Summer

Well, for those of my friends who asked me to start a blog so you can track my trials and tribulations through my first Montana winter and laugh at them – I apologize for taking so long. It was a busy summer. Relocating over about 1,200 miles is an effort. Makes you marvel how people move large armies over huge distances. I had my hands full with just this. Then needed to get internet on satellite as there is no DSL out here.

Some of you already know what I have been up to, so I will try to bring this up to the present as quickly as I can.

I'll just start with what I remember first.

Okay, so now that you are all up to speed, I will let you know what I am currently up to.

Just kidding. Here we go.

When we arrived on the first trip in June we were, of course, relieved to have reached our destination after three ten hour days on the road. Hey, we're not truckers; we're not used to it. So, imagine our amusement in finding the electricity off. We found the main switch was in the Off position. Hooray, we just turn it on. Right! Now, we just run downstairs and turn on the circuit breaker for the water pump. Done!

What's that sound of water? Oh no. There is a hole in the copper pipe running behind the water softener jetting water onto the soft water tank. It's spraying everywhere. Coises! Turn off the water pump. Okay, bummer, but we can deal, right? Right. Wrap the small hole with electrical tape, put a C clamp over it and tighten it down. All right. Now, turn the water pump back on.

I flip the switch for water pump to On, and voila! We have success. So I start to head upstairs and announce to everyone, "We, have fixed the problem ladies and gentlemen, you may now use the toilets." The only catch is, that as I walk past the wall of the downstairs bathroom, I hear the sound of water rushing in the walls. Hmm. Naturally, I stop and listen. Yeah, kind of sounds like a waterfall inside there, doesn't it? Don't suppose it's a walled up atrium with a waterfall? No. So, I head back into the basement where my Dad is still checking over our patch job. As I walk in and start to tell him it sounds like there is water rushing through the walls, and I don't think that's a good thing, I suddenly start hearing the sound of splattering water. I look up to find I can not only hear this waterfall, I can see it too. It's coming from an AC vent in the ceiling. Oh goody.

I will not take you step by step through the rest of this, but did you ever see one of those WWII submarine movies? You know the scene where they are being depth charged, and it shows the poor guys in the for-some-reason-always-forward-torpedo-room frantically trying to patch pipes spewing water from every conceivable spot? That's what our basement turned into.

By the time the forward torpedo room crew left, he had patched over nine leaks. Some of them looked like they actually may have been the victims of depth charging.

So, the moral is, even if you drain your pipes for the winter, and leave the heat set at fifty; it will not matter one bit if the electricity goes off and you didn't blow out the water lines with an air compressor. At least up here that is the moral.

We were without water for three days after we got here (plumbers are not readily available in a place like this. Actually, nothing is). My Dad's girlfriend left by the end of the first day. Never dry camped before, I guess. Didn't find it at all fun.

The water problems finally dealt with (all we have to do now is have all the holes made in the walls patched), the next thing we had to repair was the fence on the east side of our property because it was down from the winter and cows were roaming freely about our place. That took an entire morning.

All this and unloading a 27 foot Uhaul truck too. It was busy. Now, we finally have things more or less under control.

Summer is pretty different here. We have had quite a bit of rain and some pretty active thunder storms that have lasted for the whole day. Even been socked in with fog a couple of times. Looked like Davis in December. First it's foggy; then the fog lifts; then it rains; then it stops raining and gets foggy again. Repeat step 1. You know the drill. For a couple of days we had rain and temps in the mid-fifties. About the same time it was 100+ in Sacramento Valley. I felt sorry for all my friends and family there, but I sure am glad I was here. I'll take rain and 54 degrees any day over sunny and 100. Not over sunny and 85 though.

We have seen deer on our place frequently, and one coyote and one young black bear. The bear was walking across our place up near the house. When we came walking out to go to the store, that little bear took off like all the demons in hell were after it. It seemed so scared I felt sorry for it. I wanted to yell out, "It's okay little bear. You're safe here." Unfortunately, I was too busy screaming for my dogs who were already off romping in the general the bear was headed. My screaming probably took a few years off the bear's life. Anyway, it looked still small enough to be with it's mother, and I didn't see her behind it, so I thought she may already be where the young one was headed...and so were my dogs. I didn't need a dogs vs. bear event to deal with, so that's why I was screaming for my dogs to come back. They obediently did. Good girls!! Turned out there wasn't a mother bear around.

I've also seen hawks killing other birds. This past thursday there were two american kestrels (known as sparrow hawks to some) who were avidly chasing a flock of about six flickers around the aspen trees. They were relentless, too. They kept diving and diving at those flickers. I watched until I couldn't see them any longer. Don't know if the kestrels ever had any success. I saw a big red tail hawk laughing at them, though. Thought it was going to fall out of the tree.

We have lots of squirrels, gophers and badgers on the place. I can hear the badgers in their holes when my dogs try to dig them out. You can actually hear the badger breathing in the hole. Sounds kind of Darth Vaderish. I'm surprised none of them have charged out at the dogs. Maybe they figure it is a coyote pack or something. Plus, there is a...HUMAN! The most feared and notorious predator around. Although I hear, and have read, badgers are not particularly afraid of the most feared and notorious predator around. In fact, I understand it is prudent for the most feared and notorious predator around to avoid the badger people.

There are supposed to be wolves around here too, or so I have been told by a couple of different people. There are lots of American goldfinches and mountain bluebirds also, for you birders. Also had a couple of cranes flying around the house (outside) a couple of days ago. The bird kind, not the construction kind. I have seen osprey, and immature golden eagles. They were just so totally immature I couldn't watch (hair flick).

LOTS of swallows, barn, tree and cliff. Lots of bats. Hmmm, oh, lots and lots of bugs too until a flock of swallows took up residency here by the house for a couple of weeks. Now there aren't so many bugs. Between the swallows and the bats they really knocked them down. Isn't nature wonderful?

That reminds me. I found bear poop in my driveway by my gate. I don't know whether to call animal control, or just put some doggy clean up bags on the fence post with a notice to the bears. Later, the same day there was a young black bear on the road about a half mile down the road from our house. It was just nosing along checking out something on the road. When it heard the truck coming it stood on its hind feet and stared at it until I was pretty close. Then it dropped down on all four and ran off into the woods. I honked the horn to keep it going.

It is late August now, and the weather has been beautiful the past three weeks. Sunny, sometimes partly cloudy, temps mostly in the 70's and 80's in the day and 50's at night. A lot of the wildflowers that were everywhere the last three months are dying off. I guess that means it is summer now? Hmmm.

I'm getting good enough with a chain saw that I can probably hurt myself now. Hope I don't. I have a lot of dead aspen trees to cut down and cut up. Too bad we have a wood pellet stove. I sure have enough wood here to last a good while. Maybe I can sell some. I'm going to give some of it to my neighbor. He is a nice guy. He is a cattle rancher and is probably in his 80's. He has been a great help to us. Really a good neighbor, a thing he firmly believes in being.

Another battle we have here is with spotted knapweed. It is the yellow star thistle of Montana, but only in invasiveness and difficulty to get rid of. It does not have any spines like the star thistle. They had a "spray day", I guess you could call it, last month. You could rent a tank from the county for ten bucks and get all the free knapweed herbicide you needed. I used about 16 gallons of the stuff, spent about six hours spraying, and killed maybe half the knapweed. Not good. That stuff will take over and ruin pastureland for livestock and meadows for wildlife. I'm digging up a lot of it, but it is like a drop in the bucket. So, I concentrate on the areas that are not so heavily infested and look for "starter" plants in non-infested areas and dig them up. Maybe if I put more effort there, I will at least keep it out of those areas.

That's it for now. I'll write more stuff as I think of it.