a photo of how far my Jeep moved as a result of the impact - it was parked straight in the space when we went inside the Railroaders Museum (the building in the background):

This happened as the result of a hit-and-run, where a driver parked opposite us backed into the Jeep, got his bumper stuck, then rocked his pickup truck until he broke free - and promptly left the scene. Thankfully, a quick-thinking railfan/tourist took a photo of the truck as the driver fled, and a museum employee got his license number. After a long ordeal with the Altoona PD (*cough*incompetents*cough*), we finally got the information, and the truck owner’s insurance cut us a nice check. We also got three free family passes to the museum, so we’ll probably use one this week.

Moral of the story - if you’re going to perpetrate a hit-and-run, don’t do it in broad daylight in the parking lot of the city’s biggest tourist attraction, especially if that attraction has a large outdoor display yard where people will be taking lots of pictures…dumbass.

Btw, in case any newer readers are wondering, we ordered a taillight from a Jeep catalog and Dave hammered out the dents and fixed the other things himself. (We spent the insurance money on new tires and other fix-ups.) He did a great job, as usual!

That was back in late June, 2006, and the Jeep is still going strong!

Well, Hurricane Hanna threatened to ruin our weekend, but we still managed to spend some time at the homestead on both days. On Saturday, it was pouring rain, so we spent all of our time holed up in the shed. I watched videos and played games on the laptop (still no net access up there), while Dave rebuilt the carburetor for the Gravely tractor. It died a horrible, messy, oil-and-gas spewing death around the end of July, and he finally got around to ordering a rebuild kit from the local power equipment dealer (where he’d bought the Gravely).

He started the rebuild on Saturday but needed to make some gaskets, and the rain wasn’t showing any sign of stopping, so we bought some gasket material and decided to go back on Sunday, when the weather was supposed to be wonderful…and it was!

While I caught up on my exploring, Dave made quick work of the carburetor rebuild and got the Gravely running again. I spent most of my time taking pictures and bushwhacking a shorter path to the creek. When winter gets here, I hope to make some additional paths, but this new one is fine for now.

Here are some pictures from the weekend…

Ok, this first photo isn’t from this weekend - it’s from when the carburetor died. This shows how dirty and disgusting the thing was.

Here’s the cleaned up and rebuilt carb:

Once it was put back into the tractor and the stuff that had leaked all over the engine had a chance to burn off, it worked great!

Here’s one of the photos I took of the creek, which is a bit higher thanks to the rains from the hurricane. (It needs more rain, though!)

And a view of the barn from near the road, with the woods and mountains in the background:

That’s this weekend in photos…now here are the ones I promised from last weekend.

Not long after we got there last weekend, I discovered this morning glory:

This honeybee was so intent on what it was doing that I was able to take a few close-up pics:

As I was heading down to the creek, I noticed an unusual sound that I couldn’t quite place - sort of a steady “thwock” sound. Wait…what? I also thought I heard muffled voices, which made me even more curious. Who was in the creek and what in the world were they doing? Well, I got my answer soon enough - there was a paddleboat in the creek! I kid you not. A mother and daughter had brought their paddleboat up the creek. They seemed a little startled to see me, but after saying hi to them, I started taking photos of the creek. They had to turn around at the island, as the water gets too shallow beyond there. Not wanting to completely weird them out, I waited until they were leaving to take a pic.

As I was taking creek photos, I noticed a bright red flower and bushwhacked on a deer path to get a closer look. It was a cardinal flower, the only one I’ve seen on our homestead so far.

Finally, we bought a small table at a neighbor’s yard sale last Saturday for $15 - chairs included free. It’s the perfect size to replace the card table in the shed and will be great for when we cook out on the fire pit!

Slowly, but surely, we’re putting the “home” into our homestead.

I was going to write an entry today about our quick visits to the homestead this weekend, where it was too hot and humid to do much of anything. I’ll save that one for later in the week.

Don LaFontaine, the man with the world’s most recognizable voice, has passed away.

Goodnight, Don.

First off, thanks to all of those who posted a “happy anniversary” to us!

As I mentioned before, there was lots of trimming/cutting going on around the homestead on Saturday. I was giving Snoopy a much-needed haircut, while Dave was trying to put a dent in the out-of-control forsythia.

Since it was supposed to be nice that day, I originally started Snoopy’s haircut on a blanket outside in the shade, the extension cord stretched to its full length so I could use the clippers. It really was pretty nice at first, but it eventually got hot enough that we had to go inside to finish his haircut. I then gave him a bath in the new utility sink, which worked pretty well for that. I decided to just towel dry him and then let him air dry instead of using the blow dryer - he hates that, and it’s pretty easy to air dry while walking around outside on the homestead.

Here he is before his haircut:

Out on the blanket in my “dog haircut” clothes…heh…he was “talking,” begging Dave to come rescue him from the evil clipper monster:

The obligatory “after” photo - as you can see from his expression, he was ready for this haircut to be over. His hair isn’t quite dry in this pic, so it looks like I totally butchered his tail, but it actually looked pretty good after it dried.

As far as the forsythia, Dave was able to take a good chunk out of the one section, but it’s so massive and out-of-control that it’s going to take awhile to cut it down. We’re not completely getting rid of all of it, but we do want to remove some sections and get the rest under control.

Here are before and after pics of the section he cleared. There was a gap here that goes from the road to our yard, with the forsythia separating the two. He widened the gap considerably and got rid of a decent amount on the right.

One of the ladies on a local pagan mailing list mentioned that she made a wand out of forsythia, and I was considering doing the same and making a few from some of the thicker pieces. The ones I’m considering making would be more like crafts/projects and would probably not be used as spiritual tools.

Ok, I guess that’s all for now. It’s almost Friday! *sigh*

Today was our 8th wedding anniversary. After doing our usual Sunday shopping, we decided to use a TGI Friday’s gift card I’d gotten from my last job to treat ourselves to an anniversary dinner. We’d never been there before and were hoping it would be a nice change.

After a ten minute wait, we were seated and started scouring the menus. We’d looked at the online menu earlier in the day, and I had some idea of what I wanted to order. Wouldn’t it figure - that particular item (Jack Daniel’s pulled pork sandwich) wasn’t on the menu for our local Friday’s. Neither were the steak fajitas that I’d picked for my second choice from the online menu. WTF?

I had a hard time choosing from what actually was on the menu, mainly because I was really in the mood for fries as a side dish, and everything that sounded really good was served with some other side. The chipotle grilled steak sandwich sounded awesome and was probably what I should’ve ordered, but it came with onion rings. Normally I would’ve been cool with onion rings, but I was really hungry for fries. I ended up going for the fish and chips…can’t go wrong with that, right? Hrm.

Well, it wasn’t bad or anything. It was actually really good, but it definitely wasn’t what I wanted. When the server first brought it out, I almost thought she’d made a mistake. It looked like glorified fish sticks, something from the kid’s menu maybe. Had I actually paid for it (as opposed to using a gift card), I probably would’ve been extremely disappointed. It was actually really good fish, but it wasn’t what I was expecting at all and didn’t live up to the $9.00+ price tag.

Dave ended up getting a cheesy bacon cheeseburger, which was a massive thing with a “patty” of fried Provolone cheese on top. He really liked it, and I can’t blame him…it looked really good. I’m not sure if it’s something I’d order, as the beef patty was really thick and I prefer thin burgers. That said, it still looked more appetizing and impressive than mine did!

All in all, it was a pretty good meal and we would eat there again for sure. I think next time, though, I’ll get something I really want and I’ll order the fries on the side if I’m in the mood for them.

Ok, that’s all for now. Sometime this week, I’ll post an entry about what we did yesterday on the homestead, which involved a lot of trimming…of the forsythia and of the dog!

Happy 8th anniversary, Dave - I love you!

This past weekend on the homestead was spent doing some more fixing-up in the bathroom. If you’re wondering why we keep making little changes instead of getting rid of that crappy wallpaper and linoleum, it’s because the bathroom is probably the last room we’ll remodel. We figure that if it’s going to be around for that long, at least we’ll make it a bit nicer by adding some conveniences.

We’d gotten a couple of medicine cabinets free from a generous co-worker of mine, and we bought some towel racks, shelf brackets, and wood for shelves. There was already a makeshift wooden shelf in the bathroom that was still in fair condition, so we “recycled” that by just moving it to make more room for the other shelves. Heh - I don’t know why I’m saying ‘we,’ as Dave did all of the work. Hey, I did almost all of the mowing (except for the more treacherous areas), which gives him plenty of time to do renovations.

Here’s the medicine cabinet with the larger towel rack below it. He also put up two smaller towel racks (not shown) next to the shower for our overnight stays.

These are the shelves. The one in the middle was the existing shelf and was just moved in order to make room for the other two.

Here’s a wide shot of the new shelves, cabinet, towel rack, and sink:

Obviously, we’ll be able to reuse just about all of this stuff after remodeling the bathroom, or else we’ll find other uses for things we no longer need in there.

In other news, we have Brown-eyed Susans on the hillside behind the house…

Though they typically spook very easily, this mourning dove sat in a tree and watched me take pictures of it for a few minutes!

Here’s a shot of the house on Saturday…look, no Dumpster! Yep, we finally had them haul it away. It was worth it, and we’re going to get another one when it gets a bit cooler…but for now, it’s nice to have it gone.

That’s it for now…watching Hagerstown playing in the LLWS!