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Another momentous stretch for us. What kicked it off was one day we were out on a walk and we said hello to some boys I already “know” because they often walk their dog, Lulu, around the neighborhood. But this time, they were accompanied by Mom. So I excitedly said hello and we talked for a minute mostly because I knew they also owned chickens. Well, she happened to mention that they also own a tortoise! In fact, they had recently “lost” her but she was found. I had seen this drama in the Nextdoor app but I didn’t know who the owner was!

So anyway, a couple days later we visited her place and got to see the tortoise that lives in the backyard. The mom explained that the tortoise rescue place didn’t really enforce the rules that they emphasize on-line. It seemed like was easy for her to get one!

So after that, we had renewed excitement about our chances to adopt a tortoise, even from the rescue place that seemed so particular. So I looked at their website, but at the current time there were no African tortoises available. Who knows how long before there would be. They had other kinds of tortoises/turtles, but we had decided on African tortoise as they get really big, live really long, and are considered great pets. They can also live outside.

So anyway then I recalled that in my social media feed there were pics of baby tortoises someone was selling. I went back and found the entry in Facebook (a tortoise owners group) and messaged the owner, Khloe, and there were still some available!

Khloe’s baby sulcatas

So then I discussed the idea with Rob, and he agreed immediately (probably realizing that being measured and thoughtful wasn’t going to go over well with me). So that weekend we drove to Waco to pick up the baby tortoise! The seller lives in Ft. Worth so it’s basically halfway. The weather was uncharacteristically stormy, so it made for some poor driving conditions along what is already a busy road.

Khloe asked me to pick which one I wanted LOL. So this is the one I chose!

On car ride home!

I learned that the eggs had been kept at a temperature that favors females, but anyway the sex of the tortoises won’t be known for a while longer. Rob and I were both shocked at how SMALL she was when we saw her in person! Somehow the pics didn’t convey this. She was like 3 inches long. The CUTEST thing ever! I asked the Khloe and her husband some questions but I could hardly listen to the answers I was so excited. We forked over $125 and drove home.

Turns out Khloe is just converting her hobby of raising/selling sulcatas into a little business called “Shelby’s Shells” and we are therefore one of her first clients. We take this as a good sign as she has been very happy to answer questions and will be glad to have good reviews from her early customers.

We may need to keep the tortoise indoors for her first 2 years or so because predators. We have her in an open-topped container with a UVB lamp and a ceramic heat lamp. Every day I take her outside for a little fresh air, sunshine, and walkabout. Oh, and a bath which is recommended for hydration. I have been keeping those short as she seems to hate them :)

Sulcatas eat mostly grasses and weeds. Most fruits or veggies are not recommended, or at least only rarely. We provide her with “timothy hay” but she hasn’t eaten any of that yet. Khloe also started us off with some tortoise food pellets but she also doesn’t eat that. Khloe explained that in their first month, the babies don’t eat much because they are still getting nutrition from the yolk.

If all goes well, I expect she’ll grow fast. Her Dad, Brutus, weights 165 pounds!

She is scared of me and when I approach her tub she often freezes up. But I have caught her in the act of eating a few times now. She definitely will eat romaine lettuce (not ideal nutritionally but Ok for now), dandelion, and a little thistle.

I am unclear what kind of grass we have in our lawn, so I ordered some tortoise-friendly grass seeds and planted them in a planter. I also ordered African hibiscus and have planted a few seeds of that as it would be a good food source. Some of these are starting to grow. I also ordered buffalo grass seed which I hope to put right in the yard as it should survive well here.

Having some confusion about best way to raise her. Biggest concern now is humidity. We are not achieving high levels but it sounds like that’s important. So I’ve been keeping a sprayer on hand and every so often during the day I “make it rain” all around her tub. Hoping that will help a bit.

We weighed her yesterday (I think we’ve owned her now about a week and a half so far) and she was just under 2 ounces.

Don’t intend to allow dogs anywhere near her until she’s a large enough size that she appears nothing like a “chew toy”. But once she is sizeable, we plan to keep her in backyard. Then our issue will be keeping track of her. They are known as escape artists- climbing up and digging down under. So that’s a hurdle ahead of us. The neighbors with a tortoise have attached a tracking device on theirs so maybe we’ll do something like that. While brainstorming, Rob even considered a zip line for her. Haha, wouldn’t that be hilarious! Anyway there’s time to figure that out.

So I’ve been busy trying to figure out what to feed her and trying to identify our local weeds. I have an app which tells me what plants are OK for tortoise to eat, but it is UK-based so a lot of Texas plants aren’t in it.

So also one day I was in Tortoise Forum and saw that a “Lisa” was also a new sulcata owner and she lives in Round Rock which is north of Austin. I contacted her and we ended up texting each other and plan to maintain communication as we try to rear our tortoises. She already knows a lot more than me about local plants. She also already owns two other kinds of turtles! We will probably meet up soon because I ordered some cuttle bones and we will do a trade of cuttle bones (turtle can chew on it for calcium) for plants.

In other news. both Americaunas are laying blue-ish eggs. If you look carefully, you can see the difference in coloration. Isis lays more bright blue ish and Sisi’s are a little more olive-greenish.

Zsa Zsa has been a bit of a handful. First event was one day I noticed she was on her own by the pool and before the dogs walked over there and spooked her I decided to try to urge her over to steps but as I approached her she freaked out, flew up in the air, and landed plop in the middle of the pool! It was hilarious. She then very capably swam over to the edge, but was having trouble getting out. So I picked her up and out of there. She is kind of the odd girl in the flock it seems.

Zsa Zsa swimming to edge of pool.

And the last few days we found that Zsa Zsa is “broody” so she keeps going into the roost and just sitting in a trance. So to try to get her out of this mode, I have to keep going in there and taking her out. I do this at least a half dozen times each day. When hens are broody, they don’t lay eggs. We went through this before with Matt, but I don’t think it lasted this long. I’m hoping this will end soon.

I have an idea for art on a blank wall outside on our deck. We have a large, flat piece of wood we could hang up there and probably paint. Then, on top of this, I would glue down painted balls. I have been collecting the little plastic balls that are inside Guinness Stout cans. I was thinking I would choose some kind of image and paint the balls (maybe use a grid to figure out what color goes where?). Possibly the paint color on board underneath would support that, else it would be the opposite color on the color wheel. Haven’t decided on the image yet, but would like it to be dung beetle pushing spherical poop ball. Seems like a good metaphor. But I haven’t done a lot with this idea because I’m basically spending my time moving Zsa Zsa, checking on the tortoise, and thinking about what to feed the tortoise.

If you can drink some cans of Guinness, please save these balls for me.

The tortoise is not officially named yet. We don’t know if it’s M or F, but likely she’s F. So for now, we call her Malala. That may stick. The name that came up for M is Jerome, which Paige recommended as she reminded me that one of my favorite kids’ books is called Jerome (it’s about a frog). The only other name candidate on our list is Cusp of Oscillation. This came about because when I learned that her birthdate is July 30, I quickly googled to see what her horoscope sign was, and it turns out to be between two different signs, or, as one site put it, on the “cusp of oscillation” which cracked me up.

Having both dogs at a brewery (usually Suds Monkey) can be tricky because when it is busy there’s kids running around and stuff and we like to keep a close eye on the dogs to make sure they don’t freak out or whatever. So anyway, we have gone back to taking only one dog at a time. The only consequence of this is that we are now having to visit breweries TWICE as much as before in order to get the same amount of dog socializing in. Sigh, what we do for our pets!

More pics below. The last two pics are from Khloe, showing parent tortoises in her yard with her kids.

Texas Persimmons from our yard

Eggcellence

It hasn’t been long since my last post but it’s been so EVENTFUL I had to update you. Literally the same day I finished writing the last post, I found a different-looking egg in the roost- one of the pullets started to lay!

The Hash Browns lay pretty large beige-pink eggs and Matt lays medium brown eggs with little speckles. So when I found a very small egg with an almost glossy coating I knew immediately it was from one of the new hens! And since Americaunas lay blue eggs, we determined it had to be Zsa Zsa!! (Zsa Zsa is a cochin).

We quickly concluded it was Zsa Zsa’s egg.

Since then, Zsa Zsa has laid several more eggs. That may seem super exciting, but this big news was soon eclipsed…when one day Rob was moving the water hose and when the flowerbed forest got mushed down a bit, he saw that Nessa, our resident peahen, was sitting in the back of the flowerbed in the dirt! So we were like, OH, THAT’S where she’s been hiding!!!

So then we were like OK she’s either sick, or “broody”, or actually sitting on a nest. So I kept an eye out for the next time she would be in the yard (not in the flowerbed). So one morning I saw her out having a dirt bath in a raised bed and I ran out and to my surprise she had a nest full of EGGS!! Super super cool.

Nessa sitting on her nest. You can see one of the eggs underneath her.

So now it was like, OK, she’s got eggs…but are they viable? As in, were they fertilized so they will hatch into chicks? We still don’t know, but I joined a Facebook peacock group and one person told me that peahens seem to “know” so if she is sitting on them basically all the time (which she is) then they probably are viable!!

So I had been tossing some treats her way but she doesn’t eat much and I think it was attracting Matt and the Hash Browns which she probably doesn’t want so anyway I don’t bother her at all now unless she’s up in the yard (very rare) and then I throw her a few dried grubs.

We figure that all the time we thought she was roaming outside our yard she in fact had been sitting on her nest. We feel hatching time must be soon….hoping for actual chicks!

But that’s not all.

Yesterday I found yet another new kind of egg in the coop….BLUE!!

The blue egg is either Isis’ or Sisi’s. We’d lean toward Isis just because she’s larger but we don’t really know yet.

In other news. we had doors installed between the hallway and “music room” which look nice and will be a noise barrier but also create a “suite” for that guest bedroom area. And Rob’s been organizing the garage which is awesome so it’s super neat and tidy in there.

I caught a sentence or two about bonsai trees while we had the Olympics on and I heard that bonsai trees aren’t smaller trees, they are just regular trees pruned and whatever to be that way. So I was like, Oh, I can do my own! So I went to the back where we have a bunch of “cypress” which is actually juniper I think and got a couple baby ones to experiment with.

Laugh all you want. We’ll see how it looks in a year.

We found time to meet up with a couple we met at Suds Monkey Brewing, Sean and Regi. So we hope to get together with them again as they live nearby.

And finally, I am tracking another piece of data to see if it correlates with trail cam animal sightings. I note the days where my Citizen app shows that someone was stuck in an elevator. It’s something that I noticed occurs FAR more often than I ever dreamed. Like, the last 3 days it has happened!

A handful more pics below.

Summer Times

Soon after Paige left, Rob spent a long weekend visiting friends and family and I stayed put. I made a pound of noodles for dinner the day he left and ate it for the next 4 nights in a row. As soon as he returned, we celebrated Rob’s birthday by having dinner at Pinthouse Pizza which was fun as we hadn’t been there for a long time.

While our default outing is for beer at Suds Monkey Brewing, where we are now members, we occasionally try out other breweries and restaurants. We met our friends, Pat & Bob, at Salt Lick where we had BYOB and barbeque while we caught up on news from Riverside Farms Road and other important matters :) I can’t believe we didn’t take a picture- next time.

I recently lost it when we were at Suds Monkey and a gal that works there was wearing the exact same dress I recently ordered from Amazon!! She likes hers so much she’s ordered like all the patterns and I swear there are probably 20 of them. Naturally we now share a special bond lol…. and she likes to treat the pups to large treats!

Our members-only baseball cap from Suds Monkey! Rob getting our large mugs :)

We attempted to get the dogs their second bath at a groomer’s but we had to bail. Last time we brought the dogs in with muzzles on as we didn’t know how they’d react, but when we picked them up the groomer had removed the muzzles and so it seemed like it must have gone pretty well. So this time we dropped Stony without a muzzle, and sure he was nervous, but whatever. Well, turns out that instead of putting him right into the bath, the groomer put him in a kennel first, and when she wanted to get him out he growled and apparently acted threatening enough that she wasn’t sure if it would be safe so she had to call us and we came to get him! Ugh! We don’t think he would bite but anyhow next time we try we will drop them off with muzzles.

I’ve started steeping lemon balm & ginger as well as the red shiso, and both of these are now added to our cocktails. With the health benefits they offer, I figure they not only cancel out the alcohol cons but probably give us total immortality lol.

Shiso/lemon balm & ginger

It’s always anyone’s guess how my bread will turn out each week, not to mention the occasional sourdough buns I make (for hamburgers). Fortunately, though, they usually come out well enough to eat. Last night’s buns came out the size of a giant squid’s eyeball = dinner-plate size. I also had a new condiment idea for hamburgers: gout antidote whisked into a mustard aioli spread on one of the buns.

With whole wheat flour, buckwheat flour, rye flour, & bread flour. Belgian Beer. Chia, caraway, and fennel seeds.

July has been unseasonably cool and rainy which is great. I mean we are in the 90’s but still normally it is hotter!

Some guy in Dripping Springs posted in social media about some young mini pigs he is going to sell soon and then I started thinking gee maybe we should get a mini pig? It would probably be easier to prepare for than a tortoise really. But then I’m like, no, we need to focus on the original goal of a tortoise. We have periodic conversations about our next pet. These require a lot more prep so we need to stew on it more.

We sort of ignored the garden for entire seasons, but it turned out nicely as we are STILL pulling onions and leeks from last fall!

Big accomplishment with the pullets is that we finally decided to force them into the coop at night with the older ones. First night required chasing, second was similar, …but after the third night or so all the chickens were just heading on in voluntarily!! So we have retired the tractor for now. As far as daytime behavior, they sort of all hang together but the pullets are often put in their place by the others with a little peck and a short chase. Seems normal. And Zsa Zsa has grown up to be very large with her wattle and comb appearing. So she seems most likely to be laying eggs soon-ish. But who knows, the Americaunas just look different and they are actually older than Zsa Zsa. Anyway, we have placed bets on when we’ll see any eggs from them. I’m betting on second week in September! But we have no idea.

Zsa Zsa, Sisi, and Isis

I generated a graph of trail cam sightings by lunar phase which I felt showed a slight bias toward darker nights, but honestly shows us nothing. However, it was fun to post it in Nextdoor where I had loads of comments, including good ones such as someone pointing out that if I tracked individual species against moon phase I’d probably find a stronger correlation!

I also drew a map of the neighborhood through the eyes of a dog-walker and basically every section has a name now. It was fun to make. The only thing I forgot was Jackrabbit Junction. I can share it below but you have to zoom in to read it and also things may not make sense to you if you don’t know the neighborhood. Many references are to the resident dogs.

We recently had solar panels put on the roof, which is so cool, but we are still waiting for them to be “turned on” because we are waiting for final inspection. I gather from local news a lot of folks have been putting up solar (the winter storm contributed) so there’s kind of a backlog.

Panels mounted on front of house, but you can’t even see them until you’re up close due to trees.

So let’s just say you had a raised garden bed that was full of grass and weeds. And then let’s say you took a flame torch and burned it down to the ground. How long do you think smoke would rise from that garden bed even if you sprinkled some water on it? Well, I can tell you that it exceeds 24 hours.

With the COVID variants getting more concerning, and with vaccine immunity waning over time, I’m thinking we may be in for more quarantine-style living.

Paige, Pullets, Peahen, and Pox

Pullets have come a long way. We moved the tractor to the backyard so that they could see the older chickens (and vice versa). After while of that, then we started to let the pullets out during the day so they could roam the backyard with the others. They’re very skittish, but are starting to roam most of the yard. They are usually in the vicinity of the older chickens but keep their distance. At treat time, the older ones make it clear they get first dibs. Nessa is the highest in the pecking order but even so she seems pretty easygoing.

We named the lavender-colored Americauna Isis, the black Americauna Sisi (Isis backwards; pronounced See-See), and the cochin Zsa Zsa (after Zsa Zsa Gabor) because she’s covered in feathers all the way down to her feet. Very showy.

We also got the courage up to administer the fowl pox vaccine to all the birds! We had to try to learn how to do it based on youtube videos and the like, so it was kind of trying, but we decided to persevere because Matt suffered so badly last year and almost died, so it seemed worth it. They carry the vaccine at Tractor Supply, but it turns out there’s enough vaccine to vaccinate 1,000 birds! And you can’t easily share with others as after you mix it up to use it, it has to be used within an hour and you have to keep it chilled. So anyway, one morning we went out there, and Rob got a hold of each chicken, handed it to me, and I held the chicken while he opened the wing and stuck the two-prong thing into each hen’s membrane in crook of wing. Amazing that we did them all, even the adult chickens!! It is recommend to do it yearly, but I’m thinking maybe we’ll do every other year.

Meanwhile, Paige graduated from college and is visiting for a nice long time this month. The dogs are having a ball with her, but Woody in particular took awhile to get totally comfortable. Even now after being here a couple of weeks, if she hasn’t walked into the main room for a long time, Woody may growl on her approach. For awhile, he was scared to be near her!

Paige needs some rest and relaxation time so this trip isn’t about going to lots of stuff, it’s about hanging out which is A-OK by me! We spend time taking walks, doing crossword puzzles, watching sports, feeding animals, and fleading (reading while foating). One of the rare outings was a meetup at a Brewburg Brewery with Louise and John!

Trail cam still entertains with regular appearances from armadillos, fox, coyote, and bobcat. One night in particular was crazy neat with a coyote getting harassed by some deer. It’s hard to share as so many pics but below I’ll put a couple that maybe gives you the idea.

Pullets "chicken out" before crossing deck

Guests

The most surprising recent event has been the sudden appearance of a peahen. She simply showed up in our backyard….and hasn’t left since! Probably it’s been around 1.5 weeks so far, maybe 2 weeks. I attempted to find the owner via Nextdoor, but didn’t find one. She likes to walk around the yard along with the chickens, and seems to want to join the flock. The chickens are intimidated by her and try to maintain a distance. However, I think they are starting to get used to her. I’ve named the peahen Clytemnestra, Nessa for short. (She maybe murdered her husband LOL).

Nessa spends her nights up in a tree and in the morning you can often hear her loud call, kind of like a horn honking. She likes treat-time just like the chickens, but chickens are scared to eat from same pile so I go out and give chickens some and Nessa a different pile, and stand there for a bit to prevent Nessa from stealing from chicken pile. She’s not aggressive or mean, but if she simply walks over the chickens will abandon the food. So it works out fine.

She hangs in same places as chickens, which includes the flowerbeds by the back of the house. The thing is that Nessa’s neck is so long that she can look in the windows! So she sometimes just watches us which is hilarious.

Just a day or two after Nessa moved in our human guests, Tom and Leah, arrived from Minnesota. They were here a few days and took one day to explore San Antonio (Rob and I stayed home). We checked out classic Austin fare, went to a brewery, and walked Zilker/Barton Springs. We all had a really fun time, and, incredibly, the dogs were GOOD!! As in, not a lot of fussing…in fact, by the latter half of their visit, both Tom and Leah could pet each of the dogs and there was a comfort level among everyone. It was SUCH a breakthrough for the dogs!

The deer continue to be aggressive and I do have a little bit of footage of the dogs sparring with a deer on the other side of the fence. Fortunately, we have this fence as dogs actually get attacked otherwise!

We still see Piccolo, the baby deer, around our yard. Actually, there are a couple that hang around our yard.

Pullets still doing fine, and at treat-time each day they will now eat out of my hand. They mostly come right down on their ramp in the morning, but the cochin still occasionally gets confused about how to get down.

Realizing that my reluctance to travel is heightened now that I have so many dependents here: the dogs, the chickens, the pullets, the peahen, the mealworms, and the starter (which is actually about 50 million yeasts and 5 billion bacteria).

Below are trailcam pics from today which were fun because besides are armadillo, there’s what appears to be a bat captured on 3 pics.

More pics below. Notice the little deer in the pic of the grass & wildflowers. Also the pic of apparently scientists that were studying the Barton Springs Salamander!

Pullets, Trail Data, Roadkill, and More!

There have been some crazy scenes recently involving the deer and the dogs. The deer are all dealing with babies so are aggressive and stuff. The other day we had to call the dogs in when they were racing back and forth along the fence with a deer running alongside outside the fence. Sorry no video, it all happens fast and it’s kind of mesmerizing.

The baby deer that was laying by our driveway has been sticking around. We named her Piccolo.

Got a ball for the dogs. Woody gets obsessed over balls like this! In this video, we are first introducing it so Stony appears interested but in fact, he’s not keen on balls at all.

Not sure I mentioned that I learned how to use the sourdough starter discard and make a scallion pancake. Yum Yum. We get to have it once a week!

We replaced some fruit trees and others are recovering from the devastating winter weather. Two pomegranates, two peach, one fig, one plum, and a loquat. You can see some teeny eeny weeny pomegranates starting to grow!

Trail cam data visualization below!! Keep in mind I don’t tally deer or rabbits as they’re so common.

Rob finished the chicken tractor and right on schedule the guy with the pullets called…so we drove out to his place and chose 3 pullets! It was a bit random which ones we got, mostly we didn’t care, and actually one had interesting coloration but when he pulled it out he noticed the beak was curved which could be an issue, so he advised choosing other ones.

So anyway, we ended up choosing two Americaunas (one black and one lavender) and a Cochin which is basically black/charcoal. I believe Americaunas lay blue eggs! They’re about 3 months old but the Cochin is a little younger.

It was downpouring rain when we got home and with the stormy weather we decided to keep them in the playpen for the night in the garage. In the morning, we transferred them to the tractor.

We haven’t named them yet. Possibly choosing names from NFL draft again. Also in the running is “Isis” for the lavender one.

So they are living in the tractor in the front yard, totally separate for a month from our other chickens which is advised in case illness shows up. The tractor itself has worked great, but the little birds are first of all completely stressed out and go all whacky if we go near them and they haven’t yet figured out the internal architecture of the tractor. So at night, they are supposed to go up the ramp to the roost area and in the morning, we lower the ramp so they can go down and hang out in the grass and access their food and water. However, they don’t understand how to use the ramp! So until this morning, we have had to manually move them from one area to another. This is not easy because it is a small, cramped space and they go all whacky with noise and wing flapping and running around when we try to grab them. The worst time is in evening, I’ve been laying on the ground where they pooped all day to try to get them on the ramp lol.

But this morning a couple of them found their way down on their own! We had to help the Cochin down. The thing is that from the top the hens can see down into the grass because it is just some wire fencing separating them..so they longingly hang out there wishing to go down, and don’t realize that they have to go over to the ramp on the other end to get there! LOL.

I deliver a bit of a treat in the afternoon, like dried grubs, oats, mealworms, and they love those but they won’t eat any thing until I’m gone. They stay far, far away from me!

The other hilarious thing that I admit has happened to me twice is that I got locked into the tractor!! Fortunately I was able to call out/call Rob both times. Rob has since added an emergency string that will allow me to let myself out next time. Because I am SURE I will do it again!

Meanwhile, I’m attempting to “deworm” our original 3 chickens. Sounds like people do this once or twice a year typically. So I’m using the recommended goat dewormer product in their water… and probably we can’t eat their eggs during this process. They seemed fine to me but I guess it’s best to be preventative. Here’s a video of one of the hash browns being loud which she just randomly does sometimes.

I’ve seen a couple of snakes run over, including a pretty coral snake which was on the street right beyond our driveway. I also recently saw a dead porcupine.

Today on a walk I brought along the clicker and counted 26 dead toads on the road squished by cars. The walk was about 36 minutes long so that means you can expect to see .72 dead toads every minute!

We have now taken BOTH dogs to breweries TWICE!! It worked out swell! Big deal. The last trip was to Suds Monkey Brewery’s new location, which was cool to see because we love their beer and now it’s like a 4 minute drive from our house! I wish there were a path there from our house as we literally could walk. Anyway, the dogs hang out fine although they still aren’t OK with anyone approaching to pet them or anything.

A few more pics below.

Tractor Action

Rob’s been making steady progress building the chicken tractor. I help occasionally by holding one end of something lol or whatever. I think he’s almost done actually and we hope to have it done by end of the month because I contacted someone that likely will have 3 pullets (pullets are young hens) by end of the month! Below I’ll show some of the progression. It has a ramp, a couple of doors, a hinged door to access the roosts. It’s pretty cool.

Some plants have come back from the wicked winter, and it turns out roses loved the severe cold. They went crazy with blooms and I read other people’s roses did same.

A lot of shiso is growing, like A LOT. I didn’t use it last year but I decided since it is so plentiful that I should try, so I steeped some leaves in hot water which turned the leaves from maroon to green and the water kind of dark and unappealing. Then, I poured in vinegar and it all turned bright red! Very cool. So we keep this in the fridge and add it to iced tea or cocktails :) Below 3 pics.

I’m only a week away from being fully vaccinated. Then I will return to in-person grocery shopping!

There are still more breweries nearby we haven’t even tried yet, so our last trip was to 12 Fox Brewing, which was great because it wasn’t as crowded as other places, they had live music, and there was a BBQ food truck which had really good food- the meat was NOT too salty and sides were tasty! We’ll be back.

This morning there was a teeny weeny baby deer curled up beside our driveway. Left it alone as this is normal behavior, even though it seems weirdly unsafe.

Looking ahead, we expect some visitors. In May, Tom & Leah are visiting for a few days (coming from Minneapolis), and Paige is planning to be here in June. Rachel & Zach probably in August. Others I’m not sure of dates yet. It will be fun AND great socializing experience for the dogs!! So hopefully the guests can handle the dogs who can be over-the-top…I assume with each visit they will become more “normal”.

Rob picked up another 1/8 of a steer from Grey. So this is “Greyson II” haha.

Our 3 chickens seem to be doing fine. Matt keeps creating holes in the yard to sit in and dust bathe in. So I added some diatomaceous earth to the barrels of dirt in the yard that are MEANT for dust baths but so far she’s not going for it.

So the other day I was on a walk and watched as utility crews worked on the telephone/whatever wires on our street. When they were done, there were these spherical objects attached to the wire (pic below). I realized, aha, it took them almost a year, but Tokyo Electron is onto us! They’ve installed surveillance!

YOU CAN’T HIDE

Seeing more hummingbirds and lizards. Haven’t yet encountered a snake this spring. Anyway, more pics below.

First Guest Visit

Most significant news is our vaccination status…Rob is now FULLY vaccinated and I have had my first of the two Moderna jabs! We’re so very close! Once I’m fully vaccinated, I plan to actually do the grocery shopping in-person again rather than curbside (I really want to be able to pick my own produce), but honestly other than that, we may not be changing our behaviors all that much. Still, will be relieved to have that protection!

We dropped Woody & Stony on separate days at a place for baths. We couldn’t guarantee they wouldn’t bite from fear (doubtful, but who knows as they hadn’t been around any other people) so we sent them in with a muzzle on. The cool thing is that when we came back to pick each one up, the groomer had removed the muzzle! Ah, so great. Clearly the groomer didn’t feel threatened and the dogs got bathed and nails trimmed!

I stopped giving them chill pills each day as we didn’t really notice a difference. I cut them off cold turkey and we noticed Stony was getting all freaked out two days later at…practically nothing. So we realized it was maybe withdrawal so then we gave him decreasing amounts over another couple of days. We’ll save the remaining pills for an event we think will be extra stressful.

I tried feeding my sourdough discard to the chickens but they didn’t like it. But then I learned about making scallion pancake with the discard…YUM!! So now I’ll be making that once a week :) See picture below in the center of table.

I’m going to share graphs of 3 months of trail cam stats. I track any animal sightings except rabbits and deer since they are so commonplace. If there’s 1 or more of something, it gets 1 tick mark that day. Will wait for the moon phase data to accrue more datapoints before I share that. I hope it makes sense. I have a hunch I should have used a different kind of chart but anyway.

People have spotted a mountain lion in our area recently. Would be so cool to catch it on my trail cam (or with my eyes directly), but we have not yet.

My Mom came to visit for a few days which went really well. When she planned the trip, we didn’t know if vaccinated persons were likely to spread virus or not, so anyway, to be safe, my Mom stayed around the corner in our neighborhood as they have a Bed & Breakfast! We just stuck around neighborhood most of the time, but the best thing for us was that she could interact with the dogs. The dogs barked and were nuts at first, of course, but even after like day 3 or 4, when she showed up, they’d act crazy again. She offered them treats, and they would maybe sneak one or two from a table next to her, and they would run for the toys she brought, but they NEVER let her pet them! That’s how scared they are of other people! So it was an awesome first socializing experience for them.

We did take my Mom to Jester King Brewery which went well, but there was a cold front so kind of chilly. She also played darts with us at night which was extra fun.

One of the days she was here I was checking on the eggs in the roost and found Cole face-down, dead in the floor of the coop! No apparent struggle, just dropped dead I guess. She had apparently just laid an egg too. So now we have only 3 chickens: the hash browns and Matt.

We will need to add more chickens to our flock. To do that, you have quarantine the new birds for awhile in case of disease and also to get the chickens used to each other. So Rob has picked out a “chicken tractor” design that we are starting to build. Once that’s finished, we’ll figure out how to get a few more birds!

What the tractor should look like

Our baby peach tree just may have survived the winter, as it has some leaves and flowers. The fig is alive, but is just growing some leaves from the very bottom, so not sure how viable that is. Pomegranate trees appear dead.

Pics below.

Woody's legs are on top of Stony

Armadillo on trail cam

Cole memorial frittata

Sleeping this way!!

Bat sleeping in umbrella I opened

Burning weeds

Enchiladas!

Black-tailed Jackrabbits

Chill Times

Rob has gotten his first of two COVID shots! We’re starting to be hopeful although not sure how long before I can get a vaccination. Texas got a slow start.

Waiting to see what plants survive this terrible winter. Our baby fruit trees had already started to bud before the storm, so that may not be so good. Our redbud tree has started budding, but all the live oaks which are the most populous in the yard, look dismal and have dropped most of their leaves (although they typically do lose some leaves this time of year). Where a few branches had fallen, Rob cut them up, and after we reviewed the local guidelines, he trimmed the tree at the break and sealed it so that beetles won’t go in and spread oak wilt which, once introduced to a tree, can then spread to other trees via roots. Basically, a disaster.

The dogs got ahold of my prescription sunglasses and wrecked them. Which is terrible. However, I’ve had them a long time and never really liked them as they didn’t fit well weirdly I couldn’t see well with them on. So anyway, I experimented and ordered sunglasses that simply fit OVER your glasses. You’d think that’d be terrible but remember my head is teeny and my glasses are also teeny. So I ordered X-Small and Voilà! They work awesome, and are so cheap as no prescription needed, and they came with a cord so I can easily have them on or off. I’m really pumped about that.

Chickens back to regular but they do seem like they don’t lay many eggs. Possibly one or two of them no longer lay eggs? Or they have a secret stash? But the flowerbeds, normally their area for stashes, has been ravaged and so that’s not happening. The chickens spend a lot of time, though, underneath the deck surrounding the pool. I keep wondering if they have a stash under there. So finally, one day, I put on long sleeve shirt, pants, gloves and my headlamp and went “spelunking” under the deck! The maneuvering space is shallow so it required shuffling along with my body flat on the ground. At first, it was spooky and I was wary of insects, spiders, snakes, whatever, but anyway I managed to scramble all the way around…and all I saw was dirt, feathers, and chicken poop. No sign of a secret stash.

Pups are OK but same issues with them hyper together, Woody peeing anytime he’s excited, etc. So I went for it and searched on amazon.com for “dog chill pills” and yep, there they were! So now I give them each 3 of them per day and supposedly over a few weeks it will help with all those difficult behaviors. Why not try it!? We literally are strategizing all the time on how to minimize bitey-face between them, and how to prevent Woody from peeing all over due to…anything exciting or new or scary or whatever. See gallery below of pics showing an example of pee on the floor.

Dogs probably need baths but we’re ignoring that. They also probably need toenail trims. Woody’s paws we refer to as talons because they are wicked sharp. Even after they get toenail trims, Woody’s are ALWAYS sharp as knives! So anyway, Rob has dog nail clippers and has surreptitiously cut a couple of their nails when they were laying sleepily on his lap!! It’s a start!

Rob recently put another layer of stain on the deck, which looks awesome, and the funny thing is that I noticed one of the hash browns has stain on her back! Haha, as I said, they spend a lot of time under the deck so it makes sense.

We’ve been brainstorming ideas for a couple of homemade clocks in the house. For the music room, which has a mid-century modern feel, we came up with several design concepts but anyway, I think we have one picked out which Rob can build himself. Then in the great room, while we have one clock, we could use one more. So we talked about different chicken-themed clocks. Starting with the obvious, but of course I want to go radical so after considering hands that turn behind the face of the clock and you can just see them through gaps, or cuckoo-clock style, then we talked about a clock that doesn’t involve a clock face at all. So it would involve representations of the chickens and also representations of the places they hangout (chicken run, roost, under the deck, flowerbed, yard). The chickens in real life have patterns to where they spend their time each day. Overnight, all are in roosts (we lock them in). And first thing in morning, and before bed, they are in the run. Usually throughout the afternoon, any or all of them may spend time in the roost laying an egg or pretending to lay an egg. So basically, the clock would reflect the chicken daily rhythms so that you can then deduce what time it is!

A few pics below.

Stray pee from Woody :(

Aftermath of Storm

As you all know, that winter storm became an epic catastrophe in Texas. Waves of icy precip, single digits temps, and snow over the course of about a week. We fared pretty well. We had recently grocery shopped, our power was only out for around 15 hours, and we had potable water the whole time.

A few tree limbs down and a couple of outside pipes need repair, but we came out in pretty good shape it seems. After the first icy wave, we obtained some tree and shrub coverings and supplemented those with some blankets and sheets to cover some of our plants. Not sure it helped given the extreme temps, but at least we tried.

We texted with our former neighbors over in East Austin, and they had been without power for 60+ hours! And the house we rented last year was surely uninhabitable as it had like zero insulation, no fireplace, etc.

So many people were hit SO HARD by this storm with lasting problems. It’s sad. I hope Texas makes some improvements to the grid after this tragedy.

The chickens refused to venture into the snow. They spent the entire week in their coop. Not even in the run but in the roost area. So I added all I had left of pine shavings so they could have as much insulation as possible. Heres a video where I got them to step out just a bit for some treats once the snow was melting.

During the week or so of winter weather, the trail cam had little activity. The night before the storm, however, was a JACKPOT! There was coyote, fox, bobcat, and raccoon! I assume all the animals sensed what was coming and got all their hunting in that evening.

After the endless storm, there was a warm-up mud-season kind of day and ever since then it’s been warm, sunny, and like SUMMER! 80 degrees today. Weird to see the weather shift so quickly with all snow gone in about 1 day. I sure hope the trees survive.

I also tried to recall all the different herbs and shrubs in the flowerbeds around the house in case they didn’t survive, as well as the ones that were annuals. These were all here when we moved in.

Rosemary- 2 or 3 kinds
Thyme - 2 or 3 kinds Sage
Lavender - 2 kinds?
Cilantro
Parsley
Mint
Lemon Balm
Shiso
Echinacea
Roses- various kinds
Coral Glow
Texas Yucca
Aloe
Lamb’s Ear
Laurel bushes
Salvia
Sage (mexican bush, mealy cup?)
Prairie Verbena

Just a few more pics below. I didn’t take many pics as I didn’t get outside much because it was very icy and dangerous out. Also it was just really cold. And finally, I don’t find snow and ice all that novel having spent all that time up north.

Mid-Winter Briefing

Woody’s pink spot has faded away and dogs are doing fine. Fine, considering they are very isolated and we were reminded of how jumpy they can be when recently the 4 of us were on a walk and we walked by a vehicle that was stopped on the road. It was actually two vehicles- some kind of camper thingy connected to a car. The driver was outside doing adjustments or something to the connector. So we are walking along and saying to the dogs calming things and they are doing just fine (not barking at the man) and as we are about past the vehicle, out of nowhere, a little furry head pops out of the driver’s side window and releases a bunch of loud barks. We all get a big surprise, and Woody is is now PULLING ME AHEAD and it is difficult to stop him. And the thing is Woody just won’t calm down. We walk a little more but Woody is TOTALLY FREAKING and his tail is down between his legs and he’s low to the ground and A MESS. Can’t even offer him treats he’s so scared. So it probably took another 10 minutes before he was halfway himself. JEEEEESH! And a couple days later he had some PTSD just seeing a car approach from behind us.

We have not been anywhere at all since the variants were in circulation- curbside grocery and no breweries.

I finally picked up a book or two. i think I was unable to read books during the Trump catastrophe.

Recent reads

I liked all these books. My favorite was An Absolutely Remarkable Thing which read almost like a kids’ book but had adult topics some of which were quite a lot parallel to some things we’ve seen in America this past year. Extraterrestrial was a surprisingly easy read, and I for one am convinced that the thing that went through our solar system was a non-”natural” thing, but I was kind of annoyed the author had to spend so much time telling readers to keep an open mind. People are so lame. Interior Chinatown had a crazy unique approach to its story, making it hard to tell when characters were “real” or “characters”. It was heavy-duty topic and basically depressing.

So far we have seen one or more instances of the following animals on trail cam: Coyote, fox, skunk, bobcat, raccoon, possum, and armadillo! I don’t mention bunnies and deer as that’s all the time. Too early to share any graphs. I put out a little water bowl and the deer drink from it sometimes.

After drinking contents of water bowl.

Rob has updated his music playing equipment (long overdue) so he’s been catching up on listening to records when he gets a chance.

In an effort to keep the chickens away from our deck (they poop a lot on it and we plan to spend more time out there come spring), we moved the dog water bowl over to the grass. The chickens drink out of it too, preferring it to their chicken waterer in the coop. So anyway, being extra lazy, I observed that it’s a pain filling up the bowl all the way over in the grass (where there’s poop) and plus, I have to lean over! So we’ve been brainstorming fun ways to construct a water-refilling-system where you can pour into a funnel up on the deck somewhere, and the water is piped along in some roundabout manner to the dog bowl. Perhaps a branch of it goes off to a little water dish for perching birds? Perhaps part of it involves a waterfall? What’s always neat about tangents like this is it’s never just a dream; ROB CAN BUILD IT!!

I can see now that the perching-bird-bowl has to be in a different place or these birds will poop into dog bowl.

I noticed too that we have new fire ant mounds in the yard so I did a quick try at fire ant painting but the ants didn’t really walk through the paint. I tried to thin it out with a toothpick but it didn’t work out so I finally gave up and made an abstract painting with a toothpick.

Mealworms are thriving and I had to replace the oat bran substrate again recently. I finally bought a gigantic bag of this stuff at the local feed store for about 6 dollars. I’ve started to give our chickens a few living mealworms (not the dried ones I had purchased) every day.

It doesn’t even gross me out anymore.

We’re in the middle of a week-long cold streak which will break all kinds of records. We just hope the chickens get through OK, the plants around the house, the new fruit trees we planted, and our plumbing. We have taken some precautions, but I’m worried. WHAT A DRAG! We need to move somewhere warmer!

Oh and I recently received two awesome gifts from Raine & Paige. Raine sent me the most astonishing chicken earrings that she made herself! They have chickens and eggs alternately hanging on them!! And Paige sent a mushroom grow kit which grew practically instantly and soon we can harvest and eat them!

More pictures below, all of which were taken on our property.

Happy Trails

With the new COVID variants, we’re trying to take even more precautions so we are starting to do curbside pickup for our groceries. We were pretty happy with our first trip, so we’ll probably keep this up until the pandemic eases. As for breweries, we’re not sure yet. We can pretty much be outside the whole time so it is probably OK, but we’re kind of on the fence right now.

The biggest surprise recently for me was after I posted my “trail cam montage” on Nextdoor. People really, really liked it and I have over 300 reactions to the post (and counting). Since that time, we have more footage of a bobcat, and new sighting of a possum!

Hopping rabbit, coyote, rabbit, skunk, deer, fox, coyote, bobcat.

I’ve started tracking the animals we see in a spreadsheet except for deer and bunnies since those are all the time. I’m going to see if there’s any trends over time or by moon phase or day of the week! I’ll need some help with the formulas because as soon as I need to nest more than one thing I get confused :) Anyway, I’ll generate some cool pie charts and bar graphs eventually!

Woody developed a pink spot on his nose and the vet recommended we bring him in. Just getting him there was tricky as Woody seems to have developed a fear of doorways! Anyway, probably it’s just some kind of irritation from his rooting around, but vet prescribed antibiotic and we will see how he’s doing in a week.

The Great Pink Spot.

Rob’s been upgrading some of his stereo components, and he’s outfitted the backyard with speakers so we’ll have a pretty cool setup going forward! Found a little used coffee table from FB marketplace which will get our family/music room setup to our liking.

One of neighbors who we don’t know at all put up a Trump 2020 sign in their front yard…after the election. I happened to see a young man leave the house with a couple of rifles the other day. There’s also a couple of other Trump flags in our neighborhood that are still flying. So there’s that. To be fair, there are also several neighbors with “science is real” type signs.

Pics below.

Not sleeping :(

2021. We're Still Here

Our Xmas and New Years went great, given it was just the two of us. Lots of fun gifts. Probably the most exciting has been the trail cam which we setup behind our fence.

Every morning I get to see what creatures walked by in the last 24 hours. We get TONS of bunny rabbit pics and always many deer pics. But even more exciting- we’ve seen fox multiple times, as well as coyotes, skunk, and raccoon. Other animals I am hoping to see over time include: snakes, armadillo, badger, bobcat. Sometime we will probably talk to the neighbors who have creek behind their place to setup over there as I think armadillos are often seen by creeks.

For a few days I was not sure why my eyes were messed up but after a few days I started to see locally people complaining about “cedar fever” when the cedar trees have their annual pollen dump. And then, one day when walking Stony, I was seeing all these foggy spots in the air and stopped to watch some when PUFF a huge cloud of pollen just gushed out of a cedar tree. There are these huge, very visible clouds all over. So anyway, I am not really noticing it much in my eyes anymore, but they are still more bloodshot. If that’s all the reaction I get, I’ll feel very lucky.

Watching the news carefully these days what with the Capitol Riots and general state of chaos. This blog is not a place to discuss all that.

Otherwise, up to our usual which is staying home except grocery shopping and brewery once a week. I’ll just add a bunch more pics below.

Buckwheat Pancakes on New Year's Day

SmartiBot, one of two DIY programmable robots we got at Xmas

Holidays

If we don’t bother to latch the pet gate (separating parts of house), Stony will pry it open and come through. It’s not really a problem because Stony doesn’t usually do anything wrong. He’ll walk around to see what you’re up to, maybe sniff things here and there, but won’t be a bother. In the meantime, Woody often watches Stony open gate, and yet does not himself know how to pry open the gate. So he just stands on the other side. We’re pretty happy with this arrangement and we often purposely leave the gate unlatched. Stony can enjoy the privilege and get away from Woody for a little bit.

Woody is also still in the habit of peeing in the house if there’s anything exciting going on or if he is scolded. We are trying to double down on treats and positive things to try to rectify this. In fact, because we are using so many treats, I’ve been making homemade ones. Little niblets with pumpkin and peanut butter.

Woody has yet another nickname besides sea cow: fluffernutter.

I also experimented with a sourdough loaf and added dates, spices like cinnamon, allspice, chinese 5-spice, and cayenne pepper. It was actually pretty good!

We have been eating dinners more often at dining area table rather than kitchen table, and I guess as a result we were thinking about having dynamic placecards for it which will have the names of the Knights of the Round Table (from Monty Python). Our table is round and the chairs around it seem to fit that vibe. You could choose “Dame”, “Sir”, or “Warrior” and I discovered that each of the Knights actually has its own coat of arms so we would make all of those. Future project.

I’m also doing quick sketches on cardboard (leftover from packages) where I first paint some white gesso on them. Chickens are often the subject :)

Also, not sure if I mentioned this before, but I have seen Matt hiccup. It’s hilarious. She ate some treats too fast!

Recently Rob was on an errand to pick up a dinner-to-go order, and he was entering the intersection of our road and Highway 290. His light had been green for awhile, and after 2 cars turned in front of him, he proceeded into intersection….when a car coming from the left plowed through the red light at like 55 mph! Fortunately, Rob was barely moving and the front of his car raked along the side of these folks’ car. So theirs was pretty well damaged but Rob’s not very much. Rob said they were pretty upset and they said they never even saw the light (it was sunset and it’s true the sun would have been in their eyes). But wow, if it was a second or two later, Rob would have been SMASHED INTO! Yikes!!

In terms of dog separation, besides walks, we decided to make it easier on us and go to a brewery once a week and just take one dog. We alternate dogs. We’ve been to Vista Brewing, Jester King, Suds Monkey, and Brewburg Brewery. By the way, we seem to live at a brewery epicenter, so these are all just a few minutes from our house! (We haven’t even tried any distilleries yet, there’s a lot of those near us too). The dogs have been pretty good, but Stony is especially socially fearful. Recently a Mom came up with her young son and asked if he could pet the dog, and we were like, well, um, he’s a puppy so not sure … so she tried to approach him first (and I threw her a treat) but all Stony did was bark at her and act unfriendly so we gave it up. Bummer.

Before Stony growled at an unsuspecting passerby.

Oh we also flew the drone and it was funny to watch the dogs bark and be weirded out. Hoping to try again and get more pics. Hard to get good ones. Honestly, I can’t even handle the controls properly so Rob has to drive.

Our mealworms are still living and multiplying in their little plastic container. I just add a carrot in every few days. I think we have to update the substrate soon. Not looking forward to that as it involves filtering it and stuff. We also made some curried fermented cabbage but that’s still ongoing for a few weeks before we know how it will turn out.

Xmas coming up soon and we’ll maybe cook one of the finer parts of that 1/8 steer we have in the freezer. We named the steer Pat.

Oh I had a doctor annual checkup recently and it was at a new clinic location for me and it was just overall a stressful experience. Hard to locate, sketch inside, and they were understaffed and whatever so I was probably there like almost 2 hours! All the while worrying I’ve picked up COVID.

I also recently saw 3 unmasked shoppers at the grocery store! Haven’t seen that before. I didn’t do anything but my plan next time is to go up to the person and say, “Hi, I’ve got extra masks in my purse, here why don’t you take one”. If they say they don’t need one I’ll point out that it is the store policy so they really kinda have to. Yikes these people!!

Today my eye sockets are a little sore and my eyelids are a little swollen Kind of weird, seems like an allergy? As long as it’s not COVID!

Quite a few more pics below.

Driftwood

We met with a different trainer and she was a lot easier to talk to. We still had the impression that we need to separate the dogs AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE so we have worked on that some more. Our walks always include at least half the walk separated and we also do periodic “playtimes” in the yard with a special toy with just one dog at a time. And we re-introduced kennels rather than beds in the living room.

Stony, however, has almost zero interest in toys. He might play tug for a few minutes but that’s about it when it comes to playing with humans and toys. He does play a lot with Woody though. We see them chasing each other around the yard playing “keep away” with a toy or stick or whatever regularly.

We have the dogs on a waiting list for a day of “tutoring” at the canine center which would be ideal as it would be a day to separate them and also get some kind of “tutoring”. But no openings in sight. So recently we dropped Stony off at “Stay ‘n Play” which went just about as we expected: he was completely terrified and never interacted with any of the staff (he was scheduled to have some playtime with a person). Walking into the kenneling area with all the other dogs barking and stuff was alone completely traumatizing for him. So we picked him up a bit early to reduce the time he spent suffering! We chose Stony first as we knew he is more high-strung and suffers more from separating from his littermate.

In another experiment, we took Woody out with us to a brewery (Vista Brewing in Driftwood) which is nearby. As we walked out to the picnic table, he was freaking out and didn’t even want to walk! There were a lot of people, kids, and dogs spread around the outdoor area. Then, once we got him to the table he was all nervous and barking occasionally and all that stuff. Finally he calmed down and we gave him a chew. So it worked, but not totally smooth.

Since we had Woody in the car, we stopped for a tourist pic in Driftwood since that’s his namesake!

We plan to try Stony at the same brewery tomorrow, which is a Tuesday, with the hope that it will be sparsely attended so he won’t be overwhelmed by all the stimulation.

When lolling around the house we often refer to Woody as a “sea cow” due to his bratwurst-like-body. Another other trait he frequently displays is “irrational exuberance”. Any little thing that seems exciting at ALL causes him to jump up and bite on things (us). This includes but is not limited to:

• one of us walking into the living room after being gone over 5 minutes

• walking with a pail (ask Rob)

• changing any part of your clothing

• making an unusual sound

• one of us calling Stony.

Woody is also causing a hassle because he will pee when we tell him “NO”. That’s really annoying and we thought by now he would quit doing that. We try to do a lot of positive things with him and praise him when he is good, but I mean you have to say “NO” once in a while! Then he just pees all over :(

Last observation about thee dogs is something I often repeat to them on walks:

“those aren’t treats, that’s deer poop”

We tried out Suds Monkey Brewery recently, which is like a 5 minutes drive from here, (sans dogs) and sampled their pizza. It was pretty good so we are basically surrounded by nice breweries :)

I also discovered a sort of hidden path that leads out of our neighborhood on a far side, not near the entrance by the main road. So if you take this path and then keep going along an actual road, you get to JESTER KING! So that’s cool but the only thing is it probably would take about an hour to walk there from our house. So we may do this sometime and plan to spend a couple hours there in afternoon and walk back. One might consider riding a bike, but the trick is that it has to fit between two narrowly placed walls surrounding the path.

We have some veggies growing but we have no idea if they’ll work out. Well except the lettuce that we’ve already had a lot of. For a sneak peek, we pulled some carrots a bit early and saw they were minuscule and decided it was because we never bothered to thin them after planting. Noted!

A couple more pics below.

What path? Granite Trail? Huh?

We made another attempt at removing the cardboard box wall in our house, allowing dogs free rein into family room which has carpeting. Unfortunately, during the night Woody pulled up some carpet. So we finally decided to get a little pet door so we can keep them out of family room unless we are in it. I think long-term this will make things easier if, say, we want to keep the dogs in one part of the house due to guests or worker or whatever. The gate is kind of fun anyway. Except one time I was walking through (carelessly) holding some empty reusable grocery bags and next thing I know my foot was stuck in the gate door that closed behind me and I fell down—taking the gate with me. Rob came and disentangled my foot from the gate :)

We arrived at our first dog training lesson on an uncharacteristically freezing cold & wet evening. They almost cancelled due to the terribly cold nasty weather. First thing we noticed is that the class had more dogs in it than we were told to expect which was slightly disappointing. Then the instructor said that they only had one of our dogs on the sign-up sheet. Later we learned the gal who registered us messed up and spaced on the second dog. So anyway, the instructor was like, just stick around, we’ll work that out later. Ok fine.

Then we all gave quick summaries of our dogs (at a distance). Many other groups had issue with their dogs (we learned that this organization often gets difficult cases) but we just said that so far our dogs are fine, they just need training.

As instructor walked around, he looked at Stony for a prolonged moment with concern. And in talking to us he was like, “Did you say these were littermates?” And we’re like “yes” and he was all like “Oh…this is bigger than you know…” and all this dire-sounding talk and I was like geesh are we in a scary movie or what? He’s telling us about littermate syndrome and how awful it is and how from that second on we must go back to kenneling our dogs and never having both free at the same time, etc. And how we should not proceed with this class but do private lessons…

So anyway then we left. As we left (totally freezing cold too) we talked about how the instructor was like Mr. Know it All special (he’s been to Japan you know and in Asia no one feeds their dog kibble etc) and of course he wants us in private lessons as that makes the class size smaller and they make more money. But still, it was jarring and scary to hear about how bad littermate syndrome can be.

We googled a bit, and decided to just do a few more things routinely with the dogs separated. We had already done occasional walks with dogs separated, and now we always include at least a section of our walks with dogs separated. We also talked to the vet who was horrified about what the instructor said.

Anyway, Rob talked to the dog training place later on the phone and they apologized. Anyway, the dog place offered us discount on getting private lessons from a DIFFERENT instructor. So we were like, OK we will try it. That begins tomorrow afternoon.

Meanwhile, two men who came to do a check of water/septic in our backyard recently chose to meet the pups rather than having us keep them inside. The dogs were excited but only Woody got real close to the men. A lot of barking and stuff but they were too nervous to really meet. Still, better than aggression!

There was a neighborhood meeting scheduled for later in October, and we were told you could attend in person (outside) or attend virtually. So we were like, cool, we’ll attend virtually. Then as date got closer, they changed it to virtual-only. OK, fine. And then, like a day before the meeting, they totally cancelled it. The email, subject line, “CANNCELED” was kinda spooky:

As the day has progressed, Covid-19 concerns have appeared to worsen. Subsequently, a few of the HOLA officers will not be able to attend nor contribute to the fulfillment of the agenda.

We will keep you informed about rescheduling the annual meeting.

We regret any inconvenience caused by this extraordinary and uncertain time. Thank you for your understanding and patients. Be safe.

Whoah!! Haven’t heard a thing since.

In other Heritage Oaks Neighborhood news, I was looking at Google Maps and noticed that Jester King, a huge brewery with interesting craft beers, food, and music is really close to us as the crow flies. I realized that theoretically it was within walking distance. So I asked in the Nextdoor app and found someone in Heritage Oaks who said that “there are paths that take you that way” behind her backyard and we exchanged some personal messages and she invited us to cut through.

So this past weekend we made a reservation (for outdoor table just to get a beer) and set out after alerting the neighbor via text that we’d be coming. So we get to her backyard and there’s a fence all the way along the back. As we were trying to find an opening, her dogs started chasing a deer which was panicking and getting possibly stuck in the fence. It was getting hairy! I finally texted her (she was not home) and she explained we had to wedge through the fence “to the right of the little diy fort in the back”. We never saw the fort, but we did get through the fence. Then she said there “will be a clearing, then go to the right for the path”. So we tried this, but didn’t see any obvious path. So we kept going, bushwhacking and finding easier ways probably cleared by deer. Using my phone I tried to keep us going approximately in the right direction. All the while, watching for snakes and encountering grassy areas, forested sections, dried creekbeds. We did eventually find a dirt road, but it led the wrong way. Later we found a barbed wire fence, possibly the outer edge of Jester King property (not sure, but possibly as it is a really large area), but no place to get through. We probably spent about 40 minutes in our futile quest.

Which way to go?

When the neighbor checked with us later, I admitted that we were never able to get there and she was like oh gee come to think of it when I told you to go “right” I should have said “left”. Oops. She also said her husband would be better at explaining the way…LOL. Anyway, we never made it but it was a fun adventure. Meanwhile, a couple of other neighbors in Nextdoor are now all intrigued about doing this and want an actual official path. I kinda doubt that’ll ever happen as you’d have to cut through someone’s property.

Our neighborhood, Heritage Oaks

I also saw that this artist makes painting using fire ants. So now Rob and I plan to paint our very large canvas (that Rob had carried around on several moves which was originally for his kids to paint) using this technique. We already tried to experiment with this on a mini scale with small paper, but the ants turned out to the non-fire-ants. When we moved in, we had a lot of fire ants so we hired someone to use an environmentally friendly method of getting rid of them. Seems we succeeded! The thing is, fire ants are invasive and so I am sure that very soon we’ll discover a new big nest of them on the property and then we can start painting with them. The plan is to quickly shovel some of the ant hill into a bucket (wearing gloves) and then put water in the bucket. The ants will come to the surface. Then use a strainer or slotted spoon to pull out the ants and put them in a container. Then you setup your canvas with paint and pour the ants on it!!

Last weekend we drove to Milton Reimer Ranch Park and walked some trails with the dogs. Great time overall, the only puzzling part was when we entered to pay the $5.00/person fee, we asked the guy where to walk as we hadn’t been there before. He suggested taking Granite Trail and handed us a map. So as Rob is driving ahead to a parking area, I’m looking at the map and there is no Granite Trail. So we drive to the 2nd of 3 parking areas, take a long walk on a couple of trails, and, you guessed, it, THERE IS NO Granite Trail! LOL.

For car rides, we’ve been attaching the dogs’ harnesses to the backseat seat belts but they dogs move around constantly (and whine and cry) and get tangled up. And then we discovered Woody has literally chewed through 90% of the seat belt!! Repeat after me, “WOODY!!” So we will have to have it replaced. In response, we recently we tried putting them in the back-end attached to clips which seemed better but they still move around and can manage to get all the way to backseat. I know in the old days dogs were loose in the back-end but for safety it is better to connect them to car (or dog becomes projectile in case of an accident).

Photos below.

huge number of vultures flying overhead

enchiladas with homemade tortillas

Another day, another animal...

We got the OK from the vet and were able to release the pups from their cones after about 9 or 10 days. Phew!

We continue to take the pups on walks, mostly in the neighborhood. Here’s a fun fact: today is the first day either of them peed or pooped on a walk! Stony peed! Not sure why it took this long, but before this they were so wound up with nerves and excitement that they weren’t even sniffing anything, let alone peeing. So I think it is just a sign they are getting comfortable with it.

Last week we had several exciting animal surprises. First, there was another snake hanging out in the coop. Sitting right in one of the roosts. I posted pic of it in both my Texas Snake ID FB group as well as Broody Bunch, and all confirmed it was a rat snake. It was interesting to read the various suggestions on how to deal with it. On the one hand, rat snakes will prevent you from having a rodent problem, on the other hand, they’ll eat some chicken eggs. Some chicken owners leave rat snakes alone, while others trap/free them or spray to keep them out. In our case, I decided that since he seemed small, I’d just leave him alone. I could definitely spare a few eggs in order to be rat & mouse free! I also named him Bentley. Wondering if Bentley is one reason the Hash Browns have been laying eggs in the flowerbed recently rather than the coop. We do have wire around the coop but during the day the main door is kept open to the run and the ramp to the roosts is open so the chickens can go in and out…so during the day the snake can easily come and go as well.

There’s a Texas Spiny Lizard that lives on pair of trees in the backyard and his name is Henry. FYI.

Bentley

Next animal encounter was spying a large, hairy spider high up on our back deck. Sure enough, it turned out to be a Texas Tarantula. So cool! I learned that they are pretty chill, and that it would feel like a bee sting in the unlikely event you were bitten. I didn’t name the tarantula.

And last but not least, one morning as I was opening the chicken coop for the day, I spotted a VERY large CAT sitting on our back fence. I ran in for my cameraphone, but on my way back out, it slipped back on the other side of the fence (displacing a bunny rabbit that sprinted out of its way). I tentatively suspected a bobcat, and sure enough another neighbor reported seeing a bobcat in our neighborhood the same morning (as reported in Nextdoor).

Actually that wasn’t last. We also saw yet another type of lizard on our back deck which turns out is a Texas alligator lizard! I tried to feed it mealworms but the chickens ate them before the lizard did.

Oh and hey, since I posted about the tarantula I’m now going to include a pic from over a year ago that I didn’t post for fear of freaking anyone out. But I think you’re ready now. First of all, it is HARMLESS! But check it out- this Yellow Garden Spider was hanging over a bike path, so we were joking that it was there to catch & eat the bikers…that’s how big it was! LOL.

I’ve been wanting to post this for over a year. Love this pic! Spiders give me the heeby jeebies but… RESPECT!

So the next big home improvement was installing a storm door on the back with a DOGGIE DOOR!! At first, things looked bleak because Rob discovered that the people at the store had mismanaged the order and so the door hinged on the wrong side. Ugh. But this error was overcome by drilling a separate hole into one of the parts! Yay! So anyway, it is mostly installed (Rob installed it) and so we immediately set out to train the dogs on using it.

We started with basic treats but it wasn’t quite working. So we pulled out the extra-nice-yummy-yummy-large-duck-flavored treats. Within a few minutes, Woody went through the flap! Success! Stony, the more contemplative pup, took a bit longer, but eventually, he too, was passing through the flap to get to his treat. This all transpired over, oh, say 15-20 minutes I think.

So it seemed all good but over the last day or so since we introduced it, Woody has shown he hasn’t fully grasped the concept. If he is alone and approaches the door, he’ll just wait for someone to open the door. He might scratch the side. Then sit down and basically give up. But if I encourage him or there’s something really compelling on the other side, he’ll get through. So it seems like if it’s an instinct thing, then BANG, he’ll just go without thinking…but if he just kind of wants to go out, then he starts to T-H-I-N-K which actually gets in the way!

Stony is another story. Once he figured it out, which involved a bit of exploration, he was all over it. He goes in and out all the time as he pleases.

Anyway, we assume that eventually Woody will master the doggie door. Woody’s not going to be winning any intelligence contests anytime soon :)

3 quick video clips followed by a few images.

Woody vs. Fly

Doggie Door

Outdoor living

neighbor's halloween display

Texas alligator lizard

Cumbersome, Crippling CONES

Using my counting clicker, I recently counted the number of times we let the dogs in or out per day. I counted for 4 days and found that the average number was 52. We were acutely aware of this hassle factor a few weeks ago when we put in an order for a storm door with a doggie door. Still waiting for it but obviously it will drastically improve our quality of life!

We had our first social outing during the pandemic recently when we met Louise & John at Vista brewing for a couple of beers (had a reserved table outside). Great to meet with friends, but, still, we likely won’t be doing any more socializing until there’s a vaccine. Small price to pay to stay healthy and not be a spreader.

We’ve replaced the kennels in main room with beds. So dogs are free to move around at night. Generally has gone well except that Woody (we assume) found a small tear in living room chair bottom that became MORE torn apart. So we have duct taped the entire bottom of the chair before the whole chair is chewed to bits.

We also took the pups on a walk in a nearby nature trail which went great except that meeting other people and dogs is stressful and tiresome. So much barking and chaos! We don’t even have them “meet” as much as pass by from afar.

Rob ordered a portable stand that we put a TV screen on (we didn’t have to buy a TV as we had an extra one already in garage). So now we can wheel the TV out to the deck whenever we want and stream shows! It’s so cool. We also frequently eat dinners out on the deck too since weather these days is absolutely perfect. We sit there as the chickens walk under the table hoping for scraps and the dogs stand around curiously watching the chickens. Pretty fun.

But the BIG news was getting the dogs neutered. That part was fine but it was the aftermath that’s been a drag. Dogs need to be prevented from interfering with their sutures. Cones must be worn at night and anytime we aren’t constantly watching them. Of course they were freaked out by the cones at first!! Both would stand there FROZEN in place, it was so hard to watch. But within a few days, Woody started to walk around, happily smashing into things and not being deterred. In fact, I swear he almost gets excited now when we put it on! Woody is irrepressible. Stony, however, has not fared very well. He would stand frozen and at night Rob would have to lift him and set him in the bed. Stony literally cried half the night the first night (sounds like a humpback whale)! He is only now starting to walk a little with it on, hesitantly.

Now, at day 9, we have a routine at least where in the evening we give them a Benadryl and they have been sleeping better. During the day we just watch them ALL THE TIME (no cone required), although starting yesterday we got a bit more lax. By day 14 we should be done with this. In fact today, we are sending a picture of each of their suture areas to the vet to see if they are considered healed enough to stop all this vigilance.

We were all outside recently in the late afternoon in the front walk when a coral snake went right by all of us into the flowerbed. Very pretty and not scary. And it again appeared further down our walk and went right by the dogs. (ID was verified by facebook snake id group as well as iNaturalist).

Yesterday Rob picked up our order of one-eighth of a steer! Local farmer we discovered through social media (Nextdoor)..all natural and that kind of thing. So we’re set on beef cuts for….a really long time! Freezer full!

About a week to go and then Texas’ early voting begins. In Texas we can’t vote by mail unless you have a valid excuse (they don’t count COVID concerns). So we’ll hop in to vote sometime before November 2.

Below a couple quick videos and then a photo gallery.

TV outside situation

Dogs playing in yard

Coral snake

Seeing a lot of stick insects

Stuffed Poblanos

We’ve perfected our recipe. Poblanos stuffed with tofu marinated in chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, dried figs (plumped with liquor), toasted nuts, quinoa, topped with feta cheese.

LICK LICK LICK

LICK LICK LICK

Click Click Chaotic Crop Encounter

When we take walks, I often count the number of deer we see which has sometimes been in the low 40’s! Other times around a dozen. Anyway, sometimes I lose count and just quit. Well, not anymore! Rob gifted me a clicker-counter, so now I just keep that in my hand and every time I see a deer, I click it, with no interruption in our conversation! SO slick.

I made another surprise purchase recently…Rhonda the Robo-Vac! It dawned on me that we have two puppies and a sprawling one-story space with no thick rugs. Time to try a robotic vacuum! Rhonda has met or exceeded expectations. Interesting that she seems to work in a random fashion, so does some repetition, but over a 2-hour span will get a lot of work done. The dogs are very interested in her, but so far have not pawed at her. Stony generally avoids her, while Woody stays engaged and agitated by her. We’ll see how it goes. Oh and the inspiration for her name is a song “Help Me Rhonda”.

We hired landscaper to move and smooth out the pile of dirt that previous homeowners created when they dug space for the pool. The big impetus was that a tree was being “suffocated” by the dirt pile and clearly dying. The exciting part was that Rob covered the area with grass seed and already, within a matter of days, it has grown way up! We were concerned as we saw the chickens were eating the grass, and the seeds were getting washed into dense collections. The grass growth was an encouraging sign because…

…we planted some vegetables in two of the raised beds! Neither of us has much experience, but Rob tilled the existing soil and poured some new planting soil on top. (We had already gotten rid of the weeds in the beds). We planted mostly seeds since the store didn’t have a lot of young plants, but anyway we are trying: onions, leeks, three types of carrots, and some collards/chard that are baby plants. We are starting eggplant and jalapeño inside. We haven’t yet planted beet seeds. The only hassle is once again the drip irrigation, which always has leaks or other malfunctions. For now we may use the sprinkler.

We will be planting fruit trees and actually we already have a little pre-existing peach tree in the back. It is barely alive, has not had regular watering since we only recently learned what it was, it has been chewed on by the dogs and also when we left gate open recently for 20 minutes, deer ate a bunch of its leaves. So if this tree survives, it will be a miracle. And the landscaper also informed us that we have several persimmon trees in the yard. One even had a ripe fruit. After some investigation, I realized that this is a TEXAS persimmon tree which is not at all like the persimmons we have seen in the grocery (and that I’ve seen in CA). These are much smaller, but still edible.

Well the other hassle is keeping out the dogs and chickens. We decided to dismantle the fencing that was around the front flowerbeds and surround the vegetable garden instead. So now the dogs could ransack the front flowerbeds again (Woody loves to dig and they both eat plants all the time- like any plant. Often they bite on the potted agave plant which has SPINES. no problem). As we worked on planting vegetables, Rob spotted a scorpion which was cool (also slightly concerning—gloves required!) and out front when I was weeding I saw a couple of the cutest baby lizards.

The front flowerbeds I’m starting to de-weed since I can access them now that fencing is down. One incredibly satisfying moment occurred yesterday, when I decided to tackle a particularly relentless weed (again). For months I have kept an upside-down cardboard box over it (after pulling out all I could). But even so, it always grows a bit, albeit feebly (theoretically it should die as it gets no light but weeds are like that). So yesterday, I pulled the bits of new growth and started to yank at the bulbous chunk of roots. With the weight of my entire body. A little bit of give. I found some single strands and pulled them out. Then, with a series of full-body pulls, I GOT THE WHOLE GIGANTIC ROOT CLUSTER!

I also finally found the perfect time to drive the remote-control fire engine down the driveway when a herd of deer were peacefully hanging out in our yard. So I started it down the driveway, but it was getting stuck in cement cracks so I had to keep going up and nudging it through. Deer stayed in place. As the fire engine got real close, they all stood still and watched it. And then, one ran off, and then a whole bunch ran off. And that was it. Haha, not real surprising. I just was dying to do that.

Dogs have new stuff too. We got Woody a “slow” food bowl which significantly slows down his meal. I think he had thrown up a couple of times outside (we suspect since he eats WAY TOO FAST). In fact, we found them recently digging down under the deck in order to get to a couple of kibbles that one of the dog had thrown up in between the deck planks. I’m not kidding. So ya, now, Stony actually finishes his meal before Woody! Woody seems to almost enjoy the challenge of urging the kibbles out of their hiding spots.

We also ordered harnesses for the dogs. We now are trying little walks on the street. Those go OK, although they are still terribly frightened if a car goes by. We also are attaching harnesses to the seat belt, which is very difficult to do as they dogs are never in the right place and constantly moving, etc. Also, twice already Stony has randomly stepped on the seat belt release button, thereby undermining the whole setup. TOTAL CHAOS.

We’ve talked to the neighbors about our dogs socializing with theirs, but I suspect that may be awhile as they just, in the last week or two, adopted a second dog and they are having trouble getting their two dogs to get along. So clearly they don’t need more chaos right now (along with two little kids).

The other dog hassle we have is putting them to bed. Stony is fine but Woody doesn’t want to go in his kennel. And if Rob prods him (I’m always in bed before Rob so he has to do this part), then Woody will act all weird and resist and pee all over. Just a huge pain in the butt. Tonight we may just encourage them to use the kennel but leave them the option to stay out of it. Kennels left open. Hopefully they will choose to sleep all night but who knows.

Oh and one more new thing. I’m in a local facebook group, The Broody Bunch, of chicken owners and they were talking about mealworm kits and so now I’m in the group Dripping Worms (owner located in Dripping Springs) which is concerning mealworm kits- sold for $25 and discussions on how to maintain. I went from “just curious” to a new mealworm kit owner in a matter of days. I’m a little confused about all the steps to keep them alive, but they basically live in a small plastic box with airholes and about an inch or two of wheat bran/corn meal. And a hunk of carrot on top. The beetles lay eggs which become larva (mealworms) which turn into pupa which turn into beetles. Eventually, once I have a bunch, I can feed the very nutritious mealworms to my chickens and also I can pour the waste onto my garden for fertilizer. But I need to wait weeks or months before I can use the mealworms. Meanwhile, though, I can remove any dead beetles/worms and feed to chickens. This morning I found a few dead beetles which Cole ate right up. I don’t think there’s much maintenance except at some point I have to filter out the bottom junk and replace with new substrate.

Most common words and phrases in the house: “Woody!!”, “Down!”, “In or Out?”, “Don’t chase the chickens!”, “Good Boy”. Below are a few other pics.

Another hidden stash

Mealworm kit

Seeing Things

With the pandemic, we only hang out around our house. Fortunately, there’s a lot to see besides chickens and dogs. Here is a list of some of the things I’ve seen on our property so far. If there’s an asterisk, it means I see them pretty much daily. Probably there’s more, but this gives you feel for it. And I suppose at other times of the year there will be different players. A lot of times I don’t know what they are but find out from iNaturalist.

• Deer*

• Hummingbirds*

• Roadrunners

• Checkered garter snakes

• Coachwhip snake

• Texas spiny lizards*

• Green anoles

• Geckos

• Whiptails/racerunner lizards*

• Mushrooms, including flowerpot parasol

• Bees*

• Red wasps*

• Eastern cicada-killer wasps

• Cicadas*

• Differential grasshoppers

• Admiral grasshoppers

• Katydid

• Fire ants*

• Dragonflies

• June bugs

• Yellow cellar slug

• Drop snails

• Cactus lady beetle

• Click beetles

• Painted lady*

• Monarch butterfly

• Pipevine swallowtail

• Green lynx spider

• Dancer damselfly

• Jumping spiders

• Gulf coast toads

• Birds of prey (not sure what they are yet)

• Grubs (larval form of beetles)

• Eggs laid in odd places in yard

And most recently, we learned that we have at least a couple of persimmon trees in the yard! Turns out they are Texas persimmons which are not at all like the persimmons we see in California. But still, they are edible too!

I’ve seen the dogs eat cicadas, other large insects, and play with a large toad in the yard. The insects make a large “crunch” and the toad, oh the poor thing, tossed around like a toy! It saddened me so much. Eventually, I’m gonna setup a toad habitat where the dogs won’t harm the resident.

You made a what appointment?

Pups have appointment at end of the month to be neutered!