Planning Ahead

Well, at least I now know what (some) of the lumber is for.

My brother treated himself to a firepit. He intends to build what he calls a patio by the front door, set up the firepit there, sit back and drink beer and use the wood for fuel. He doesn't want to put it out back because of some obnoxious nearby dogs who are happy to bark at anything they see (or think they see) all night long. He's much happier with it being visible from the road which, in all honesty, is a better view, anyway.

No idea when the construction on this "patio" might begin. No idea, either, on his intentions for the plywood. Or the crutches.

The funny thing is, we already have a couple of woodpiles on the property that have been aging for literally years. Of course, by the time he's ready to start burning, the new sticks could also be well-seasoned despite being pine.

In the meantime, city code enforcement stopped by and left a note on our door. Apparently, the carrotwood tree is visible from the road and so was all the new lumber which is a violation of the city's "No Outdoor Storage" rule. My brother moved a small section of fencing to hide the 4x6 stumpy bits and carefully rearranged the pallets to lie flat behind a decorative wall of railroad ties (still around the carrotwood) and: voila! No more code violation. (At least, nothing that can be seen from the street.)

On the plus side, he did just bring home a large bag of blood oranges from somewhere, so there's that.

Fer Mowin' or Fer Ownin'?

Which is the punchline to an Old New England Farmer joke: A guy moves up from the big city and buys a smallish farm next door to a native New Englander. While inspecting his purchase he notices that there are no boundary markers and the fields just sort of merge into each other. He approaches the old farmer and asks, "Say, neighbor, can you tell me where my property ends and yours begins?" The farmer thinks on it for a moment and responds, asking, "Depends. . . . (see headline, above).

It's one of the reasons Robert Frost thought good walls made good neighbors. There is no wall between our place and Neighbor Mike's.

Which is not any kind of issue, except that Neighbor Mike has apparently thought recently of selling and, as part of the plan, called in someone to examine his place and his title to it and that person discovered that Mike has been mowing a strip of our property almost from the very beginning. As a matter of fact, at least one of Mike's irrigation sprinkler heads is buried a couple of feet over on our side of the line.

My brother discovered this a few days ago when he went looking for a place to plant the pecan tree (potentially awesome present) he received for Christmas. (Actually,what he got for Christmas was a picture of a pecan tree, but the actual stick finally showed up courtesy of UPS.) He noticed a string running parallel to what he thought was our property line and followed it to little flags staked out to the front and back of the territory. Mike confirmed that the survey says everything to the east of the string is actually ours.

It's not much. A few hundred square feet at most. Despite nobody knowing where the real line was, and despite Mike mowing it, he has not, by his actions, claimed it and we have not alienated it.  And now we all know, so it stays ours.

Although we have to admit: Mike did a good job caring for it.

Show Time

My brother took an extra day getting home from his trip. Actually, he stopped by his girlfriend's house and spent the day with her before coming home.

As a result, he is now (yesterday and today) scrambling around the front yard staking and inflating his scary Hallowe'en decorations. Despite not being able to find all of the extension cords, they seem to be coming together much better than Neighbor Dan's balloons a good half of which he replaced with all new items because they would not inflate properly. That was a big hit to his budget this year.

Ours still have a few problems. The headless horseman is slumped over by the mailbox although the hearse behind him is doing fine. And there's a ghost out by the main road that keeps falling over. Either a guy line or a spike keeps coming loose in the wind. And the giant black cat looks a little wobbly in the knees. Nevertheless, my brother seems confident all will be up and running come sunset.

On the non-inflatable side, over by where the trick-or-treaters will be coming up the drive, the zombies have established a wedding party by the recently established graveyard and are merely waiting for the groom to finish extricating himself from the ground. The bride looks positively ethereal.

And on the more mundane, but no less important, sugar front: We have twenty (20!) bags of assorted candy bars sitting on the dining room table being inspected by the cats. Our contribution to the continuing childhood diabetes epidemic is well established.

Let the pint-sized hordes descend. Let the pillaging and plundering commence.

And Hallowe'en Is Still Over Two Weeks Away

I went out this morning to the library and as I drove down our main neighborhood street (the one that had the  lane removed and turned into a bike way and is soon to get sidewalks) I passed a house with the most extraordinary--and scary--lawn display.

The entire frontage facing the street, from property line to property line, was piled literally five feet high (more in some spots) with furniture, clothing and large, bulging, black plastic trash bags. They made a wall, a berm, a blockade across the entire access to the house. There were a trio of pick-up trucks parked on the street and median (the driveway was blocked). From the size of the house and the sheer volume of the mountain range of trash out front, I can only surmise the occupants must be/have been classic hoarders. I can not imagine how it would be possible to stuff that volume of stuff into the available space.

I have no idea if this is the result of an intervention or merely the cleansing after an estate sale.

The funny thing is, the outside property itself has always been well cared for. Lawn mowed. Shrubberies trimmed. No litter. There was never any indication that anything might be amiss inside.

I feel the urge to recycle some old paperwork and magazines, now. And catalogs. They're coming in fast, now, too.

A Visit From the Critterman

Last night the cats started acting weirder than usual. At first they were just tearing around the house with too much energy, racing each other (mom included) across the living room, sliding on the coffee table, over the couch, onto the recliner by way of the TV tray, into the kitchen and onto the window sill (or all the way up to the curtain rods). And then back again.

Suddenly, it became very still and quiet. When I looked around from where I was doing dishes I saw the kids trying to climb the front of the bookcase and mama all the way up on top, over six feet up where she had never gone before, and threatening one of Mom's ceramics. She backed as far away from the edge as she could and, although I could just reach her, I couldn't get the leverage to haul her down. There was a dull, rhythmic thumping behind her which I assumed was her tail against the wall.

I called my brother, who is taller, to help and when he came out of his room, which shares that wall, he took one look at Jasmine and said, "So that's what all the noise is about." He was wrong.

After we hauled the cat down, the noise continued. Jasmine, incensed at being forcibly removed from her discovery leapt from a side table to a small but slightly taller curio stand (knocking over a vaguely disturbing articulated painted wooden wizard/clown "doll" of unknown provenance) to the top of the old TV onto the bookcase, thus explaining how she got there the first time. Something was in the wall and she had dibs.

My brother, after yelling at all the cats sufficiently to keep them off the bookcase, spent the night listening to whatever it was skittering around.

First thing this morning he called an animal removal guy who came out, crawled into our attic and removed a smallish 'possum that had fallen inside the wall and couldn't climb out on its own. He also found and blocked up the hole that had allowed the 'possum to get into the attic in the first place although he warned that his fix will not prevent raccoons from gaining entry if they want because they have those nimble, tricksy fingers and can literally pull the patch apart.

The 'possum is now on its way to the local (semi-)wilderness where it will be set free to live happily away from people and near to the pythons and panthers and black bears and alligators and tegus and whatever else is hiding out there.

Good luck, little fella!

Deconstructing The Old Year

Our nephews came down for the New Year celebrations. They were down here to party with friends so, technically, they just used our house as a base of operations but they did visit for a while when their sister and mom returned from Georgia and they also helped tear up the back yard which was a good thing.

My brother has long wanted to remove the small mound out back that Dad built years ago. It originally contained a rock garden and a small working waterfall feeding a stream that emptied into a koi pond. The mound was built on a base consisting of the excavated dirt from the pond. On top of that, Dad stacked a short ton of coral boulders glued together with cement. The watercourse from the fall to the pond was lined with river stones embedded in cement. The pond was a homemade basin of cement over a sheet of black waterproof plastic liner and edged with slate cemented into place. Dad was a frustrated landscape architect and concrete was his medium.

The overall effect was very pleasant for several years but, eventually, the underlying earth sank a bit and the water didn't flow properly and the pump stopped and the whole thing was too tightly cemented together for the operating guts to be accessible to repair and so it became simply a pond with a slight rise in the background. The folks added and aerator to the pond and the fish were happy.

The fish were happy for a while, anyway. I was on the phone with Mom one day when she suddenly exclaimed, "Oh, look at the great blue heron!" which, of course, being on the phone from Connecticut, I could not, but she described in detail how it had just landed in the pond. Her excitement was understandable. Great blue herons are magnificent birds and not that common, even down here, are usually spotted at long range off in a swamp somewhere, and to have one standing not more than 20 feet from the back door was extraordinary. It was only after the great blue had flown that Mom realized the visit might have been somewhat less than exceptional and that, in fact, they had invited the heron by setting out such an easily accessible goldfish buffet. A few of the smaller fish survived by hiding under the leaves overhanging the edge of the pond but they were too traumatized to ever come out of the shadows again.

Dad died and the pond and mound became overgrown. The last of the fish were eaten by some other bird (no witnesses this time) and the water was allowed to evaporate. My brother didn't make any changes while Mom was alive because she liked some of the flowers that took root there.

That all changed this past weekend. The nephews gave my brother a new sledge hammer and chain saw for Christmas. I gave him a new orange tree. On New Year's Eve day we all went out and started dismantling the pond with the sledgehammer (my brother initially claimed he didn't need a new one so the boys started off with the old one but it broke about ten minutes in (Dad always made bunker-grade concrete.)) and the overgrowth with the chain saw.

The nephews have now gone back to base. The project's not done yet. The walls of the pond are completely broken up and it is about two-thirds filled in with rubble and dirt. The mound is half gone. We will have extra volume remaining thanks to the cement fill. The coral boulders have been rolled back to the property line in preparation for we know-not-what further use. The trees and bushes are down (with the exception of the central trunk of the tree on which the mockingbirds built their nest last summer where its ruins still perch) and the branches hauled out front for disposal.

The area looks disturbingly like a mass grave. Sod or grass seed will take care of that. What's worse, we can now see the neighbors.

The Eagles Are Coming, The Eagles Are Coming!

O.K., technically they're already here, and have been for a few years, but I didn't know we could watch them live.

After a few years of watching the Decorah Eagles in their home in Iowa (apparently deserted right now), I was delighted to find out we have our own eagle cams right here in town.

Ozzie and Harriet have been living down here for six or seven years and recently moved across the street. They are currently caring for two eggs which comments from the folks running the site seem to indicate could hatch at any time.

There are, officially, an even dozen eagle nests within the city limits. Fledging season runs through May 15, 2013 and the city has posted notice that any and all building permits in areas close to nests have been suspended until the little ones are out of the nest. This is in addition to the restrictions regarding how close construction can come to a nesting site in the first place.

The Place Where I Live

A couple in this county but a few towns over recently had a safe stolen from their home. It contained $100,000 in gold and silver bars that they had just removed from a bank safe deposit box in order to buy a house. I'm thinking either first generation immigrants untrusting of banks due to experiences in the old country (although, why then use a bank's safe deposit box?), or drug dealers trying to keep income off the books (although, I can't imagine customers buying with gold and silver so somewhere along the line cash must have been paid for these bars so there's a record somewhere), or--and this seems most likely to me--idiots.

Considering all of the advertising on TV and in the paper pushing gold and silver hedges against a falling dollar, junk mail touting collectible coins and medallions and right-wing ranters extolling the virtues of hoarding hard metal for the end-times, I'm not surprised someone thought this was a good idea.
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On a totally unrelated note, the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commissioners remind people that it's not just a bad idea to hunt alligators with a handgun, it's also illegal. Handguns are, apparently, perfectly legal when hunting Burmese pythons, as long as the coup de grace is administered correctly.

But do not share with bears. Or the feral hogs.

First One To Christmas Wins

How to tell the pressures of the Holiday Season are upon us:

Starting the day after Thanksgiving (maybe even Thanksgiving day, I don't know, I refuse to go out then) traffic on the roads not only spikes but speed increases and aggression rises as well.

I've been out and about, to the library mostly and a little shopping, almost every day since the feast and it was very noticeable how many more people were on the road during non-rush-hours. Side roads and residential streets aren't that bad but the main routes are packed with people going at least ten miles an hour faster than usual.

And red light runners. Drivers here in Florida know to wait when the light turns green until they can see the oncoming vehicles slowing or stopped before entering an intersection. I usually see maybe one person every other month trying to sneak through an intersection against the light. I've seen three so far since Thanksgiving.

The best was Saturday. I was approaching a huge crossroad, three lanes in each direction on both roads plus extra dedicated turn lanes both left and right for a total of 22 controlled lanes plus three additional uncontrolled right turn lanes. The signals in my left turn lanes turned yellow and a pick-up truck ahead of me in the rightmost left turn lane sped up although it was obvious he would barely make it into the intersection, with no chance of being through it, before the light turned red. At the last he second the driver suddenly realized the car in front of him had no intention of running the light. He hit his brakes hard, swerved rightward part way into the adjacent leftmost through lane, came to a dead stop inches from the rear of the car in front, pulled hard to the right and gunned it straight through the intersection which was legal because the through signals are on a different timer and were just turning yellow. I half expected to see him pull a U-turn and try a right hand turn coming from the other direction but he kept going.

(Zoom in on the Arrow for the intersection in question)

Catalog shopping is looking more and more appealing. We just received Pendery, full of bulk spices and herbs and sauces and cookbooks and other good things. I think my afternoon is set.

Mom, A Life: Part Eight

Mom, A Life: Part Seven

Sunshine, Real Estate and Art

Using the money from the sale of the Connecticut house and the property in Arizona, Mom and Dad built a new, small ranch house on the property they had bought on the north end of town. Unfortunately, the developers had opened up huge tracts all at once and so people moving into town bought and built all over resulting in isolated houses on barren streets across the peninsula.

The city was billed as a planned community but it was really just an artificial one. No plans were made for any commercial development commensurate with the expected residential population. Hundreds of miles of canals were dug across the city but, in an attempt to save money and with total disregard for future traffic growth, bridges across the canals were intentionally built narrower than the roads. To this day the city hall, police department and post office all sit in the middle of nowhere, miles from the naturally developing center of town as does the library (but in a different direction).

So, of course, Mom and Dad got their real estate licenses. At first they sold houses and condos as agents for a larger firm. Mom's heart wasn't really in the profession and she ended up mostly sitting open houses and model condos. After a couple of years they realized it would be decades before their "neighborhood" filled in and they bought a condo in an 8-unit building "downtown." At least it was within walking distance to stores.

Mom requalified as a nurse in Florida and did some work at the local hospital but didn't enjoy it saying the profession had changed too much over the years for her to really keep up. The technical aspects were difficult as were all the new drugs to memorize.

It was about this time that Mom and Dad came back up north and kidnapped my brother and his dog. My brother had moved in with me after mustering out of the Air Force and brought the dog with him from California but he was showing symptoms of depression, partly from his military experiences, including scraping two of his pilot friends off the runway when they'd crashed, and the death of his best friend, an innocent bystander in a high-speed police chase in Connecticut. They thought a change of scene would do him good, showed up one weekend, packed him up and took off. It worked.

Dad opened his own agency but it didn't really go anywhere until he met some commercial developers and started specializing in buying up and consolidating lots into workable commercial size properties. Mom left the business and concentrated on her artwork. She had enjoyed painting over the years, mostly still lifes in oil on canvasboard although she did a huge owl with glowing yellow eyes in acrylics on cloth and hung it at the top of the back stairs in Connecticut where it scared her grandson so much he would only ever use the front stairs. They moved again, this time to a larger higher-end condo where Mom figured out how to make beads from rose petals and began creating necklaces and earrings, some of which she sold, some of which she gave away and some of which are now in the local historical society collection. It was also around this time that she became interested in ceramics.

At first Mom was content to decorate premade greenware, experimenting with paint effects and glazes. Soon, however, she started creating completely original works, mostly flowers: roses, chrysanthemums and lily pads although she also did some dessert dishes and rice bowls. She took lessons at the senior center and eventually the staff asked if she would teach the class, which she did until her fine motor skills started to go and her work became clunky. Eventually she went back to using greenware and finally stopped when her painting started getting muddy, too.

Succumbing to the Gypsy urge one last time, Mom and Dad sold the condo and built a last house, the one my brother and I now share, in a neighborhood that was finally filling in.

True Names

I love finding places or things that have True Names.

A True Name is given to a place or thing by the people who find it or create it or use it and not by some marketing guy. The town where I grew up in Connecticut was pretty good at True Names. Within the town were neighborhoods named for the original families: Mungertown was where the Mungers lived and had their lumber business. Nortontown and Allentown were where the Nortons and Allens had settled. (I went to school with kids from all three families.) I lived on Durham Road which, logically, was the road from our town to Durham where the name changed to Madison Road since, for them, it was obviously the road to our town.

Almost any place name given since the opening of suburbia has not been true. This goes for the streets, developments, malls, etc. Places without True Names are artificial and lacking in history (or really any context at all).

Around here, the developers who created this town from scratch in the late '60s at least tried to avoid the cutesiest names. Most of the local streets are merely numbered and given compass coordinates. This allowed for a lot of repetition and avoided the need for imagination. We live on SW 23rd Terrace (which is not a terrace by the normal definition) which is one block away from SW 23rd Street in one direction and SW 23rd Court in the other (also not a court in the normal definition). There are, of course 21st, 22nd, 24th, 25th, etc. versions of all of these as well as NE, SE, and NW copies of the entire lot. Only the major streets are named. A few are actually functional, i.e., Country Club Road, Pine Island Road, but most are meaningless although they do avoid the saccharin overload syndrome: Del Prado, Santa Barbara.

However, if you can get out of town into the rural, or even better, wilderness, parts of the state it is possible to find True Names. One of the original ways off our peninsula is via Burnt Store Road. There's some history there. There's a neighborhood in Ft. Myers called Whiskey Creek. No marketing guy ever touched that. Southeast of us is Corkscrew Swamp. To the northeast is Nicodemus Slough.

All this came to the fore when I saw a newspaper article yesterday about people objecting to the state pouring sand into Cowbone Marsh because it could disrupt navigation on Fisheating Creek which flows through it. Those are True Names for real places. (And I'm confident the "g" in Fisheating is silent.)

Mom, A Life: Part Five

Mom A Life: Part Four

Career and Early Suburbia

When Mom was pregnant (with me) she quit the hospital and went to work in the private practice of Dr. Elisabeth Adams, a GP who had just moved her office from New York City to the quiet, classically New England village of Guilford, Connecticut. Mom took the bus from New Haven where she and Dad had an apartment. Both mothers-in-law lived in the same building.

(Dr. Adams' residence and office on the NW corner of the Guilford Green.)

Dr. Adams was a bit of a character in her own right and fit in quite well with the New England tolerance and encouragement of eccentricity. She was a Christian Scientist and did not believe in doctors--for herself--but became a doctor to serve others less enlightened. She also didn't believe in pain. Mom became the office head nurse and desired administrator of all shots.

My delivery was complicated but that didn't stop Mom from having two other children, both boys. The second child, Jon, was also born in the apartment in New Haven but, when they were expecting the third child, Robert, Mom and Dad decided to buy a house of their own in a newly opened suburban development in East Haven, adjacent to New Haven and one town closer to Guilford. The development, High Ridge, was huge by the standards of the day, paving over and landscaping acres upon acres of river bottom farm land and building hundreds of houses, all variations on the theme of single story ranch.

All the families on our little cul-de-sac moved in within months of each other. All the parents were roughly the same age (Mom and Dad were the outliers, having started later) as were all the (many) children. The one notable area of diversity was in religion. Our family was Congregational Protestant (the old Puritan church of New England). Our neighbors on one side were Catholic, on the other Jewish. The kids of all three families grew up calling all the other parents aunts and uncles. We envied Larry and Debbie because they received a present every day of Hanukkah. They envied our Christmas tree. 

Parenting was different then. The dog was frequently our babysitter. Fortunately, he was a smart dog. One day he came running home to get Mom and bring her and Aunt Barbara through some back yards and into the woods down to the Farm River that formed the western boundary of the development where Barbara's daughter Debbie was crying because my brother Robert was trapped in the middle of the stream with his snowsuit snagged on a branch. They were around three years old at the time. I would often ride my bike twenty miles or so round trip two towns over, mostly on back roads but occasionally on the state highway, just exploring. I never told anyone. I was eight or nine.

As the '50s came to an end, the state completed a new highway (the Connecticut Turnpike, I-95) east along the shore, opening up formerly isolated beach towns for expansion. We moved further out, leapfrogging Guilford, to Madison.

Balance of Terror (Holiday Version)

Several decades ago, in a previous millennium, my International Relations course discussed the theoretical possibility that the Balance of Terror between the US and USSR could have been maintained with a very low number of nuclear warheads on each side as opposed to the tens of thousands eventually produced. As I recall, our conclusion was it could not, that the low balance was too unstable because nukes are cheap and that the next stability point comes only when both sides have maxed out their capabilities. The only choices are none or all.

We seem to have arrived at some sort of unspoken truce this year between ourselves and Neighbor Dan. What with our lawn problems and the expenditure of energy needed to put up the Hallowe'en decorations at the last minute only to have to take them down again almost immediately, my brother has not been in the decorating mood for a while.

Meanwhile, Neighbor Dan and family were away for an extended trip through most of November.

The result is neither party has yet put out any outdoor Christmas decorations. Nothing. Nada. My brother has decided as long as Neighbor Dan does not, he will not. While I am not privy to the internal Neighbor Dan Family debates I get the feeling he also is waiting to see what we will do.

The difference between our competing lawn decorations and the strategic arms race (aside from the number of potential fatalities) is this: a deadline. The longer each side waits the closer we get to the Christmas don't-bother-it's-too-late date. The closer we get the easier it is to just say "Why bother with so little time left."

Our solution this year appears to be: None.

Balloon Envy Therapy

We are now the proud owners/displayers of a life-size inflatable Headless Horseman dressed in black with pumpkin head astride a black horse with a swiveling head of its own. Also a twelve foot tall green Frankenstein Monster wearing an orange shirt, purple pants and big black boots. There is possibly another which has not yet been set up.

My brother also went out last night and bought a package of white party balloons over which he will drape his ghost sheets and hang from various tree branches.

We continue to be outnumbered by Neighbor Dan's sheer volume (the severed head hanging over the kettle was a nice touch by the driveway) but, including our 30ft tall black cat we're holding our own in variety.

Balloon Envy

Mt brother came home last night suffering a severe case of holiday balloon decoration envy. It seems Neighbor Dan has inflated and lit all of his Hallowe'en decorations--and our yard will suffer by comparison.

"He's got two hearses just like mine although they're a little smaller but one has a coffin on top that opens. Plus he's got all new ghosts. Not to mention the haunted house." Also not to mention the Great Pumpkin hot air balloon the headstones and skeletons both semi-buried and hanging. Neighbor Dan has long held the edge in total decorations such that, between the inflatables and the palm trees, his yard is impassable.

Our decorations are not up yet, having been delayed by our inability to mow the lawn, but that will be rectified before nightfall.

This morning, despite recently receiving a homeowner's insurance bill with a 50% premium increase, my brother went out to buy more spooky lawn balloons. We have our priorities.

There's a Fable In There Somewhere

I was sitting at my desk pretending to write when I noticed, out the window, a mockingbird repeatedly dropping from a tree branch claws first onto a black spot amid a tangle of dead leaves. It would hit, bounce back up to the low-hanging branch, sit for a second, and drop again. On the third or fourth attack the black spot moved. It slithered through the leaves revealing a decent size black snake, maybe two inches diameter and two+ feet long. It just wanted to escape and didn't even try to fight back.

Mockingbirds really hate snakes.

This morning the snake was obviously nowhere around as a young rabbit was out in that spot enjoying the early sun. Later the flock of ibis came by to graze the lawn.

Did I mention before that we live in an extremely suburban development?

The Wild Life

We live in a stereotypical suburban development.

Earlier this winter, my brother heard loud noises in the ceiling crawl space. After some fumbling around with ladders and flashlights we determined that a raccoon had taken possession of the attic. My brother chased it out and found a loose board under an eave above a projection that allowed the beastie to climb up and in. He reattached it and the attic has remained vacant.

In January, something ate through the connecting hose between the dishwasher and the sink drain. My brother replaced the hose and set a mousetrap under the sink. When that was tripped to no effect, he went out and bought a much larger rat trap but the rat was way too smart for that. It did make the mistake of coming out while I was up, though. It was huge, fat, sleek and beautiful. I chased it along the edge of the living room and behind the bookcase. When it came out the other side I was afraid it was going for my brother's room but it took a left into the laundry room instead. I blocked off the space under the laundry room door and chased it into the garage (which door has a step and therefor no clearance allowing re-entry). It hasn't returned that I know of but it was fastidiously clean and (unlike a mouse) left no indication of it's presence anywhere visible.

A few nights ago, as I was sitting in the living room, I noticed a little face pushed up against the glass door to the lanai (the wall between the living room and lanai consists of three floor-to-ceiling glass panels one of which slides open). It was an opossum. I went to the door and waved at it to no effect. So I took the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog (which has multiple offerings of expensive high tech toys and cleaning robots and shoes and slippers for sufferers of plantars fascitis (hey, it's their demographic) but not one thing (I checked) for removing 'possums from your back porch) and slapped the glass with it. It moved to look around the catalog. So I turned on the lanai light. It blinked, assumed it was now daylight, and slowly walked back to the hot tub where there is apparently a hole in the screen big enough for a 'possum to get through.

Yesterday, as my brother was carrying groceries in from his truck, he had to stop at the front door to say hello to a rabbit that was hanging out with one of the gnomes. Last night the opossum was back in the lanai peering into the living room again.

We live in a stereotypical suburban development. Really.