Ahrensburg

R has moved on to the second area of his mission. This one is Ahrensburg. Located just northeast of Hamburg and southwest of Lubeck, Ahrensburg is a huge change from Siegen. It is in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany's northernmost state. It is not far from the watershed boundary between the North Sea to the northwest and the Baltic Sea to the northeast, but it is only 137' above sea level and is rather flat. R also works in surrounding communities including Delingsdorf and Bargteheide. It's most famous building is the Schloss Ahrensburg (Ahrensburg Castle) shown above.

Here are some other pictures from around Ahrensburg.

German art can be kind of strange (not unlike American art, actually), but can someone please tell me what the point of this sculpture is and why the city allowed it in their park?

Snow in Vancouver

We don't get much snow in Vancouver, Washington. Most winters go by with none. That was not the case this December. We set a local record with 12" of white stuff this month and the first true white Christmas in over a hundred years. Here's a picture of downtown Vancouver three days before Christmas. It wasn't tough to get around except on Christmas and the day after when the previously well-packed snow on the side roads softened up so much that, as one of my co-workers described it, it was like "driving on butter." Wheel ruts went all the way to the road, but the front of a low car like mine had to push the snow in front of it. Vancouver needs to buy a plow and learn how to use it.

Bad day for doves

Yesterday, I hired a friend to work with me on thinning our huge douglas-fir tree in the backyard. Everything went very well, but we both wondered why two doves did some dangerous flying stunts in the area with enormous limbs falling all around them from heights of up to eighty feet. I found out later.

As I was hard at work cleaning and bucking some of the larger limbs for firewood, I glanced to one side and saw what looked like a large piece of bark in the lawn. It caught my eye, because this particular piece of bark was gray and the bark on the tree was brown. I took a closer look and found that it was not a piece of bark at all, but two baby doves snuggled side-by-side and head-to-tail in the green grass. The birds were clearly too young to fly, but they had all their feathers and were breathing and blinking their eyes. We still haven't found the nest, and I have no idea how the two of them came together to lie in the grass the way they did. We found out later that they had some limited standing and walking ability, but at least one of them must have done some pretty good traveling by their standards to seek the other out.

I showed K my discovery, and she placed a call to an organization she found in the phone book that "adopts" and cares for injured raptors and bird of endangered or exotic species. The man who answered the phone said he couldn't take these birds, but he kindly told us exactly what to do.

Following his instructions, we cut a square hole in the middle of a half-gallon milk carton and added natural grasses, leaves, and other local materials chosen for their cushy softness. We hung the new "nest" on the northeast (shady) side of the douglas-fir tree from which they fell. Then we inserted the birds next to each other in the carton.

Our counselor assured us that the mother would find her babies and that they had a very good chance of survival. He also passed on two pieces of information that we didn't know, which I will now pass on to you: (1) Have you ever been told that you shouldn't touch baby birds, because the parents will sense the human contact and abandon them? Apparently, this is BS. Actual bird parents will return to help their young after far worse than a human touch; (2) You should never feed a wild baby songbird water from a dropper or otherwise. If you do, it will likely aspirate (i.e. get fluid in its lungs and die). Wild songbird chicks get their fluid from the food that the parents regurgitate into their little mouths.

We haven't seen the parents since, but the babies are still alive in approximately the same condition as we found them. Any neighbors who have cats be warned: all felines seen in the area near our dove nest will be hunted down, captured, and flogged until dead. And that goes for raccoons and possums too!

Siegen!

R is now living in the city of Siegen, Germany. Siegen is a city of 105,000 people in west central Germany, 57 miles east of Cologne and 79 miles north of Frankfurt. It features the University of Siegen (12,500 students), one of Germany's highest bridges (about 315 feet above the water of the Sieg River), and lots of trees.

Siegen has been around since at least the early thirteenth century and features two "castles" (more like very large, very fancy, very old houses) named Oberes Schloss and Unteres Schloss, both shown below.

Siegen's history is replete with colorful characters, including Heinrich the Rich, Engelbert II of Berg, and Wilhelm Hyacinth.

Siegen has changed a lot. During World War II, the Allies bombed it several times, because it had a crucial railroad. Those bombings erased 80% of the town at that time. After the war, it had just 28,000 inhabitants. By 1975, it had 116,000. Its population has declined a bit since then.

Coming soon!

As I write this, R is over the Atlantic Ocean on a Delta Airlines jet, booking it for Paris. He'll finally reach Hamburg at midnight PDT (9:00 AM 8/13 in Hamburg). Details on his first assignment in a week or so.

Look What I Caught in My Trap!

Well, okay. Not really. However, this is a real picture taken in our friend's backyard last evening! They moved to Alta, WY several years ago. Everything beyond that fence is Targhee National Forest. The picture was taken from four hundred yards with a telephoto. Their son got within fifty yards on his ATV before the bear reared up and their son scrambled back. I told them I was very impressed with the size of the bear, but that I had seen much scarier human beasts in Vancouver transit buses on my way home from work.

Killer Travel Quiz

Our family has travelled a lot in the last eight months. Each of these pictures depicts a place that one or more of us has seen in those travels [Disclaimer: In most cases, we did not take the photos ourselves]. Your task? Identify the places! Helpful hint: each of these pictures was taken in a different American state. However, it would be good if you did not just identify the states. Be as specific as you can!

1. 2.
3.
4.
5. 6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

This is Getting Old

This is not the second raccoon I trapped. He would not have stood still long enough to be photographed this way. Also, his teeth were pointier and not so white.

I was just about to stop the project. I thought I had cleared my property of these nasty things. Then, on the last day I was to set the trap, I got another.

I think I got the alpha male. When I got near him, he hissed, growled, and bit the cage. He backed himself to one end of the trap and tried to explode through the other like a charging ram. He tried to scratch me through the cage and succeeded a couple of times, though he never broke the skin. He was big and mean.

He should have been grateful to me, since I hauled him to within a mile of his relative, the one I trapped just under four weeks ago. Unfortunately, he wasn't. The hardest thing about the traps is hooking them open. Hooking this one open when its contents were trying to bite my fingers off took me a good five minutes. I finally had to shake the trap and twist it so violently that its contents were disoriented. This gave me roughly three seconds to work before the beast came to its senses and could aim its teeth and claws effectively again. If I ever catch another one like that one, I will leave him in the cage until his ribs show through his chest. I am not interested in rabies shots.

Maybe I need a new trap:

At least with this one, I would only have to keep an eye on three claws.

I think I am developing a healthy hatred of certain mammals. Add an acre to my carbon footprint.

To Idaho Falls and beyond!

Our car had a water pump problem right before we were to leave. We rented another and abandoned ours in the garage.

The drive to Idaho Falls was uneventful. We stayed there a couple of days with friends. Then we picked up R in Rexburg after he arrived back from a whirlwind tour of the near Midwest! He and friends crammed into cars and drove through Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Utah (where they stopped to see A), and back to Rexburg. There was a friend's wedding in Omaha. The rest was just fun!

Back to our trip:

This sign is actually by a roadside in Idaho Falls. Given the high number of concealed weapons permits issued there, I took it seriously!

This is a picture of downtown Idaho Falls. The place looks like 1955, except for the cars. Most of eastern Idaho is like that!

By the way, Vancouver to Rexburg is about 785 miles each way. Lots of beautiful country and lots of boring country. Very little city. Very nice.

Quiz

(1) Where was this picture taken?
(2) Why is it in my blog?

Animal Trap Redux

After I caught the cat on Easter Sunday (see Meow? <*Hiss! Spit!*>), I didn’t have time to re-bait my cage trap and drop it in the crawl space. I set it out back under the eaves by the crawl space vent hole with the torn screen. It was left in the open position, but without bait.

K woke me up at 5:00 this morning, because something out back was making noise. A hit! I had another catch without even really trying, and this time it wasn’t a cat.



The beauty of catching a raccoon is that you don’t have to worry that it is someone’s cherished pet. Since the Humane Society didn’t open until 10:00 AM, I loaded Rocky’s cage in the trunk and headed to Oregon. He now has a new home where there is more space to roam and plenty to eat. It was far easier to get him out of the trap and into a nearby blackberry patch than I thought he would be.

Raccoons are smart critters (though not smart enough to avoid capture), so I am gambling that this one is not smart and motivated enough to travel five miles to a bridge, negotiate the bridge without being pancaked, and travel another three miles to locate the crawl space of his youth. Are raccoons good swimmers? This one would have to be. The Columbia is 500 to 2,000 yards wide, depending on where he tries to cross. Maybe I can successfully capture his entire family and transport them to a happy reunion in that blackberry patch.

Is it legal to transport raccoons across state lines?

Port Henry

Some of my earliest memories are of visits to Port Henry. We stayed in Dad’s parents’ two-story house south of the high school. The first picture is of that house. I remember that it had hardwood floors. The second-story floors had vents in them to allow heated air to circulate from the first story. I can remember “spying” on people downstairs through the vents. Also, the vent grates had holes just large enough to accommodate small marbles. My brothers and I had a great deal of fun scaring people downstairs by dropping marbles from the second story to the floor below. What brats we were!


The second picture is of a huge house owned by my Grandma L’s family. Dad’s Uncle S lived there. The picture shows that it has been greatly improved since the early 1960s. In my memory, it always appeared pretty run down and in need of paint. I always imagined that it was haunted, although I don’t think I ever shared my thoughts on that with anyone. I don’t think I ever went inside until after Uncle S died. We went with the adults, who were there to determine the fate of all the “treasures” inside. I remember ascending a wooden staircase and avoiding holes in some of the steps. I remember LOTS of cobwebs, and it seems like we startled a field mouse or two. Of course, that could all have been my overactive childhood imagination.

Picture three is a view south along the railroad tracks near the lake. That is St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in the distance on the hill. Port Henry was essentially a railroad town. It owed its prosperity to the work of transporting the iron ore from the mines in nearby Mineville. In the 1890s, Essex and Clinton Counties of New York produced 23% of the nation’s total iron output. Dad’s family made a living from the railroad. Mom’s father worked in a mine.


We enjoyed a nice walk on solidly-frozen Lake Champlain while we were at Port Henry. The last picture is one of a large number of ice-fishing shanties on the lake. By the way, if you want your very own ice-fishing shanty, there were a large number of them for sale by the state campground down by the lake.

If you enjoy milk, thank a dairy farmer

After we left M & J’s place, the first stop on our New York trip was cousin T’s dairy farm. Family dairy farms are much rarer now than they were when I was a kid, and on the New York side of Lake Champlain, they are almost all gone. Somehow, T, his wife B, and their three young boys hang in there. Even with a herd that fluctuates around the 150-head mark, he is considered a very small farmer.

T has to go over to Vermont for almost anything he needs for the farm. Dairy equipment and parts just are not available anywhere nearby.

If you are like us, the price you are paying for milk is half again as much as it was five or ten years ago. Don’t blame T or the other small farmers. None of that filters down to his level. Maybe it goes to the bigger operations. More likely, though, it goes into the pockets of the middlemen – big dairy processors like Dairylea in New York or Alpenrose in the Northwest.

By the way, if you have an extra litter of kittens, PLEASE do not dump them on dairy farmers. T and B have a problem here. The supply of cats is far greater than the demand. For some reason, though, everybody thinks dairies need them.

People have been watching too many movies and TV shows that show someone who is milking a cow aiming the teat and firing at the mouths of nearby cats. It’s as if the dairy farms (where, in the movies, everybody still milks by hand) have more milk than they properly know what to do with and are some sort of mecca for cats. Too much milk? Give it to the cats!
Not so. There is no such thing as too much milk at a dairy farm. Milk is money, money pays bills, and there are always more bills.

T and B’s orphan cats might be too numerous to count, even if you could get them in one place to count them. They’re not mousers. More likely, the rodents living on the farm are catters. B puts a little bit of cat food out for them each day, because her heart is too soft. However, it doesn’t even make a dent, and the cats that aren’t the fittest die. T wouldn’t be sad if they’d ALL die. They’re always under foot, and a cow with a turned ankle cannot go out to pasture. It might even mean one more vet bill.



T and B are happy running the farm. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t do it. They work sixteen hours a day in all kinds of weather and do not prosper. Cows need milking and care every day, even when you’re sick or your son is getting married in Kalamazoo. If you cannot do it, you have to hire someone who can (if you can find someone that capable and responsible for hire and can afford to pay them).

Ts and Bs are almost extinct. When the Ts and Bs are all gone, all the dairy farms will be big, sterile commercial mega-farms. The world, or at least this part of the world, will miss them.

Meow? <*HISS! SPIT!*>

Something tore a gaping hole through the screen on one of our crawl space vent holes. I’d have thought it was a possum, except that I haven’t seen a possum (not even of the common road kill variety) in our county in at least two years. My money was on raccoons. We’d had problems with them in the distant past, because we once had a neighbor who thought they were cute and fattened them up on cat food. We hadn’t seen raccoons for awhile either, but they’re great hiders and rarely pause in city streets to fight moving truck tires as the now-hopefully-extinct possums did.

Whatever had built this entrance to our crawl space was really beginning to agitate me. Off and on for several weeks, we heard horrible sounds emanating from underneath our laundry room – hisses, howls, bumps, and a sound that I imagined must be the sharpening of eyeteeth on drain pipes.

Time to act! We acquired a good solid wire box trap of the sort recommended by the Humane Society and various other PWCs (people who care). We added a dish of dry cat food, set the hook, and placed it down there where the varmint would find it.

It only took a couple of days. But it wasn’t a raccoon or a possum or my third guess (judging from the noise it made down there), a velociraptor.

My prey wasn’t happy inside my trap, despite the trap’s innate humaneness. I wasn’t happy with him either. Believe it or not, I am quite tolerant of and even friendly to well-behaved and well-controlled pets despite a vast array of dog bites collected while delivering newspapers in the days before leash laws. My catch hissed and snarled unceasingly in that trap. I’d rather have impaled it on a spear and displayed it in my front yard as a warning to all other feral creatures and their past or soon-to-be past owners. However, I have learned through a half-century of experience that even the most obnoxious members of sometimes-domestic species have a politically-correct army of human(e)s the size and ferocity of which I am ill-suited to handle on my own. Besides, my benevolent wife would not be pleased. So I did the right thing.

We gave up a portion of our Easter Sunday. We contacted every neighbor we could find to see if they were missing a cat or even recognized the one we “stumbled upon,” for the beast was not licensed or even collared. I knocked doors. K talked to various humans and machines on the phone. No takers. No leads. When we got home from church at 2:30 PM, there were no messages on our own phone-answering machine and no Post-It notes on our door from distraught mothers or fathers looking to reclaim “Fluffy” or “Tiger”.

My wife and I had agreed (thankfully!) that the creature could not spend the night. Nor could the creature be released within five miles of the house. If nobody would claim him, we did not want him awakening us at 2 AM again. I had a nice woodlot picked out in my mind, ten miles away from our house on the opposite side of a wide, deep, fast-flowing river, where there were plenty of rodents to feed on and plenty of coyotes in need of a meal. If the cat wanted to be wild, maybe it could be wild there.

Did you know the Humane Society’s Pet Lost & Found Department is open on Easter? I didn’t. I was going through the motions of dialing their number “just to be sure,” and a real person answered on the second ring. Try to get that level of customer service from your bank! I learned that they would accept my beast if I got him there by 5:00 PM. At four, I decided time was up. I loaded the cage in my trunk, now lined with an old tarp in case “Toby” got scared sh**less during the ride. Off to the shelter we went.

The volunteers there were very nice. I think they were all high-school girls, either working on their Senior Service hours or campaigning for a Teens Who Make a Difference Award of some kind. They walked me through the paperwork and took the varmint trap to the back room, where somebody who was hopefully dressed in thick leather from head to toe apparently extricated the animal. When one of the volunteers came out to give me the trap, I asked her what would happen to the cat. She replied that hopefully somebody would return to claim him, and if not, maybe somebody would adopt him. My interpretation: “The thing will be stone-cold dead in a week, but it won’t feel a thing.” Okay. That’s mean. I apologize. I didn’t particularly want the cat to die. I just didn’t want to hear it under my house again.

I got home at about five, and we went to a friend’s house for Easter dinner. We didn’t get home until late. However, the phone-answering machine was there, and it did its job, much to my chagrin. The little red light blinked on and off. When I pushed the little button, the machine spewed forth its message, recorded at 7:55 PM. “K, I hope I am not too late. This is Connie Ferguson over on Tremont Street. I think you found my cat….”

K talked to her this morning. “My cat would never have gone under your house on his own. Something must have scared him to make him go under there. He wasn’t licensed yet, but I intended to do it this week – really! He had a collar; it must have gotten snagged on something and broken off.” It really did sound to K like Connie was going over to the Humane Society’s animal jail to bail the fur ball out. I hope he never comes back here. Now that I know he’s Connie’s “kid,” there’s no way to dispatch him without seeing that humane army storm across my front lawn in battle array.

I’m looking for suggestions just in case!

Back alive

We just spent a week in upstate NY! A great week it was too. GEL-oh, sorry to have missed you on Sunday. I hope you are feeling better.

Too much happened to fit into one entry. Besides, we don't have our own pics yet. Let's start with this borrowed photo of Kristof Ongenaet dunking on Lazar Hayward of Marquette during the Saturday 'Cuse game that I attended with LUD. Syracuse won, 87-72, in its last good moment of the 2007-2008 season. After today's blowout loss to Villanova, the season is over (unless you count the post-season NIT, which nobody from a real conference does). Maybe we'll be better next year with a somewhat more experienced team and, hopefully, a more injury-free one.

When a dog chases a zamboni

A picture is worth a thousand words. Regards to http://www.deadspin.com/ for the picture.

Gram's home town

Grandma K is from the village of Zawoja. Zawoja is in a valley at the base of one of Poland's highest mountains, Babia Gora (translated Old Wives' Mountain). Babia Gora, at just over 5,600 feet above sea level, is actually part of the Beskidy Mountains of the Outer Western Carpathians. It also happens to be right on the border with Slovakia, since the border follows the divide.

At the time Gram was in Poland, it wasn't really Poland at all, but Galicia. At that time, Poland had been divided among Germany, Russia, and Austria. Galicia, like Czechoslavakia, hungary, and a number of other places, was officially a part of the Austrian Empire. Due to its unfortunate location, much of Poland has been passed back and forth among eastern European powers for ages.

As you can see, this part of Poland is surprisingly reminiscent of the 'Daks (although probably more like the White Mountains of NH) where she eventually made her American home. She'd have probably felt more at home there than, say, Illinois.

What's a caucus?

For those of you who never get to play the caucus game, here's how it worked in Washington.

On Saturday, February 9, we traveled to a local elementary school and found the library, where the Republican caucus was being held. The Democrats were in the cafeteria. The rule in Washington is that you can participate only in your own party's caucus, unless you are an independent like me. Then you get to take your pick. I could have gone to the Democratic side and cast a vote in the straw poll against Hillary, but K is a registered Republican, so I went with her.

We were all placed at tables by precinct. Our precinct officer was a guy down the street whom we know from neighborhood association meetings. We were good friends with everyone else at the table; in fact, we took two of them to the caucus with us. I thought it weird that there were only seven people from our entire precinct, an area that covers a heavily-populated square mile. Five were actual Republicans, and there were two of us independents. Meeting at our location were approximately ten precincts.

My fellow independent and I were allowed to participate in the straw poll and provide platform input, but we could not vote to elect delegates. There was nothing scientific or fancy about the straw poll. Everybody got a two-square-inch piece of yellow paper. You wrote the name of your choice on it and turned it in the the guy running the show. I won't tell you whom I voted for, but I can tell you that the vote count in our precinct was Romney 7, Everybody Else 0. I will leave it to you to figure out how I voted. :-)

Now you may be thinking, "Hey, hadn't Romney declared that he was withdrawing by then?" If you are thinking that (or even if you are not), the answer is "yes"! However, this was wide open. I could have voted for Barry Obama if I had wanted to (I didn't want to). In our location AND in our entire county, Ron Paul actually finished first. The Huckster was second, Romney, the non-candidate, was third (4.7% off the lead), and McCain was fourth. Nobody else was above 0.5%. In the state as a whole, McCain won. The papers were quick to mention that the Huckster was a very close second, but they ignored the fact that Ron Paul was a just-as-close third.

The platform stuff was just a data-gathering survey thing, not very exciting.

Last step: our precinct had to nominate and vote on four delegates and four alternates for the county convention in April. The precinct officer could not be a delegate; he had other roles at the county convention already. Only Republicans could participate, so we actually had five people choosing eight people. You needn't be present to win. Our precinct delegates included K, two other people at our table, and the precinct officer's son. Our four alternates were one of our close neighbors, the precinct officer's daughter-in-law and 18-year-old grandson, and our son, R, who is away at college in another state. Okay, so we were nepotistic. Don't blame me! I couldn't nominate or vote! Blame the thousand or so who did not come and participate!

So that's the nonsense of a party caucus. If your state ever has one, go! It's a real kick! I'll have more from the county convention in April.