Peanut Battle HD

Remember my photographs of the famous Rosings Park Peanut Battle? This is actually an ongoing war, one which has been waged almost daily for the past four years. Thanks to new technology, I’m pleased to be able to bring you close-up footage of the action:

I realize that some of you may find this video tedious. That’s okay. For me and Kris, this is nine minutes of heaven.

Update!

I’ve joined Vimeo, where the HD videos really show up in HD — or something close to it. Here’s the same film as above:

Peanut Battle HD from J.D. Roth on Vimeo.

Also, for those of you who are curious, I filmed this with the Flip Mino HD, which is an iPod-sized hi-def video camera. It’s very light. All of this was filmed with the Mino HD, though not all at the same time. This is actually two different feedings, a couple of hours apart. For one, I set the camera about fifteen feet from the feeder. For the other, I set it inside the feeder, which the birds did not like. (The little birds wouldn’t even go in while the camera was there.)

The Man with the Meaty Claw

I borrowed the neighbor’s pressure-washer on Friday. After five years at Rosings Park, I decided it was time to clean the gunk and the moss off the sidewalks. It was fun, actually, and strangely satisfying.

I encountered a problem, however, while working next to the house. As I sprayed the sidewalk, the mud and grime splashed onto the siding. This meant I had to spray down one wall. Unfortunately — and unbeknownst to me — this also meant that I was spraying down a nest of bees (or wasps or hornets — whatever the stupid things are).

I was merrily spraying away when I felt a sharp pain in my hand. I shook my hand a little, but kept on spraying. The pain continued. I looked at my hand. There were two bees (or wasps or hornets), backs arced, driving their stupid stingers into my stupid fist. Ouch!

Swearing forcefully, I dropped the pressure-washer and shook my hand as hard as I could. The stupid bees (or wasps or hornets) continued to sting me. Finally, I brushed them off, and then danced around, cursing and swearing. After I got that out of my system, I moved the pressure-washer away from the nest and finished my work.

“Poor sweetie,” Kris said when she saw my hand. “Does it hurt?”

“Yes it hurts,” I said. “It hurts like hell. Remember my adhesive capsulitis? That pain was a 9. This is an 8. It sucks.”

Fortunately, the pain subsided. Unfortunately, it was replaced by swelling.

On Saturday, we drove to the hardware store. “What happened to you?” asked the checker as we were paying for our stuff. I told her I’d been stung. She sort of freaked out. “Oh my god. You’ve got to go to a doctor. Why haven’t you gone to a doctor? With swelling like that, you need to go to a doctor.”

As we were driving home, Kris said, “Maybe you should go to the doctor.”

So we drove down to Canby — the only place we could find that offered “urgent care” for our insurance network — and I went to the doctor. Though she assured me that there was nothing to worry about, she seemed duly impressed by the swelling. She prescribed a couple of drugs and asked me to return on Sunday.

The swelling continued. By Saturday night, my entire right forearm was swollen. It was as if I had a grotesque meaty claw instead of a hand. I certainly could not type.

By Sunday morning, however, the swelling had begun to decrease (and the pain had returned). As requested, I returned to the doctor’s office in the afternoon. She seemed pleased that the swelling had begun to subside, but surprised that it hadn’t gone down completely. She prescribed another medication (actually, a second steroid).

Now, on Sunday evening, the swelling is mostly gone (though not completely) and has been replaced by a dull ache throughout my hand and wrist. Plus everything itches. As you can see, I’m able to type, though it hurts to do so for very long. That’s bad news because I don’t have anything written to go up at GRS in the morning!

Meanwhile, I have a little present for the bees (or wasps or hornets — whatever the stupid things are). While we were at the hardware store on Saturday, I bought three cans of long-range (27 feet!) poison. Those bastards are dead in the morning.

Hello, Autumn

Autumn is here. The days and nights are getting colder. My usual strategy for coping with the chill is to bundle up. This morning, though, I couldn’t shake the cold. I turned on the heat for the first time since April, and sat at the kitchen table drinking a mug of cocoa.

As I ran a hot bath, I sat and watched the leaves fall from the walnut tree. I mowed the lawn yesterday, so the grass beneath the tree is short, like a carpet. There’s no wind to speak of, but still yellow dying leaves are drifting down in waves. It’s as if a group of leaves hatched a plan: “Let’s all jump at the same time.”

The cats aren’t pleased with the change in seasons. First of all, there’s not enough light. Second, it’s raining too often. Third, although they have fur, they’d prefer not to have to rely upon it to stay warm. Finally, they no longer have freedom of movement. During the summer, the doors are open constantly, and they can come and go as they please. Not now. Now they have to ask to be let in and out, but they don’t like asking.

Mornings like this are slow. They’re nice. But I need to have some productive mornings. During the week before our vacation, I worked hard to prep articles for the time we’d be gone. It’s been nearly two weeks now since I worked at such a frenzy, but I can’t seem to muster ever a little motivation.

That’s okay, though. I have stuff ready to go through this weekend, for the most part. I still have time to sit at the table, sipping a mug of cocoa, watching the leaves fall.

Complaints from Rosings Park

It’s come to my attention that I haven’t written enough about our cats lately. I apologize. Here, then, is a revealing look at the psychology of the beasts with whom we share Rosings Park. These are the top complaints from each animal.

Max

“Not enough birds.”

“This family is boring.”

“Simon plays too rough.”

Nemo

“Dad is scary.”

“Dad is very scary.”

“Simon plays too rough.”

Simon

“The front door is shut.”

“Dad is in my chair.”

“My brothers are pansies.”

Toto

“I want to snuggle.”

“I don’t want anyone to touch me.”

“I hate my brothers.”

The squirrels

“Too many cats.”

“Not enough pumpkin seeds.”

“Too many birds.”

The birds

“Too many cats.”

“Not enough peanuts.”

“Too many birds.”

The Whole Point of Having a Tree

The Idea of Having

“You know our house isn’t really cluttered, right?” Kris said last night.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“When you write about your battle with clutter, it makes it sound like we live in a house filled with junk. We don’t. Our house is pretty clean. You’ve just got a lot of stuff you’re holding onto that you don’t know how to get rid of.”

“That’s true,” I said.

Our house isn’t cluttered. Sometimes it gets messy, but that’s my doing. For example, the dining room table has been covered with personal finance magazines for the past week as I worked on a forthcoming article at Get Rich Slowly. Or before that, I had all of our exercise stuff (yoga mats, exercise ball, stretch bands, etc.) strewn across the floor. But it’s not like we have junk all over the place.

Instead, I have piles of Stuff in my office, in the guest room, and in the workshop. Even these piles are moderately neat.

“And you know why you can’t get rid of Stuff, don’t you?” Kris continued.

“Because I want it,” I said.

“You think you want it,” she said. “You like the idea of having certain things, but you don’t actually use them. You’ve got dozens of books stacked in the guest room. They’ve been there for a year. Have you needed any of those books in that time?”

“No,” I said.

“That’s my point. You can’t bring yourself to get rid of them, yet you don’t use them, either. So they sit there. You wouldn’t even notice if you got rid of them. You should just do it.”

As always, Kris Gates is right. The difficulty is forcing myself to move from acknowledgment to action. Tiffany has offered to help me get rid of my Stuff. Maybe I’ll take her up on the offer. Or maybe I’ll just pile everything in the workshop and let it sit there for another year or two…

The Curse of Clutter

While Mom was in the hospital, Kris and I spent several hours at her house cleaning. I’ve noticed before that it’s easy to see the clutter in another person’s house, and this time was no different.

The trouble is that it’s difficult to see the clutter in your own house. Coming home from our cleaning trips, I could look around and see that there was too much Stuff around us. I could see that there was lots of stuff I could sell or give away. But I don’t know how to start.

I’ve spent the past year or so working to thin the amount of Stuff I own, and after each session, I feel like I’m down to bare bones. I know I’m not, but that’s how it feels.

Now, looking around my office, I wonder what I could part with. My personal finance books? My comic strip compilations? My comic book compilations? My music collection? I don’t know. I’m paralyzed by indecision, so I never start.

The workshop is worse. That’s my staging ground for the Stuff I’ve decided to get rid of, but which I haven’t actually been able to act upon. There are piles of books and records and who-knows-what-else sitting out there. Cleaning experts say that if you haven’t used something in a year, you should get rid of it. There are lots of things like that in the workshop, and yet I cannot pull the trigger.

Sometimes I feel like I should hire a “cleaning consultant” to come in and purge for me. Maybe Andrew or Pam would do the job for me. I’ve seen both of them ruthlessly purge clutter in the past.

Meanwhile, I’ll just sit around looking at all my Stuff.

From Bread to Cherries

Ah, friends, so many things to tell you in order to relate a simple story. I should write at this blog more often. I’ll do my best to be succinct.

In March, I wrote a post at my fitness blog asking which whole wheat bread is best? I picked up one of every loaf from Safeway, compared ingredients and price, and then asked six people to taste test each loaf. I concluded that Milton’s Whole Grain Plus offered the best bang for the buck.

After some advice from readers, I tried a couple loaves from Trader Joe’s, and ultimately decided that I liked Rainier Organic Sasquatch Grain & Seed Bread. Eating a slice of that stuff is like eating a field of wheat.

But during that discussion, Brad suggested I should try making my own bread. “That’s crazy,” I thought. “Making your own bread is too much work.” But Brad pointed me to a Mark Bittman recipe for No-Knead Bread. Soon after, Kris and I discovered some refinements from Cook’s Illustrated. Over the past few months, she and I have been regularly baking an easy and cheap home-made bread that is far better than any store-bought stuff.

When I wrote about our breadmaking experience at Get Rich Slowly, several readers told us we could make the process even cheaper by purchasing our ingredients at Costco. On Friday, we headed over to pick up two pounds of yeast and fifty pounds of bread flour. (We also met Rhonda for lunch, where we talked about clothes and clubs, but that’s a story for later.)

While Kris was looking for breadmaking stuff, I nosed through the books. I found a title called Back to Basics: A Guide to Traditional Skills, which I fell in love with immediately. It’s an illustrated how-to manual for people interested in homesteading and self-sufficiency. It features lots of advice on growing your own food, both vegetable and animal.

This afternoon, Kris went across the street to chat with our neighbor, Patrice. I eventually went over to join the chat. Patrice was offering to let us pick more from her cherry tree, an enormous old thing that may never have been pruned. While we chatted, we started talking about the property she rents from John.

“This used to be a farm,” she told us. “In fact, John still calls it The Farm. The barn was actually a chicken coop. That’s where the vegetable garden used to be. And he had cows and horses. He was pretty self-sufficient.”

This is unsurprising. In addition to the old cherry tree, he has several large apples, rows of raspberries, and the best grapes in the neighborhood (which grow wild along the fence and up into the trees). When we moved in, John was the one who gave me wood and advice to set up our own grape and berry arbors. He’s happy to see us growing our own food.

This evening, Kris and I went back over to pick cherries. We’ve already picked all the low-hanging fruit (which led me to understand finally what that phrase actually means), so we carried a ladder over. Kris climbed into the tree first, but she chickened out. “You’re a girl,” I said. “I’m a boy. Let me at it. This is boy’s work.”

I loved climbing trees when I was a boy, monkeying around from branch to branch. I did something similar this afternoon — in a 39-year-old man sort of way — snagging all the gorgeous cherries. (While I was in the tree, I thought I was doing a very Joel-like thing. “My new motto should be WWJD — what would Joel do?” I thought.

As we were finishing, the new neighbors came down to pick cherries, too. While Kris went inside to make some cherry preserves, I stayed outside to meet them. I let them use my ladder to climb into the tree to pick fruit of their own. We chatted a little to get to know each other.

“This is a strange neighborhood,” said one of the new neighbors. “It feels so old-fashioned. We’re so close to Portland, but it feels like we’re in the country. I mean, here we are all getting together to pick cherries.”

Exactly. That’s why we love it here. In a way, it feels like getting back to basics.

A Lovely Secluded Spot

Last summer on our drive across England, we stopped at Jane Austen’s house. The inside was okay, but mostly I found it a little boring. A house is not a house when there’s nobody living there. It’s an empty shell of a thing — a museum.

But I found I loved the gardens.

In the U.K., what we call a yard is called a garden, and it comprises not just shrubs and flowers, but the lawn as well. In the case of Jane Austen’s house, the garden included a large carefully-maintained lawn, a variety of old trees, and lovely secluded spots. I was entranced by these lovely secluded spots.

“You know,” I said to Kris. “I think we could create a spot like that at Rosings Park.”

“Where?” she said.

“In the front border bed,” I said. She was skeptical.

When we returned in early August, I fought my way through the laurel and azalea to see if I could indeed create a lovely secluded spot. To my surprise, there was a relatively large opening in the midst of the front border bed. Or there could be. When I first looked at it, it was covered with English ivy, and crowded in by laurel, lilac, and holly. The ivy itself was covered with a couple decades of twigs and branches.

Last autumn, I made a half-hearted effort to clear the space. Mostly, I just pruned the big holly by the sidewalk. Then I let the idea lie dormant.

After gestating for nine months, the idea has finally, well…that’s a metaphor that’s been stretched too far. Let’s just say that over the weekend, Kris and I did a lot of yardwork. One of our top tasks was to weed the front border bed, and to do that, I had to climb back into my secluded spot. This time, the possibilities were much clearer.

This afternoon I grabbed a rake and a hoe and my pruners. I spent an hour raking twigs, pulling up ivy, and clearing debris. When I’d finished, my secluded spot had begun to take shape.

The space is roughly circular, maybe fifteen feet in diameter. It is completely enclosed by shrubs and trees. Dappled sunlight filters through the leaves overhead, and all around is a wall of trunks and limbs. At two locations one can see clearly outside The Grove (as I have come to call it):

We pulled down a laurel limb, granting a view of the house.
Because I pruned the holly tree last fall, there’s a screened view of the street. (It seemed like a good idea at the time, but how I now regret having pruned those branches!)

I’ve been sitting in The Grove for the past half an hour. It’s wonderful. People pass by on the street, and they do not notice I’m here. Though it’s a warm day, it’s cool beneath the trees. It’s peaceful. The only drawback so far are the goddamn mosquitoes.

Now I have to decide what I want to do with this lovely secluded spot. My first idea was to put down a layer of pea gravel and then install some wrought iron furniture. That seems like the proper English thing to do. But after further thought, I wonder if there might not be other possibilities.

Should I install a fire pit? Should I find some sort of soft surface? (I can imagine how awesome it would be to do daily yoga in The Grove.) Should we opt for a picnic table? Is it best to level the space? (There’s a slight slope.) How can I screen the road from view?

There are many possibilities. I’m not sure where to even begin looking. All I know is that this idea, which seemed a little crazy at first, will come to fruition, and soon. Of all my pipe dreams — Mini Cooper, Stickley furniture — this is the one that will be most satisfying to achieve, and the cheapest to do.

I can’t wait to have a lovely secluded spot to call my own.

Bonus! As I was editing this post, Sammy (or friendly blue jay) fluttered into The Grove and came hopping up beside me. I could have reached out and touched him! He was apparently after a peanut I had unearthed while clearing the space.

The Thunder Rolls

Ah, the Fourth of July. Such a pleasant time in our neighborhood: lots of loud explosions. The early evening is filled with pops and cracks. It sounds like small arms fire, like we’re in some sort of war zone. Of course this is especially pronounced on the Independence Day itself (when the snap, crackle, pop lasts well into the early morning), but it’s also noisy in the days leading up to the event.

Last night was especially bad. It wasn’t just the sound of “gunfire” at 10pm. No, last night we had the boom of “cannons” at three in the morning.

Okay, to be fair, that cacophony wasn’t actually from neighbors with firecrackers. It was from thunder.

The Portland area doesn’t have frequent thunderstorms, but we do get them from time-to-time. All my life, I’ve liked the sound of thunder rolling in the distance. It never occurred to me to think about what it must sound like to have the thunder overhead. Last night, I got to experience it first-hand.

Between 2:30 and 3:30, the thunder and lighting raged all around Rosings Park. It was as if we were in the midst of the Battle of Trafalgar. The lighting sometimes seemed to be a strobe light. And the thunder rolled thick and heavy.

“Crap,” I said when the rain began to fall. “I left the windows down in my car.”

The lightning flashed.

“Well, you’re not going to roll them up now,” Kris said. “But why don’t you go see if you can let Nemo in.” Nemo had been the only cat who refused to come in before bed.

I went downstairs to call for him. All of the other cats were tense. Every time the thunder cracked, Toto froze in fear. Max, his ears back, followed me around, begging to be let outside. But Nemo was nowhere to be found. He wouldn’t come when I called.

If I had been thinking, I would have grabbed my digital camera to record the scene. I don’t know if I’ll ever experience another thunderstorm like that again. But it was 3am and I wasn’t thinking straight.

Now the firecrackers over the next couple nights won’t seem like that a very big deal…