This blog ends here.

Interested parties are referred to www.goingurban-dbd.blogspot.com

Back with the spirit of the blog.

This, I think, is a former chicken. All I found was feathers in a distant field.

Victim, I'd guess, of an airborne predator, a hawk or similar. That, ladies and gentlemen, accounts for the price of free range eggs.

This is rather alarming.

According to the mechanic where I left the Beetle the cause of all that rattling and clonking was that a wheel had come loose. I did have the car serviced a couple of weeks ago and that entailed removing the wheels. It seems odd though that, if the dealership didn't tighten it, it should have taken two weeks to fall off.

Things I like about it:

- incidental fitness, I can't be doing with manscaping but lifting things, hauling things, all the time, you do stay in some sort of shape.

- space, yes there's a nosy neighbour but he's gone half the year, mostly there's little hassle from people.

- chickens, it's nice to have good eggs and it's also nice to sell them.

Things I don't like about it:

- the miles and miles in the car.

- not being able to walk to a pub. The lack of casual socialisation with strangers.

On a lighter note.

We have too many roosters. There's the original one, now pushed around by late comers. Two white ones I've taken to calling Dave and Andrew and now, one of the heritage breed straight run chicks has grown into this:

I'm pretty sure that's not a hen. I suppose I'll call him Colin.

At 10:19

this morning Anna collected her car, the Element, and drove off to a new life. What a city boy is going to do with 100+ chickens, two horses, a donkey, three cats, a dog and a tractor is anyone's guess. I don't suppose I'll be moving that lot to an apartment convenient for work.

The rest of that weekend.

I had a mishap on the way to the lake, one tyre went all Ford Explody. Leaving the car on three legs.

I thought something must have seized for it to fly apart so comprehensively but the wheel still turns and the tow truck guy thought it might just be a bad tyre. I doubt that considering that we drove from Colorado on it. We'll have to see once a new one's installed.

I had it hauled. Astounding service from the CAA, the driver offered to take me anywhere and then to take the vehicle anywhere else for repair. He also mentioned a place where they sell eighties Land Cruisers, for $12,000 a piece, at that price this one might be worth some restoration. Not that it's for me to say.

Something different.

It was the end-of-summer long weekend and, with Anna at her parents', it was time for a change. Juliette and I decided to try gliding. Here she looks underwhelmed by the prospect.



To be fair, she had just come off a night shift.



Her glider was a new a shiny job.

There's a lot of pushing aircraft around involved in gliding, that and running alongside holding the wing up while the craft gains speed.

Eventually though you do get towed into the air.

My ride was less new and shiny, there was even a small hole in the floor that later offered an alarming view of the ground rushing up to meet me.

This is the view as we took off. The structure below is a bull fighting ring, not something one expects to see in rural Ontario.

This is a passing hang glider. Due to the lack of mountains hereabouts hang gliders are towed to 2000' by an aeroplane. I'm told that, in order to launch, the hang gliderist is pulled along on a skateboard.

Since they launch from grass I think it's probably a contraption in the manner of a skateboard rather than an actual one but who knows? People who soar thousands of feet while hanging on to a kite may be capable of any sort of lunacy.

Hang glider pilots can't see up while glider pilots can't see down, there are lots of tow planes buzzing around. A collision would be ill advised so gliding is not quite the chilled cerebral activity one might think. It's more like sailing in the Toronto Harbour or driving on the M25 than an afternoon of quiet contemplation.

Today's lesson in horsekeeping.

Firstly, for the person who loved the afternoon sky, here's a morning picture. This is fog over a lake I pass on the way to work.

There's a similar amount of fog over the fields.

Anyway, lots of burrs about at this time of year. Austin managed to get his tail into one huge knot.

I unpicked it back to swishability with, er, help, from the donkey.

In the course of which I learned never again to stand behind a horse full of pears.

Oh-oh.

It's lovely here, warm and sunny until it gets dark. Some trees though now look like this:

It's all coming again.

Pear time again.

A colleague has pear trees, trees that produce far more pears than he's about to eat. I went and fetched them setting off a feeding frenzy.

Here Dixie pauses for a rare breath.

Donkeys, of course, can breathe through their ears and don't need to stop.

Anything that fell from the equines was pounced upon

suggesting once again that you don't want to fall down injured among a flock of hungry chickens.

Making It.

Just now someone came to the door. "Do you have eggs?"

"We do have eggs", we said, together.

We took her five bucks, thrilled. Selling eggs to the farmer's wife in an area where very many people have chickens is validation of a sort. We're excited. We're odd, of course, but we're excited.

Neighbourly Interactions.

We can go for weeks, months even, without seeing the neighbours then, like buses, they all come at once. Glen was over on Friday, distributing potatoes. Anna gave him eggs in trade. He mentioned our rooster, the one that's decided to live out and crows from 3am. He mentioned the donkey that used to go off like a foghorn at 4am. "When Laverne sold you that house he had a clause in the sale agreement saying that you knew this was a farming area and there might be tractors and pesticides and so on." He said. I said I remembered. "What we should have had was a clause protecting us from you and your farming activities". I took that to mean that we're getting to be accepted around here.



He bitched about Canada Post, apparently they've been auditing mailboxes and this is suddenly offensive to them:

They have, of course, been delivering to it for decades. Now it has to be moved ten feet. Ten feet to the right would put it in the middle of the driveway so I suppose they mean ten feet the other way, then again, Canada Post is not renowned for efficiency or for logic so maybe they do want it in the driveway. Neither move has obvious merit.


Merv, our nearest neighbour, has also been ordered to move his mailbox, from his house to ours. I hope Canada Post doesn't expect him to move over here as well. What Canada Post wants, of course, is not to have to deliver the mail, they want everyone to use a communal mailbox such as they have in housing projects. They should perhaps be mindful of the trend to the use of email, we don't actually need their service.


Anyway, we dutiully moved Merv and Bev's mailbox next to ours.




Now we can both get letters from Canada Post complaining that I don't move the snow quickly enough. The base of Merv's mailbox is 41 and three-quarter inches off the ground. There will be another audit and they may discover that it isn't the demanded 42". Maybe they won't notice that but will detect that ours is 43" off the ground and demand that it be lowered. I'm not converting by the way, perhaps the only merit of Canada Post is that it's not metrified.


While we were out there measuring and remeasuring, Ian from up the street stopped to chat. He said that he had crashed into the tree that had fallen across the road a week or so ago. He was incensed that, as soon as he stopped, windshield shattered, the lights on a police car parked at the scene came on and a cop came over to discuss whether or not hitting a tree on the road in the dark was careless driving. "Serve and Protect" it says on the cars. Ian felt neither served nor protected. He did however say that he has a huge fallen maple tree and no longer has a wood stove. He wants to borrow the tractor to move some decorative rocks around (well, actually, to steal them from the gravel pit) and offered the wood in trade.


I went over with theLand Cruiser and the chain saw. The tree was in a gully lined with three foot tall wet grass and it was raining. I decided to try going down there anyway. I sawed and loaded and, with trepidation, set about driving out. As mentioned in past posts, the LC doesn't have a great heating and venting system so I couldn't see out. I blasted up the side of the ditch, turned hard right where I remembered the driveway to be and shot out on to it.


Alas, I hadn't considered that there were several yards of top soil in a pile on the driveway. Thunk. The LC came to rest atop the pile.

(Poor picture quality due to there being a thunderstorm in progress). I fetched the tractor but to no avail. In order to get the angle to pull I had to be on sand and the wheels just dug in. Fortunately Ian is a truck driver (as an aside, one might note that that's quite some house to be building up from a shed on a truck driver's wages).

The Peterbilt pulled the LC off the pile in seconds.

I didn't want to drive into the ditch again so, for the next load I tried going around through a wheat field (a track through the field takes us to the gravel pit, I wasn't squashing the crop). The track was blocked by yet another fallen tree.

I didn't pause to cut that one up but I did stop to wonder about the weather. I don't think this area used to have such winds and so many tornadoes. Global warming brought about by chain saw use, no doubt. I took two LC loads and a tractor bucket load of wood away, half a cord maybe and there's very much more.

It's an attractive idea, heating the house for free from a sustainable resource. Shame it's such hard work!

Brigid swimming.

On the weekend we went to watch a bit of one of Anna's battles. It was on a lake so when Brigid seemed in danger of overheating I took her in, she seemed game for swimming so I later took her and Charlie here, the Pine River, which is very near us:

She followed Charlie who followed my thrown stick,

and that was it, next problem getting her out of there.

She's not the swimmer that Charlie is, not yet anyway,

but then he has ocean experience.

Fort Erie

In one of the stranger developments in this country life, I have taken up War of 1812 re-enacting. It started back in fall when the Royal Newfoundland Regiment did an event at the museum, the sadly defunct Traces of Our Past. For someone who loves history and doesn't mind the public, it is a great hobby.

Last weekend was one of the bigger events in the area, at Fort Erie. I stayed with the Glengary Light Infantry, seen below with their commander.

They were later fired upon by the Americans with this cannon.Re-enacting is a very family-friendly hobby. Some units are known as being wilder than others, but even in the wild ones, kids run through the camp with toy muskets looking too cute for words.

Of course, if we were being completely accurate, that little boy would still be in a dress. But you have to make some concessions to modern times when children are involved.

I guess between heading up the Dufferin County Virtual War Memorial and re-enacting, my life has taken a strangely militaristic turn of late.

It's an ill wind.

Usually August brings an end to the good summer weather, it gets humid and there are thunderstorms. This year there wasn't good summer weather but we're now having humidity and ferocious thunderstorms anyway. Some trees across the street were brought down by a storm, one blocking the road. They were cleared up with astonishing efficiency; gone before we could get a picture. The minor branches were left in a field giving these cows a rare treat of leaves:

There's been so much rain, and so much ferocious rain, that I'm now worried about the lane to the barn washing away. I've been enhancing the driveway by stealing bucket loads of gravel from the disused pit and spreading it around. That works well for the driveway but each bucket, containing maybe a yard, takes twenty minutes to fetch and spread; the laneway would require hours and hours and, even then, something glutinous would be needed to bond the gravel. Ah well, that problem can stay on the bottom of the list of things to be done while I struggle with the ones at the top.

RIP Ronnie.

Hit by a car early this morning. It looked like a single blow, perhaps a merciful end for a cat in decline. Here she is in better times.

She was lucky to have had Dana and Anna to rescue her from the alley, at least she had a couple of years of regular meals and a warm place to sleep.

A weekend with minimal rain!

Shock, horror! Great progress on the deck rail and on the unstained wall of the house.



We also fitted in a rodeo and a gun show. A gun show in Canada is a strange business. Prior to 1985 there was no regulation of munitions at all, when regulations were introduced any examples of banned weapons in private hands were exempted and the holders of such "prohibited" weapons were allowed to acquire other prohibited weapons. (There's some provision for inheriting the permit with a weapon but the details escape me). Thus, at the gun show there were Thompson submachine guns, AK47s and a grenade launcher all at bargain basement prices as it's only legal to sell them to a diminishing pool of people who already have a assault rifle.

The gun show iinspired us to some redneck entertainment in the gravel pit.

Environmentally friendly redneckism, of course, cans not bottles. And imported cans at that:

"Damn dogs, digging up the lawn"

I thought, unfairly. The divots weren't from the dogs at all.

The divots were from the loose horses and loose donkey. I knew that one day it would happen and that day was this week. I drove a load of chicken feed into the field and, on the way out, misjudged how quickly them equines over there could be these equines rushing past me over here. I ran to the barn and fetched two halters, I couldn't see a third, and a bucket of oats. Anna had heard the commotion and was outside to shoo the horses off the road. Austin's a pig and went for the oats, he was easily haltered, I put a rope around Dixie's neck and we led those two home. The donkey however wanted to see more and charged up and down the hills to our house and the neighbour's house. They're fast and nimble, donkeys, like Brigid. I confess to having enjoyed watching him go.

How much has it rained?

So much that we have a mushroom crop:

It's been a disaster for sanding and for hay making, we were lucky to get our bales first as now the hay is only good for cows. Even then, Glen, the farmer, is using some sort of machine to squish it a bit, somehow making it more palatable.

The dogs don't care, they march dutifully to the pasture

and frolic on command

then, when properly covered in mud, they trek back up to the house and flop on the furniture.