The Unfinished Projects of Spring

It is Autumn. Where did the Summer go? I took a long walk around the house and I noticed all the unfinished projects planned last spring. I am not frustrated; I am more amazed that the time escaped us.

The tree that fell last winter - still there. Like I expected to get up and leave (leaf?) or something. We had discussed getting a lumber company or logger to come out, thin out some of the overgrowth and pay us for the lumber. But the economy beat us up on that - if people are not buying houses, or fixing things up, they do not buy lumber and so the loggers do not look for the little purchases and clean-ups - they need to make money on the stuff people are buying. We could pay to clean it up, but that is an expense we cannot handle in the priority of things.

It is what we call a 'yay/boo.' Yay, that huge tree is not hurting anything, really. Boo, when it toppled, it must have disturbed the water table, so the pond is no longer there in our woods. Yay, we had less mosquitoes and we did not have to treat the pond for standing water. Boo, we did not see the ducks or hear the frogs as they enjoyed the pond.

Hedges grow extremely well in the wet summer we had, so we never got them trimmed as much as we would have liked. We did get a garden planted, late, but we are still picking squash and we put in a second planting of lettuce to hopefully get picked before a heavy frost. The corn gifted us with maybe 8 ears before it got sick and died. Nice corn stalks, however.

I have to believe that it will all be accomplished eventually. As my husband always says to me, "You are the only one bothered by it!"

When we start a new project, like the garage project, sometimes normal maintenance can suffer. We had a chilly day this week and when we took our warm jackets out of the closet, one of them had mildew on it. One of those rainy days caused water to seep in under the door of the closet, causing a moisture build up and attacked my husband's canvas cowboy coat. (I think it is a costume type thing - the South Philly boy in a cowboy coat and Stetson - oh, yeah, cowboy boots too. Go figure!) So washing and spraying with Lysol was the chore for that day. The excitement goes on...

Adaptations

I have noticed a phenomenon of 'hardening off' for people, animals, and plants during the cold winter months. I know many of our plants were severely damaged by our early, heavy, wet snow storm at the end of October - the plants had not had the opportunity to harden off yet to prepare for the snow. We have many broken limbs and bushes smashed by the weight of the snow caught in the leaves that had not fallen off yet - they just were not ready.

People get used to the cold as well and 'harden off' - we had a warm spell and most people were in shirt sleeves, no coats and shorts in temperatures that would have required a warm jacket on people who are not used to our often-bitter cold. Even now, I find we walk outside without a coat to tend to things that do not require a long time outside, but during the bitter temps we always put a coat on. By way of explanation, current air temperatures are now in the 30's during the day - much easier to handle than the 'teens and below that we have just lived through. We are hardened off. No guarantee the temperatures will not drop again, as snow is again predicted later this week. After all, the stupid groundhog did not see his shadow!

Birds get used to the cold somewhat, but when we have a break in the weather, they go crazy! Nice to walk outside and hear all that type of noise though. Some of the birds we have here have made adaptations that are very puzzling. We have a woodpecker who every year for the past two has tried to build a nest on our old, unused TV antennae. The antennae is, of course, a heavy aluminum type and has probably been attached to our chimney for 50 years. We have not taken it down because it is 'up there' and not hurting anything, and it is so well tethered in place with wires attached to adjacent buildings and other poles that we are afraid of starting a house-of-cards effect. So the woodpecker still tries to build a nest for a potential mate each spring and clangs his head on the metal trying to bore a hole in that thing. Annoying noise, but we admire his tenacity.

Another bird we had last year, and I hope comes back this year, provides moments of amusement for our cats (if you know about cats, moments of anything is an accomplishment - they get bored easily!) This bird is a bit of a clown, trying to sit on one of the guide wires for the power pole in our yard. The wire is attached to the ground at a 45 degree angle, but he still tries to perch on it, sliding down, getting back up, over and over again. On top of that, he is insisting that it is his right and this is his territory and swoops at anything that comes close to him. I am not afraid of him, but I do tend to wait until he flies away before I go outside. I just have these visions of the bird pecking me - I think it is Alfred Hitchcock damage. So I have adapted to him.