As I was approaching the square rose garden I heard some rustling behind me over by the raspberries. When I turned around to look I did not see anything at first, so I kept looking, thinking it was probably a bird in the apple tree.
Was I ever surprised when I heard the rustling again and this time I was able to look right where it was coming from. It was not a bird or even a squirrel, but a big old raccoon, so I turned the hose from shower setting to stream and pointed it in the direction of the raccoon. It took off over the fence and headed west.
About five minutes later I heard another noise, and when I stood still for a few minutes I located where it was coming from...the apple tree. So I again turned the hose to stream and shot it into the apple tree at the raccoon. It climbed a little higher, but then started going down some of the branches and over the fence to the south and then headed east.
I really do not need a family of raccoons living in my back yard, so I am going to try to discourage them from finding a friendly nesting place. Unfortunately there is a good supply of food, in the berries and the apples, and while I do not like them eating the fruit and berries, I would rather that they visit rather than actually live here.
I now not only have to fight the birds, squirrels, slugs, ants and other insects, but now raccoons. I suppose it could be worse I could have bears, coyotes, wolves, foxes and cougars, so maybe raccoons are not that bad. Although they can be a real pest once they claim an area as theirs.
I finally finished watering about 0730 and went into the house and cleaned up. After breakfast, dry cereal and raspberries, I went into the living room to read the paper. While I was reading the paper the door bell rang. When I answered it, it was a person from our power company saying that he wanted to show me something.
I put on my Birkenstock's and went with him to the side of the house where he showed me the insulation from the mast coming into the house had come off. He said that I needed to have it fixed and that normally they would just turn the power off until I did, but he gave me 30 days to get the work done.
So after finishing the paper I called one of our friends who is an electrician to see if he could recommend someone to do the job. He gave me the name of one of his former employers, so I called them and had to leave a voice message with their estimator.
I waited for the call back, but finally thought that I would have to go out and mow the lawn as it is suppose to be raining off and on this weekend. So I took the phone with me and mowed the back yard first, since I still had a little energy left, I mowed the front lawn as well.
I still had not gotten a call from the estimator, but I had heard the mailman dropping off the mail as I was cleaning up. I got it, but other than the water bill there really was not much of anything there. Again the door bell rang and this time it was the FedEx driver delivering Kathleen's new A-pap machine. She had not gotten up yet, so I just left it on the couch.
The estimator finally called back and gave me a quote of $500 to replace the wire and bring everything else up to code. I was not expecting it to be quite so high, but I was not overly surprised either...everything cost so much anymore.
I decided to make myself some lunch, so I heated up the left over mac and cheese and the rest of the snapper for the other night. Not the tastiest meal, but I was too tired to really care.
Since the yard debris got picked up today I had an empty barrel to fill up so I went out and pulled out some more ivy and even got out my stubbing hoe and dug and cut out some of the roots. Some of them were three or so inches across, no wonder the ivy was so healthy.
After filling the barrel up about three-quarters full, I decided that I would call it enough and go inside. So I cleaned up the hoe and moved the barrel to behind the fir trees and went into the house and cleaned up.
After falling asleep in my chair, I decided that I would get on the computer and pay the water bill and get that out of the way. Kathleen heated up some frozen fish and tater tots for dinner. She cooked them in the convection oven so the fish and the tater tots were not real mushy and did not taste all that bad.
Well, I am sure that I am leaving out some other rather uninteresting information about my day, but that is all that I can think of for now, so I will just say good night!
