June Sweeps - Day 487

Okay, here I am, the same place I was last week at this time--in my comfy chair at the cabin, listening to the settling of the timbers, hearing a clock ticking softly in the kitchen (I think it's the John Wayne one, surely a gift to my dad from either my sister or my Aunt Barbara).  But unlike last week, I am not going to take a nap of any length, and I'm not even going to lie down.

I will take my shoes off, however.  They're the same ones I took on my hike on Sunday, and they're still dusty and grey, instead of black like they were when I first put them on Sunday afternoon.

Shoot, in just typing this much, I felt the pull of The Nap. 

The cabin is big and quiet and comfortable, and yeah, I thought "I could lay down, just for ten minutes or so.  What would that hurt?'  So, I did.  But this time, I set a timer on my phone to wake me in just a few minutes, and hey, it worked wonders--even before I fell asleep, it was time to get up, start editing, or start reading, or exercise, or do something other than sleep away the day like I did last week.*

When I got here, sure I was the only person who'd been here in a week, I was surprised to find two of the doors--the upstairs bathroom and stairwell doors--open, despite me having closed them last week.  That meant somebody had been here, even though the patio door was locked, as well as the front door.  My brother's traps were all sprung, and I had deliberately reset one before leaving last week, but that didn't mean anybody had been here.  

The true evidence was that the hummingbird feeder, which I had glanced at on the windowsill last week, was now hanging on the deck, filled with that red sugarwater mixture we keep in the cupboard.  And way up above, on the roof, the flag had been set up.  That meant my brother had been here.  I went upstairs to chase after a fly, and discovered the door wide open up there.  In the same way you don't tell me that Richard Donner's GREMLINS, starring Lance Guest, came out in 1982 and was PG-13 because I simply can't let that kind of thing go uncorrected, you don't tell my brother that he left one of the doors ajar and that it was wide open when I got here.  Instead, I wrote up a little note, telling everyone to make sure the door was secure, and taped it to the inside glass.  

Last year, I think it was, we came up here and found that door wide open, and there were two or three dead birds inside the cabin (did they starve to death, or fly into a wall, or what?  Why not just fly out again, unless some unseen Presence took their lives from them?).  So, it's fair to say that the door is one of those where you have to rattle the handle or lift up or something to get it to close securely.

Sit-ups Today: 200
Sit-ups In June: 311

So, confession time again.  Father, it's been three blog posts since my last confession.  I almost always get donuts for my trips to the cabin.  It's as much a part of coming here as audio editing, reading out on the deck, spotting wildlife, and hearing spooky sounds and soiling myself, and what I almost always do is go to the We Made Too Much rack at the back of the grocery store (or Walmart) and see what delicious baked goods can be had for cheap.  I've bought an entire box of donuts to consume over here before, and why not, it's podcasting fuel.

But this time, there was a two pack of something called Chocolate Eclairs on the clearance rack, and they looked very similar to the donuts I like the most, which are the brown ones with either custard or cream filling inside.  So I bought them, and ate one today and one tomorrow.  

And I gotta say, if you ever hear the word "indulgent" outside of talk about the history of the Catholic church, it's to describe these pastries.  Each one was too big to pick up with one hand, let alone stuff in my mouth (I ended up using a fork after getting it all over my face and shirt), and they were so rich and overstuffed and topped with whipped cream, little candies, and maraschino cherries, that I felt like Henry VIII disposing of another wife.

I looked at the sticker on the tray, and it had the number of calories recommended for a full day . . . if you're a Sumo wrestler.  Each.

But I bought 'em, and I ate 'em, and now I've blogged about it.  Next time I drive up here, when I go back to donuts, I'll feel like I'm dieting!

Push-ups Today: 177
Push-ups In June: 227

I could hear frogs singing when I went out on the upper deck this trip and last (but oddly, I couldn't hear them when I went outside on the ground--which means something, but I don't know what).  I thought it would be fun to drive over to where I heard them last year, but I couldn't find it.  There are several narrow dirt roads, weaving around cabins and up and down hills, and I only saw one other vehicle (an elderly couple in a four-wheeler).  

Eventually, I went back to the lake, which is criminally low already--the stream on the other end of the dam which is where irrigation water goes is already just muddy puddles, which usually happens around August or September--and walked around in the grassy area beyond the lake, where there are still shallow ponds, at least (those tend to dry up by the time school starts again around Labor Day).  I heard frogs, but the second I would walk to where I could see the water, they'd fall silent, definitely seeing me.  

We got another one of those skies where the water is so clear that the cloudy sky was perfectly reflected in it.  I took several pictures.

Unfortunately, I ruined a handful of them by trying to stick myself in there too.

When I got home--I didn't do a song this week, but this weekend, we're all coming down here again to stain the outside of the cabin, especially where the sun has dried and bleached it, so I'll have plenty of opportunity--I saw a rather large potgut on the stairs going up to the deck, despite the long boards my brother or my dad cut to keep them off of it (there's one at the bottom of the stairs and one at the top), and I got my phone out to record his antics.  There was a squeaking sound from under the woodpile, like an animal signaling another animal, and when I came around the side of the cabin, I saw something large move in the shadows down below.

The potgut (you might call it a ground squirrel), like a gymnast, climbed up on the outside of the railing, got up to the deck, and ran across it, all the way to the ledge on the other side, and jumped off, hitting the ground with a heavy thump, then took off into the woods.  I didn't know if it was afraid of me or--

And then I saw something else under the woodpile, something larger, but by the time I raised the phone to film it, most of its body had disappeared underneath.  I kept hearing the squeaking, and found that a large woodchuck had gotten caught in one of my brother's traps, and was calling out its distress, but what was freaking out the other one was a surprisingly large badger.  It stuck its head out of the woodpile and looked at me, and I did get a shot of it in the shadows there, but because I had turned my camera to catch the potgut up above me, the video image was on its side and unusable.**

(I didn't dare get any closer to the woodchuck, so this is the best photo I have)

Even so, I found it interesting to be that close to a wild animal, and one I've not encountered before.  It looked at me with the expression you see on the faces of bears, and then, after I approached the trap to look at the woodchuck, I heard it growling from beneath the woodpile.  Growling . . . because it wants the animal in the trap for its own?  I really don't know.

I texted my brother up on the dam, and he said he'd either have to poison or shoot the badger (although it could go away on its own, I suppose), but for me to keep my distance, since they're mean.  He didn't have to say so--the sound of the growling under the logs was pretty chilling, and would've been much scarier if I hadn't seen the badger first and known what it was.

Before I went in for the night, I reset the largest of my brother's traps, right there at the base of the woodpile, and put a couple of dried banana slices in there from the trail mix I like.  I didn't know if the trap was big enough for the badger, but I thought I'd at least try.  If I caught it, perhaps my brother would look at me with respect, something I certainly never got from our father. 

So, lastly, I got very few words written--so few it's practically unforgivable--and started to fall asleep around one-thirty.  And that's fine--I hadn't taken a nap, I had exercised, I had read, I had taken a walk, etc.--people get tired at the end of the day.  But I forced a few more push-ups out of me (I could've done more, I realized at the time, but didn't) and sat down to get to at least two hundred words.

There's a story I was planning to run on the podcast years ago, that I recorded in 2017, and finally got around to editing in May (it's a longer explanation than that, but who cares?), and I had worried that I'd lost the file (or some of it), but I found it on my laptop yesterday, opened it, and it had the last two pages or so--and only that, which leads me to believe that I typed it up from my notebook separately, then forgot to combine them.***

Words Today: 1040

Words In June: 1649

*And maybe you think I'm being too hard on myself, having practically passed out on the couch a week ago.  Maybe you're thinking, "Dude, if your body was that tired, maybe you needed it."  To which I say, perhaps.  And thank you for saying so.

**I once did a whole Storage Unit Serenade that way, where the phone had recorded a vertical image horizontally, and I could never use it (I believe I did the theme to GOLDENEYE, with the "You'll never know how I watched you from the shadows as a child" bit I've always dug).

***Even this is an oversimplification.  The recording I edited had several changes from the typed version I was looking at, which means I did one more draft that seems to have disappeared.  However, it is SO much easier to listen to a recording and type in the little changes than to have to type up the whole thing again.