Wild flowers and Evil Squirrels

Sorry for the long post.

Time for an update on my summer since I didn't do a whole lot of blogging cause of the craziness of it all. Yup it was crazy and its the end of summer. Boooooooo Hissssssss. But on the upside there are only a few more months till spring. I would rather avoid thinking about the misery months to some. That's what I like to call them.

Lets see, there was my poor kitty Meetso. He got really sick. So sick I thought he was going to kick the bucket. The poor guy got so sick he stopped eating all together. So I brought the poor guy to the vet. He hated it of course but at least he's not a mean cat. He does have great manners after all. So he had a blood test to make sure he didn't have any major diseases. He did not thank goodness. He ended up getting a shot and some antibiotics that I had to orally give him every day twice a day. Also not fun especially when you need two people and the person does not follow instructions well making the situation worse. But then finally he was all better. All up to snuff and a terror of his domain. 

Also did I mention my doves, my sneaky doves pulled another fast one and made two more babies. Didn't expect them and neither did I expect them to be speckled again. One white with peach colouring and the other white with regular colouring. I'll have to take some pics when I can. Probably when they're indoors for the winter. Bright little fellas. Btw they are boy and girl. They always come that way with doves. Also they learned all kinds of things really fast too.

A few weeks later if I remember correctly one night when I when to feed Meetso after taking my bath. About 3am I noised water on the floor in the basement. Not too unusual when its warm outside and cool inside especially downstairs. But then it was coming from underneath a door to the water heater room/ small storage. I go and open the door and there was water spitting out of a pipe onto the ceiling if you would call it that on to the water heater. I was a little worried that it might damage the tank. But I guess it didn't after my dad repaired it the next day. Luckily every thing worked find and the pipe hasn't leaked since.

Then we ended up find out we had a huge wasp colony in our fruit cellar. I first noised something odd when I went in there to get a pop. At first I thought it was another water leak of some kind. So went outside to see if there was a leak outside since we do have a water faucet there. But then I noised lots of yellow jackets coming in and out of a little hole in the wall. Hummmmm Then went back inside and I went closer in a corner of the room to take a so called closer look. I made some noise by knocking on the wall and sure enough realized that we have a very large and angry colony. I also noised that there was a certain spot on the ceiling where the drywall was very thin. I was very concerned about the whole thing but nothing was done about it till it was too late.

A few days latter mom was the unfortunate one to go there and take care of some business but didn't get too far. The wasps apparently finally broke thru that spot of concern and were now flying around the cellar. Luckily she didn't get stung. But unfortunately one family member got stung indirectly and unintentionally. Eventually every thing was brought under control and the whole colony was killed off as a result of a nasty and expensive insecticide spray. It was then after leaving the room to its self for a few days and pulled out a sample of the hive when we realized how large the mass yellow jackets were.

I think they were there for at least 2 years.

But of course as a result we had another problem.

Poor Meetso came home one night, the same night we took care of the big wasp problem. So he came home from one of his kitty adventures only to be licking his tail area profusely and acting strange. He ran straight inside like a cartoon kitty. He wasn't acting any better the next day and then after that stopped going out all together. Forcing him to go out and get some fresh air wasn't any better since I noised he would go nuts when any mosquito or other flying insect would land on his butt. No one believed me and I think no one believes me still that he can act so strange and all of a sudden. Of course I knew that it might be a possibility that a left over angry wasp had stung him at night when he when to explore the bushes at the front as he brushed by. So there fore any flying insect especially mosquitoes would send him in to a tizzy. He would even try to bite them in mid air. It was just crazy.

Well none the less this summer fiasco lasted several weeks. I think it was a month's worth of trouble for Meetso but just a few days ago he finally got out of it. He seems now back to his king of the jungle self. In fact he landed him self a tasty tidbit with wings the other morning. A morning dove. Unfortunately I found the evidence of his messy dinner all over his favorite dinning spot.

Speaking of things to eat did I mention the squirrel invasion? No I don't eat squirrels but I do or rather we as in the family like to eat tomatoes. In recent years they managed to eat all of our peaches but this year there was none. It was the bad winter we had but my dad mentioned that it also might be the age of the tree. So anyways the squirrels decided that they would help them selves to every beef steak tomato growing our vine, ripe or not whether it was too big to carry or not. When it was too big or behind a fence they would just take a bite out of it to claim it as their own. That was the last straw! That and the fact they then tried to eat all the seeds in my doves cage. Some how they little thieves got their little stick paws in there and snatched out every seed. By morning my poor doves had nothing to eat. Oh yeah did I mention they mooched all the wild bird seed I put out for the wild birds too.

So yeah, I decided that it was time to do something about the most annoying creatures ever besides mosquitoes and do something about it. I when to the store and bought a small trap. A nice little humane trap to trap the little buggers. So then I set up the trap which was fairly easy and filled it with extremely tasty things like peanut buttered bread, some peanuts, some acorns, sunflower seeds and a trail of bird seed leading to the trap. I set the trap in a small area next to our garage and under a pile of wood, piled up near a wall and then waited. I didn't wait long till it caught one of the little buggers.

My dad then helped me oust the guy leaving him at a nice wooded area with sparsely populated with people and farms. A really nice place for a bunch of little bushy tailed jerks. Too good for them really but what ever. So far I caught 4 of the little jerks. I'm still aiming for two young trouble makers still hanging around. So you heard me little bushy tailed thieves, I'm coming for you.

Oh and actually I do have one thing that wasn't so crazy that I found. It was another interesting weed that's edible. So I took a few pics of it. It looks a lot like rhubarb only its not.

Apparently its another European import called the Common Burdock.

You can eat the boiled roots in its first year and in the second you can boil and eat the stocks and flowers with some salt and butter. Neat stuff! Sounds way better then rhubarb any day. Yuck!

Oh yeah I heard you can candy the flowers or something. I guess for more uses go look for the info online of course. 

Burdock's just about to bloom. ^

Burdock's blooming. ^