October day

It’s very hard for me to sit in my office and write on a mid October day when the sun is shining and the temperature is reasonably mild.  I know that there will be few of these days left.  But duty calls and a writer has to have some self discipline.  But I promise to get outside later in the afternoon when it will be even nicer I hope.

 We had some excitement at 6 am this morning.  I was lying in bed and kept smelling this odd smell, I knew the smell but couldn’t place it.  It almost smelt like paint and since I could hear one of the dogs scrambling around I decided to get up and see if they had spilled something. 

 
I found Ginger standing in my big variegated leaved geranium plant and she and some of the other dogs were looking up at the shelf filled with plants higher in the window.  The crushed geranium was what I smelled.  I couldn’t see anything but Steve got up and poked at some of the plants and bam- a tree rat ( red squirrel) jumped out.  He didn’t stand a chance once he hit the floor and at least three dogs pounced on him.   That’s one down.   How it got inside I don’t know.

 Those darn things are in the attic, on the enclosed porch and a few other places in the house I guess.  They are getting in the attic someway probably through a hole under the eaves somewhere but we can’t find it.  Rat poison doesn’t seem to kill them and we can’t get into the attic easily enough to set traps up there.  I am seriously thinking about getting all the walnut trees around the house cut down.   I think that’s what attracts them to our yard.  And all the nuts on the ground are a big nuisance as well.

 I was hoping that the stray cat that has her babies in the woodchuck hole under the propane tank would kill some of them.  She sure does a number on the birds at the feeder.  But she must not be able to catch them or at least enough of them.

 Mama duck, that one that’s produced 25 babies so far this year was sitting in a lower chicken nest this morning.  All of her last bunch of babies were under the nest boxes waiting for her.  I told her to go ahead and lay there it would make it easy to collect the eggs since we do not need any more baby ducks this year.

 I am seeing tons of buzzards this fall, they’ve been around all summer but I think they are here much later in the fall than usual.  Maybe they are adapting to global warming or to the fact that there are so many dead deer by the roads all year round.  I think a group of them nest in our woods.

The wind has been so strong the last few days that the redbud tree I wrote about just a few days ago has lost almost all its leaves, as have most of the trees around here.  I can see the neighbors houses now, a sign its nearly winter.