This past week, in pictures.
Saturday, at a small old-fashioned (no agri-tainment, only cider and doughnuts) cider mill with most of the grandkids.
Monday, sugar maple leaves getting bright.
Tuesday, Jedi loving his after-ride itch-relieving roll, and the last of the flowers from the garden.
Wednesday, beautiful weather could it be Indian Summer?
Thursday, sunrise looking like another great weather day.
This post might get a little long, there's a story to tell. Bear with me. (Ha ha, you'll get the pun if you read all the way through.)
This is my "recycling bin". It is what I've put my recyclables into for over 20 years. We do not have curbside recycling out in the country where this little place here is located. We have to provide our own collection container and drive our recyclables to a transfer station or other recycling location (depending on what we are trying to recycle). As mentioned in this recent post.
Prior to being my recycling bin, it was our trash can. Around the time we finished building the house and moved into this little place here, most of the trash companies were getting out of bag pick-up and going to wheeled trash bins that they provided their customers. So my trash can became my recycling bin in the early 2000's.
About ten years prior to that; in 1991, DH and I purchased it (most likely from Pamida or Kmart, as those were the two housewares shopping options where we lived) when we moved to the U.P. (Upper Peninsula for you non-Michiganders and non-Sconnies). We kept it in our enclosed, but unheated, back porch in the first rental we lived in while DH was in college at the engineering college there. The second rental we lived in, his final year of college, did not have an enclosed porch. So we kept this trash can on the back deck of our mobile home which was situated on a corner of the landlord's farm, with woods about 50' from our back door.
The close proximity to the woods is important here. Because it's how the recycling bin got to be known as the Bear Trash Can in our family.
There were (and still are) black bears in that part of Michigan. Occasionally we'd see a bear on one of the dirt roads we drove on going to or from work (me) or classes (DH). Including the dirt road we lived on. More consistently, they could be spotted near the dumpsters behind the grocery store in town.
One night, in very early April 1993 (we remember the time frame because DS2 was born the second week of March that year, and he was not yet a month old), DH and I both were woken up from a sound sleep (remember, we had a newborn, so if we were actually asleep it was a pass out from exhaustion kind of sleep!) by what sounded like footsteps and heavy breathing in our living room.
He looked at me, and I looked at him, both wide-eyed in the darkness, and he said "Did you hear that?" To which I replied with a question and a request "Is somebody in the house? You get up and go check!"
With hearts hammering, I checked on DS2 asleep in basinette right next to the bed, and DH grabbed a baseball bat (why it was in our bedroom, I have no clue). He quietly slipped out of the bedroom, through the utility/laundry room that joined our added-on master bedroom to the rest of the mobile home, and peeked around the corner where the kithen was to his left and the living room to his right. Turning on lights as he went, he searched the living room, hallway, bathroom, DS1's little bedroom (where he was thankfully still asleep), then the kitchen last. He found no person in our home, even though he checked behind the shower curtain in the bathroom; we were both that sure we'd heard the breath and heavy footsteps of a human.
Sure now that there was no one in the home, DH stepped out onto the back porch and shone a flashlight around toward the driveway, looking for a person or a car. Seeing nothing but our own vehicles, he went back to bed where we rehashed what we'd heard. Eventually we both calmed down enough to get back to sleep, although I'm pretty sure there was a diaper change and feeding for DS2 first.
The next morning, DH went outside for something (I don't remember what, very possibly to drive to the college and go to class), but that's when he noticed our trash can was missing. It had been on the back deck the night before, and now was not there. In the daylight he could see much further than he had with the flashlight the night before, and he thought he could see a bit of blue out in the woods behind the house. So he walked out to investigate, and found our trash can.
As you can see in the picture at the beginning of this story, it has handles that latch down to hold the lid on. When DH found it, the lid was not on it anymore, and our trash was scattered around. That was odd.
Finding the lid, he picked it up to place it back on the trash can (he had gathered up all the trash that he could and put it in the can). That's when he noticed two punctures near one of the handles. Weird, but whatever.
It's been a long (but short; fast, busy) week.
We've had some hot humid weather, several rainstorms, and a 15-ish hour power outage.
We had Faline, Buck and Sixlet for about 7 straight hours on Saturday while DD1, Honorary Son and his parents went to a Detroit Tigers game.
We went out to eat several times, which is unlike us, but happened to work out that way. Once was meeting Honorary Son and DD1 to hand off their kids after the baseball game. The other due to being too dang hot to cook on the stove or the oven and the one meat store that I can actually eat their lunchmeat (without my body protesting) being all out of said meat when I went to buy it in order to make (the planned) sub sandwiches for that night's dinner.
I rode bareback (the first time in over a decade for me on any horse) on the Little Black Mare when one of her scheduled training days ended up being a light but steady rain and I didn't want to get my saddle soaking wet. I'm fairly certain she's never been ridden bareback before, but she adapted to it well. It felt weird for me too, and the first five minutes I was trying to get my own bearings, but after that I'd say we both enjoyed it (minus the uptick in rain in our faces that made me cut the session short after a bit).
I rode a lot (2-3 horses) on days that the weather was cooperative and only one horse or even zero horses on days that it wasn't. Like the day that was 70-something degrees and 90+ percent humidity at sunrise and I was heat sick practically from the moment I got out of bed. No riding that day; I didn't want to pass out and fall off a horse. Instead, that day, I did only necessary horse chores (feeding, turnout, cleaning stalls bringing in, feeding) and slowly with frequent breaks. Well, plus cooking and laundry, and housekeeping (but you know, depending on who you talk to, those don't count as work 😠).
K3 came over on a not-rainy morning (original day had been rescheduled due to weather) to ride Jedi with my helpful instruction. (aka had a riding lesson). They are starting to mesh a bit more as she learns the similarities and differences between him and the LBM (who she rode off and on the past two summers) and he tests her a bit to determine if she's the boss or if he is (and, with my guidance, she wins those challenges).
I assembled the new 'bistro set' I had purchased on sale on-line at Mother's Day (which had been super delayed in shipping) and installed it in its intended spot on the deck. Even gave DH a haircut out there while he sat on one of the chairs ("It's very skinny. And upright.") Given that all of our other outdoor seating is extra wide and tends to make you sit slightly reclined (which I find uncomfortable), yes, yes it is skinny and upright. It's just what I wanted for that space. That space happens to be the 8-10 feet between the sliding door in the dining room and the sliding door in the living room and needs something that doesn't sprawl too far onto the deck or too close to either door. Skinny. And upright.
DH got my little tiller running--it had needed a tune-up--and between the two of us we got all the tilling done between rows of vegetables in the six planted sections of the garden. I hand weeded around the tomato plants in four of the seven rows of tomatoes (and then a storm hit).
I found a nice rock in the garden, which I had to take a picture of so I could text the pun to DD2, whom I knew would get it. Geology and puns, two of my favorite things. Which are also two of her favorite things.
The peonies have been in bloom, and with the heat are wrapping up very quickly. It's been nice to enjoy their cheerful pop of color and wonderful smell this week.
Also blooming are the spiderwort
Later, after it was dark and we had gone to bed--with the front door open as well as all the windows to try to get a breeze through the stuffy, very warm (80-ish degree) house--we were woke up by what sounded like something hitting the screen door at the bottom of the stairs (bedrooms are upstairs, the flight of stairs lines up with the front door, great for getting airflow into the bedroom area on a summer night).
DH grabbed a flashlight and looked down the stairs, to see a raccoon on the porch right at the door.
Well, that wouldn't do, we'd been trying to catch a lingering pesky raccoon in our traps with no luck lately. So I hopped out of bed too, to be the flashlight bearer while DH grabbed the .22 and we went out coon hunting!
The coon had fled up a cottonwood tree between the house and a corner of the garden when it heard us coming down the stairs and out the front door. With me standing near the trunk shining the flashlight up into the tree, and DH a few feet out from me, we were able to spot that raccoon and get a successful shot that brought it crashing down (sounded like, in the dark, as it bounced off tree branches, it was going to land on my head!) to the ground. Luckily it was not on my head, but about 6 feet from me. So that was an exciting evening and night!
I hope this coming week is a little milder with both more catching up on tasks and a bit more time for sitting and relaxing. And uninterrupted sleep!
In less than a minute. I went from excited, when I spied out of the corner of my eye while moving a tractor bucket load of shavings bales from DH's shop to the aisleway of my barn, a round white object under the tree near the chicken coop that from that distance (on the tractor) looked like it could maybe be a puffball mushroom that had developed since the day before's rain.
To mad, when I hopped down off the tractor seat and walked over to the (eagerly anticipated as a dinner ingredient) potential baseball sized edible delicacy, and saw that it was really this:
Not a mushroom at all. And definitely not anything edible for man or beast. Which was why this mostly deflated former helium ballon with about a foot-long tail of plastic ribbon invoked such wrath within me.
Stupid frickin' balloons! Farmers hate these things. Horse people hate finding these things in their pastures. Livestock owners hate it when their inquisitive livestock try to sample a bite (or two) of these things and end up with it stuck in their animal's digestive tract. Even if it makes it all the way in, rather than the string/ribbon/tail getting caught up in the craw or throat (poultry vs sheep/cow/goat/horse/pig) and choking the animal, it isn't digestible and gets stuck somewhere enroute between stomach, intestines and the anus. Which casues impaction and potential livestock death that way.
In the last ten-ish years I have found more and more balloons that have floated their way onto my property. Be it in the woods, in the pasture, in the hayfield, or in the yard, be it mylar or latex, the damn things are not welcome here. I wish people would stop releasing the things. What goes up must, eventually, come down. They don't go to heaven where your loved one receives them. Sorry, they just don't. They end up in some farmer's field or pasture where, if the farmer doesn't find it before the livestock do, they can (and do) cause an animal death. And if they don't end up in a farmer's field, they end up in a more remote, less humanly patrolled area where wildlife too try to ingest them and die from the attempt.
So it wasn't so much the realization that the round white thing wasn't a harmless mushroom that made me instantly mad. It was the fact that it was a balloon that someone, somewhere, previously and most likely on purpose let fly away. And that finding one on my property isn't a rare occurance like it once was. This is the fourth one (or remains of one) I've found in 2026. The year isn't even half over. How many are out there that we don't find but an animal does?
Recently, DH was out of town on a snowmobiling trip with DS2 and friends, and I was here holding down the fort, tending the animals, keeping the fire stoked, etc. One evening, when I was stoking the fire (which is DH's job when he's not gone on trips) after caring for the horses and chickens for the night, I heard dogs barking. Not just any dogs, these had the distinctive voices of hunting dogs. Looking around, across fields both north and west--towards where the roads are--I noticed several trucks idling on the shoulders. Coyote hunter trucks.
So, the dogs I heard were definitely coyote hunting dogs, and they were, it sounded like, in the woods north of my property. I went back to stoking the fire, one biggest-I-could-carry-and-fit-through-the-wood-boiler-door chunk of wood at a time.
Then, from the corner of my eye, I caught movement over on the east perimeter fence line of my pastures. Turning my head for a better look, it was two deer, does, running from north to south, spooked up by those dogs. They ran on past, heading for the marsh to hide in.
I kept stoking the fire, carefully putting the wood in the boiler in neatly placed rows and stacks, trying to stuff as much as I could in there to make sure the fire would make it through the (very cold, around zero degree F) night. Turning and walking to the wood pile for another piece, I was startled to see a coyote run right between me and my barn. Okay, he was about 30ish feet away from me, but, WOW that's close! I've never been that close to a coyote before, even when I'm up in the deer stand.
He ran right past the front of my barn, and down the driveway, headed west towards the road. Now I could hear the dogs heading towards me from the east, on my own property, and soon they came bounding through the backyard also heading west.
Long story short, I took the trash bin the rest of the way to the road, the hunters gathered up their dogs, then, with the coyote still determined it wasn't chancing running anywhere, got a catch rope and took the coyote off my porch.
Meanwhile, I got my mail out of the mailbox, and talked to another one of the hunters whose truck was still pulled off the side of the road. He assured me, before I had a chance to say more than "well that was pretty crazy to find the coyote on my porch" that they had gotten him off, and would 'take him to the field and let him go again'. At which point, I looked him in the eye and said "Really? I would think you'd take him safely away from the buildings and pop him one. I mean, that's what I do with raccoons that I catch in my live trap."
I'm pretty sure, because I'm a woman, he expected me to be all 'poor little coyote, don't hurt him'. Nah. The coyote population needs to be kept down. I'm always watching for their tracks around the chicken coop, and would definitely shoot at any coyote I found sniffing around over there.
Just make it quick, and dispatch them as humanely as possible.
And don't chase it onto my porch!
As they were pulling down my driveway to leave, and I was walking back to the house, one of the hunters did introduce himself, and ask if DH still lived here (he and DH met years ago and have sometimes had words in regards to the coyote hunting as this guy is supposed to call/text DH and give him a heads up if they are hunting near our property where the dogs might be coming through onto this little place here). I told him yes, DH does. We talked a few more minutes, me never letting on that DH was currently out of town, not just at work at the moment.
Because I may be brave enough to command strange dogs and coyotes off my porch, but I am not crazy enough to ever tell anyone that DH isn't home and won't be for days!
It's so exciting to see this first itty bitty egg in the nest box each Fall. It means that this year's chicks are now old enough to begin laying eggs. And if they start laying eggs in the Fall, that typically guarantees somebody (i.e. the youngest hens) will lay me fresh eggs during the winter when the older gals are likely to take a break in productivity.
