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.