Tag Archives: deer

Tuesday Thoughts 12-3-2024

Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne – illustrated by E.H. Shepard

I’m feeling ‘animal happy’ this morning. We had another deer in the driveway this morning. I went out on the deck and saw a road runner streaking across the yard, and then a rabbit!

Amber came and threw my arm up with her nose while I was trying to type. We looked at each other a minute. I finally said, “What do you want?” “Do you want to go OUT?” She grinned at me and barked, so she’s out now. (It’s cold enough, she just barked to get back IN.)

Monster Cat stole one of my husband’s knot-tying ropes out of the canister on his shelf and was playing with it. It is now becoming HER toy. I threw her pom pom ball and she bounded after it – but didn’t bring it back, of course. Suddenly, she was on the floor behind me, with her pom pom ball! I threw it again. Do you think I might have a cat who likes to play, “Fetch?” ‘Rich in animals,’ for sure.

We have a few errands this morning, but mostly will stay in. I’m spending a lot of time in my art room, having a blast, playing with painting with alcohol ink.

I hope you’re having a fun Tuesday, staying out of trouble, and embracing the new month!

Leave a comment

Filed under Thoughts on a ________

Monday 10-7-2024

Angela Jeanine-saatchiart.com

A beautiful morning here in Arkansas. We have doors open to the breezes and a/c off. Woo HOOOO!

Cleveland.com

We’ve had a lot of deer in the area lately. We were coming home from errands a couple of days ago and FOUR deer were suddenly crossing the road in front of us. My husband managed to slow down enough to miss all of them, including the baby, who was lagging behind and might have been hit. We’ve also seen them toward the bottom of our driveway. They are always crossing over the driveway, on the way somewhere else. :0)

The Courier-Journal

We were going to watch the Dallas Cowboys vs the Pittsburgh Steelers football game last night, but gave up because of the hugely long weather delay. I read this morning that they STARTED the game after a 90-minute delay. We’re not die-hard fans of anyone, so too much for us.

I will be super-aware of my husband today. He’s in a mood to do a bunch of stuff. I heard the driveway alarm and got up to see if anyone was there. When I came back, he was upset he couldn’t find me. He wanted me to check my phone for a code he needed from our investment brokers. I gave it to him and then asked why he didn’t have them send the code to HIS phone. He said he couldn’t remember how to do that.

NOW he was gathering some tools in the office. I asked him what he was planning to do. He said, ‘surge protector for electrical system.’ I asked him if this was a big deal – and he said, “kinda.” I asked him to get me if I could help. He left, mumbling. I’ll check on him in a bit. As so many of our days around here go…

3 Comments

Filed under Thoughts on a ________

Feeling Frazzled

@atchoumthecat (Norwegian Forest Cat)

My day is almost gone already! As you can see, I got my hair cut this morning. My husband went with me because he wanted to go to Walmart after. By the time we got home it was almost 1pm.

We ate lunch and took naps (have I told you how much I love having a humongous heat pad in my recliner and being able to sandwich myself between that and my throw or my new quilt and just let myself go?)

It’s a beautiful day today – sunny and 55 degrees right now, although it was really chilly when we left for errands. Our driveway detectors kept going off, but only one of them, over and over, indicating probably an animal, rather than a vehicle. I went out to check and it was several deer! One turned, looked at me for several seconds, then flashed his white tail at me and leaped to the other side of the driveway into the woods. Beautiful!

And now the afternoon is half gone and I’m writing my first blog post of the day!

This is my wood-working set up. I have the Dremel on one side and the wood-burning tool (which basically looks like a soldering iron with some fancy tips) on the other and the experiment scrap board in-between.

I FINALLY got up there yesterday and played with the wood-burning tool a bit. I used some stencils so I would have something to work on. I’m going to find some YouTube videos to watch that I hope will give me a good idea of which tips do what. Meanwhile, I quickly decided that I needed a ‘holder’ for the hot tool. You put it down for various reasons, and I want to be as safe as possible. I came downstairs to see what I could order from Amazon and my husband gave me an extra soldering iron he wasn’t using that will be perfect for my needs. Here it is –

I’m going to see what I can get done otherwise so I can experiment some more in my art room. I’m getting over being intimidated, since I’ve soldered for a long time and didn’t realize how similar the tools are. Making ‘designs’ with it is totally different than soldering, but the feelings of total inadequacy are gone now and I can concentrate on seeing what I can do with it.

I finished getting my Etsy offerings labeled and back on clean shelves. I added the rest of my memory boxes to the site. It’s interesting that this is a work in progress. I’m trying to improve the site, add new things, improve the traffic to the site, and more. It’s a lot of work, but worth it. A customer left a nice review recently and I’m still walking a bit above the ground. :0)

I hope that you’ve either been more productive than I have today or that you’re enjoying yourself immensely.

4 Comments

Filed under Thoughts on a ________

Gift

The Birdhouse Chick

In the space of a 5 minute slice of my day, I was treated to squirrels on our bottle bird feeder and our regular hanging bird feeder on our deck,

Amazon.com

then a roadrunner on the bottle feeder – coming to sit on it twice,

Southwest Desert Gardener

and then the driveway detector going off, telling me there was something in the driveway. It turned out to be several deer toward the bottom.

DarcyinTN on Flickr.com

These photos I found just give you an idea of the gift I received.

I felt rich today.

2 Comments

Filed under giving

Frosty Wednesday 11-16-2022

Country Living Magazine

Right now I’m trying to hold onto my sanity because our driveway pad detector keeps going off and there is no one out there. There is one good thing about it – when there is an actual vehicle, the alarms are more frequent and longer than the one at a time beeps we’re getting now. It gets on your nerves, though, kind of like water dripping on your head, one drip at a time, but relentlessly.

iStock

We were out first thing this morning to get lab work done for our routine doctor appts Monday. Hopefully, our health will be such that we won’t have to go back for six months. To give ourselves something nice after being good little people and getting the work done, we went to The Dari for a sumptuous breakfast before coming home. I had a really nice veggie omelette. YUM.

There was frost on everything this morning, but the sun was shining, so it seemed things were sparkling. It’s 38 degrees now, and it’s supposed to get to 49 this afternoon. If it actually DOES get that warm, I’ll try to get outside and get something done in the yard.

Santa Cruz Sentinel

As we approached the top of the driveway, a couple of deer leaped across in front of us. Such a beautiful sight!

Have a beautiful day.

Leave a comment

Filed under Thoughts on a ________

Morning Full of Animals

National Geographic

We made a big circle in our errands this morning. As we were going down the driveway with the humane trap and the raccoon that was in our garage this morning in the bed of the truck, two deer jumped across the driveway.

Plastic Pollution Coalition

We got my husband’s haircut, then went to Ace Hardware. There we saw a friend we haven’t seen in a long time. He had a possum on his shoulder! The possum was pure white with bright black eyes. I spoke to both of them, but wasn’t drawn to try to touch the possum. We got two big bags of sunflower seeds for our birds.

Tahlequah Daily Press

We stopped at the local grocery store and then headed out of town to relocate the raccoon. We passed a dog who tried to chase the truck and then saw a bunch of rabbits running along the ditch beside the road. I had never seen that before.

When my husband let the raccoon out by the creek, he just walked out of the trap, not in a hurry. He was a big one, too.

On the way back to the house, we passed a pasture full of cows, and more deer as we got close to home.

It looks like the cold weather is bringing the animals out. My personal reaction was to fix us some lunch and then cuddle under my throw to take a nap. Later I’ll fill the feeders and also put out some suet cakes for the birds.

Leave a comment

Filed under Amazing Animals

Terrific Tuesday 9-20-2022

m.weheartit.com

This isn’t the one we saw yesterday, but we watched a beautiful deer on our way to town. Happily, this one didn’t get too close, or jump out at a time when it would have been difficult to avoid hurting him.

Yesterday I got the garden boxes sprayed nicely with EIGHT – the nice bug killer that only kills bugs – particularly the vicious fire ants that keep ruining my day. I’m almost completely healed from the bites/stings I got recently, plus the mosquito bites I got yesterday while spraying.

We’re leaving for my husband’s haircut in about half an hour. It’ll be too hot when we get back for me to spray today. Then “I” have MY haircut at 2:00 this afternoon. Poor Michael will be overdosed with Lewises today. :0) I’ll plan to do the spraying with the weed killer tomorrow morning.

I got the trash down the morning. It would be nice if that became a routine thing, not fraught with worry about our trash being strewn by animals because the trash people didn’t pick it up on the scheduled day. It gets old having to try not to fall on our heads as we have to get down into the ditch to gather our trash again. One can hope…

Hoping for a quiet day otherwise. I wish YOU one, too. :0)

Leave a comment

Filed under Thoughts on a ________

Heh, Heh, Heh…

compliments of my SIL

We are foiled once again in our efforts to catch racoon # 8 in our humane trap. He ate the seed all around the trap, but didn’t go inside. We are frustrated, but persistent. The birds will be happy when this one is caught and we fill up their feeders again.

When we went to do errands the other day, we had to slow down to give two young deer room to run along-side us and decide if they would then run into the woods or try to cut in front of our truck. Happily, they ran into the woods.

To finish off our ‘wildlife report,’ there were two white-tailed rabbits who sprung out of the way in huge leaps across the grass yesterday when I walked out to check the garden. Living outside the city limits exposes you to a whole life full of possibilities and joy.

Now I’m fighting happy tears. My husband is at his computer across the room from me. He asked me to check an email he was going to send to our son, who had written to him via email because my husband hasn’t taken the time to write to him on the chat program our son set up for us.

Several times a week our son says to me, “Please tell Dada I love him.” I always do. It isn’t the same as hearing from someone directly, though, so our son reached out more directly to him, thanking him for all the time and effort he spent teaching him about computers and programming, etc. He was thanking him for making it possible for him to enjoy the lifestyle he has now.

I teared up reading his email. And then again, when I read my husband’s answer. I talked to him about how lucky we are that we’re close to our son – other than in geography – and how special the love is between our son and him. I told him that I see so many people just doing ‘duty’ things, or not feeling close at all. We’re lucky that our son not only FEELS the love, he reaches out to give it back tenfold. My husband has been a wonderful dad and is now reaping some well-deserved rewards. Simply beautiful and overwhelming.

Leave a comment

Filed under love, Thoughts on a ________

I Love These!

HamishMackie2020-online.fliphtml5.com
stonegardengreyhound-Jandlstoneornaments-etsy.com
DidoCeramics
S.I.ArtCreations.etsy.com

Leave a comment

Filed under sculpture

Wildlife

today.com

We’ve had an amazing several days on our trips to town. Almost every day we have seen deer, either standing beside the road watching us, or jumping in front of our car, scaring us to death before we can breathe enough to appreciate their beauty.

Yesterday it was a doe and two fawns crossing the road. The mother went first, followed by her baby, and then, when we thought the show was over, another fawn followed them.

I don’t know if it’s the really hot weather we’re having lately (heat index of 113 F. today) or what. Usually, if we see them at all, it’s early in the morning or just before dark in the evening. Now it’s in broad daylight.

I love it – but I HOPE we can give each other enough space not to get hurt.

Leave a comment

Filed under Amazing Animals, Mother Nature

Two Spirit-Lifters

The Oakland Press

On our way home from errands yesterday, a deer – much like this one – jumped across the road ahead of our truck. It was far enough away neither the deer nor we were in danger. We were just able to appreciate the beauty of it.

The second spirit-lifter was a bird on our deck.

This is a picture I found on the net. My husband agreed, after seeing the bird this morning, that this Painted Bunting is indeed, the sweet bird we saw. We have never seen him before. I don’t know if he has a mate with him. He has been here for 3 days. Who could look at this beautiful bird and remain down?

I’m happy to be able to share these with you. We all need to embrace the good stuff in the world right now.

Leave a comment

Filed under love, Mother Nature

A Beautiful Day, Except…

i.pinimg.com-originals

We are having a truly gorgeous day today – particularly for February. The sun is shining brightly and it’s 59 degrees outside!

Yesterday we not only saw the small herd of 6 deer beside the road on the way to town, but also saw a roadrunner when we got home.

Getty Images

This one above is not the one we saw, but the picture gives you an idea. He was up on our deck railing, eating the handful of seed we try to leave in the “bird” feeder we made from a shovel.

Shovel Bird Feeder

Shovel BirdFeeder and Friends on the Deck Railing

He seemed quite comfortable eating brunch as we watched. Two squirrels and a rabbit rounded out the wonderful display of nature.

Our doggies have LOVED the day, wearing us out with letting them out and back in again over and over. (They have to go out separately, since our lab, Amber, is jealous of our elderly cocker spaniel/schnauzer cross, Molly, and tries to hurt her.)  We are getting our exercise today playing “doggy doorman.”

Amber

 

Molly

I got the ingredients for keto chili in the crock pot early this morning – at my husband’s request – so we’ll enjoy having that ready to eat for dinner tonight. I also cut up a HUGE container of strawberries because my husband lives for his ‘cakes, ice cream, and strawberries’ each night.

This would be a perfect day except that it’s February, meaning I need to get our paperwork organized for our CPA to do our taxes. I have kept spreadsheets on the various deduction categories this year, and I have made myself enter the data each month, so I think it will be mostly a matter of checking things over, totaling everything, and printing the spreadsheets, then adding the appropriate backup for each thing.

Stock records to confirm as we wait for the company to send us the official records, filing, updating, and THEN opening the spreadsheets for the records for 2020 are also on the list.

If all this paperwork were done with a swish of my magic wand, I would be the happiest of women….

 

Leave a comment

Filed under Acting Like a Grownup, Family, Lewis Art, Lewis yard art, Mother Nature, Thoughts on a ________

Thoughts on a Saturday 9-14-2019

Sven Zacek – http://www.zacekfoto.ee via Jeff Jett – LinkedIn

We are having a very pleasant morning – doors open, front and back, ceiling fans on – so we have a nice breeze going through the house. It’s quiet. My husband is already enjoying a nap. We’ll have to close up and switch to a/c later, but it’s wonderful now.

 

COSMOPOLITAN South Africa

 

Apparently my yoga practice yesterday was a bit TOO exuberant. I woke up with a super sore back today. My good husband slathered some muscle gel with Arnica on me first thing, and then I took two Tylenol to top it off. I’m better now, but still very aware that I overdid. I’ll practice SUPER ‘Gentle Yoga” today to see if I can finish the relaxation process.

 

Yesterday on the way back from Lunch Bunch, we had a very nice, nature-filled bunch of sights. On the road there were two deer. We only saw one of them on the road, but I saw another as we passed. Such beautiful animals!

Richard Johnson – Mass Audubon

 

Later our son came and got me so I wouldn’t miss the roadrunner that was perched on top of our deck cover. I wish I could describe the sound one makes. Truly unique.

 

Nat’l Audubon Society

 

My husband got a second hummingbird feeder to put out. Before you give him total kudos on providing for our feathered friends, I have to tell you that his REASON was that we have one hummingbird who sits, guarding the feeder, daring the other two hummers to come and try to get some food. My husband put the new feeder on the other end of the deck so that he would go nuts trying to guard BOTH of them.

 

Mother Nature Network

 

Finally, there was a praying mantis on the screen outside out dining area window!

 

Tree Hugger

My only plans for the day are to start clearing out our square foot garden. Even with daily irrigation, it has just been too hot for the plants to survive. This will take several passes to accomplish, but I’ll try to get started today. I’ll go armed with bug killer spray in case I encounter aggressive ants in the boxes. I’m hoping that our onions are still doing well out there.

Happy Saturday to YOU! Have a wonderful day.

 

 

5 Comments

Filed under Amazing Animals, exercise, Gardening, Square Foot Gardening - Raised Beds, Thoughts on a ________

On the Way to Relocate Another Raccoon…

Wikipedia

Last night we set the humane trap again, having been cleaned completely out of sunflower seeds for several days in a row that are SUPPOSED to be shared by birds, squirrels, AND an occasional raccoon. This morning a BIG one, maybe the daddy of the pack, was in the trap, calmly waiting for us.

As we always try to do – unless the raccoon is hissing and spitting and trying to bite us – we fed our animals and then put the trap in the back of the truck. We travel about 5 miles away from the house and let them go in a small creek that runs under the road.  I like to think they all meet again to enjoy the rest of their lives together.

This morning the trip to relocate the raccoon was a bit more eventful than usual.

On the way out to the little creek we saw three deer beside the road. They were on my husband’s side of the car, but I think they were close enough he could have reached out and touched one of them as we slowly went by.

Alice McDowell

Further down the twisty, turn-y road there was a bull in the middle of it!

Pixabay

We slowed and watched him as he gradually moved a bit to one side. We went VERY slowly around him. He didn’t move a muscle. I don’t know about my husband, but “I” was holding my breath.

Further down was one cow, munching grass right beside the road.

Motion Array

Finally, another raccoon raced across the road in front of our truck.

Shutterstock

We let our raccoon out. He went right out of the trap and down into the creek. (It MAY be that he’s been through this before?)

We came home, hosed off the porch, and will re-bait the trap tonight to see if there are more.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under Arkansas, Challenges