Hey, Hey, We’re the Beatles!

And people say we beetle around. Well, that’s not going to work… Do over!

I spent most of the summer communing with nature while living in the great north woods. Actually, at Anne’s family cabin nature can now be comfortably held at bay, generally, but it is always just outside the window waiting for you. Now that I’m back in the city, I’ve turned from communing with nature to combating nature. Yesterday, I mowed the lawn. I know that that doesn’t sound like much, but it’s been over two months since I last cut the grass. That’s not to say that the yard hasn’t been done while I was away, Ethan the neighbor boy took care of it all summer while I was gone. Still, if you want it done right (i.e. your way), you have to do it yourself. I quit trimming and pruning, only when the yard waste bucket was full. There is still a lot more to do next week.

Today, I pretty much accomplished my first retirement honey do. On the same day that we purchased our new refrigerator, was also purchased a roll of hardware cloth. Above the lintel of the back door of our screened in porch there was a hole in the screen. Squirrels had chewed through the mosquito screen, to gain access to the porch. Now, they usually only come just inside the hole and sit on the lintel and only during the most atrocious of Missouri’s winter rains. Think, Clint Eastwood in The Unforgiven type rains. Now you would think that Anne, benevolent Anne would take mercy on these poor, soaked and bedraggled creatures, but you would be wrong. In the past, when she spotted one up there she would shoo it away, but it would be back in five minutes, so it was a rather fruitless endeavor. I fixed the screen and then covered it with hardware cloth, making it relatively certain that no squirrel will be getting in that way again. Now about the acres of unreinforced screen everywhere else around the porch?

Oh look, a squirrel!