Category Archives: Personal

Come Back, Little Zoe

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Our cat Zoe has disappeared. Leah let him out Thursday night around 11. He ate a little dry food in the garage and we haven’t seen him since. Normally when he stays out overnight, he’s at the door first thing for his food. But not Friday morning.

We’ve looked in all the places he frequents, but there is absolutely no sign of him.

We’ve had cats that stay outside ever since we moved up here, and, although there are potential predators around, there have never been any problems. I have seen coyotes in the woods and on Fouche Gap Road some distance away, but we have never seen one anywhere near the house. I don’t think foxes are responsible; they have eaten cat food in the driveway with the cats looking on, and the cats and the foxes never bother each other.

Zoe doesn’t stray far from the house, so we don’t think he has wandered off and found a new home. Besides, all of our closer neighbors know who he belongs to, so they would let us know.

It just doesn’t make any sense.

So far he has been missing for 24 hours. We haven’t completely given up hope that he will show up again. He hasn’t been the most rewarding cat to own, but Leah is really attached to him.

Catching up

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A few things have happened in the last week, so this is a catch-up post.

First, we had to call an ambulance last Friday, October 17, because Leah was having severe abdominal pain and vomiting. This is the second time we’ve had to do that. The first time was in 2011. That resulted in surgery to fix an intestinal blockage. The blockage was the caused by adhesions and scarring from the colon cancer surgery she had back in 1999.

Leah has had relatively minor episodes several times this year. An x-ray in July had shown what was characterized as a chronic, partial blockage. A colonoscopy in early September (Leah’s second this year) did not show anything in the colon, so we (and presumably the doctors) were left not really knowing what was going on.

This time there was no question that something bad was happening. Fortunately, Leah began feeling better fairly quickly and the blockage, if that is, indeed what it was, resolved with no surgery. She had one CT scan and an x-ray while she was in the ER, and at least two x-rays after she was admitted. The first scans they took during this stay seemed consistent with the July x-ray, but a later scan where they followed an x-ray opaque liquid through her small intestine showed quick passage, indicating no blockage in the small intestine. At one time her surgeon thought it might be gastroenteritis, but that did not seem to be the case.

In any event, Leah came home on Tuesday and has been on a liquid/soft diet since. They told her at the hospital that it might take two weeks to get back to normal.

That means two weeks without huevos rancheros.

Once Leah made it home, I started tramping over our new property to find the middle of the lot, which is where we plan to build. The most work I did was clearing a wide enough path to drive our side-by-side 4-wheeler (a Kawasaki Mule) up to the site with a chainsaw and other tools. There are lots and lots of trees, ranging from small enough to cut with large lopping shears to large enough to require a lot of planning before cutting with a chainsaw. Clearing for construction will take a bulldozer, and the operator said he wants the trees uncut so he can uproot them with his dozer. That’s fine with me.

And, finally, on Thursday I performed an experiment with a free-range dog. Leah has been telling me to take Zeke with me and let him roam freely while I work. She thinks it will let him get all his wandering urges out of his system. So I put him up in the front of the Mule and we rode up to the lot.

Zeke wandered around while I worked, and gradually left orbit. I didn’t see him again for about two hours, when he plodded up my newly-made path to greet me. One a scale of one to 10 (with one being perfectly clean and 10 being completely covered with mud and cow manure) he was about a three. Not too bad, but he needed a bath.

He was tired. Here he is resting after Leah and I went back up so I could show her what I had been doing. The tree with the yellow ribbon around it is the approximate center of the lot.

zeke_at_the_lot

Later in the evening we began hearing some noises from Zeke’s direction. He was lying on his bed at the end of the sofa. And then a revolting odor wafted up in my direction. I wasn’t sure which end of the dog it came from, but eventually we figured out that he was burping. That continued through the evening. I had to keep a box of matches nearby. He woke Leah up at about 5:30, and Leah woke me from a dream (I didn’t mind; I was dreaming about writing reports at work.) I had to take Zeke outside to relieve himself. He has been having intestinal disturbances of his own all day today (Friday), and his burps can still cause paint to peel. I’m hoping he can work this out of his system.

The good news is that he came back to me. That’s encouraging. But I don’t think the wanderlust is over, and when he wanders, it seems he’s living up to the omnivore name. I’ll try this experiment again. Maybe Leah’s prediction will be right.

 

Surprise success

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It looks like our search for a building lot is over, and I’m surprised.

Leah and I have been looking for property to build a house so we can sell our current house, which is too large and requires more maintenance than I’ll be comfortable doing much further into the future (like next month). We had narrowed our choices down to four, and then two pieces of property in this general area. Both of the semifinalists are easy walking distance from our house. The closest property is within sight of our mailbox.

The owners of that property had paid a lot for the lot, at least for this type of rural property in this region, so they were asking a lot, although less than their purchase price. We had intended to use the proceeds from the sale of Leah’s parents’ house for the land purchase, but the proceeds turned out to be less than we hoped. We called our neighbor real estate broker and asked him to give the owners an offer anyway. We had an absolute limit that was nearly 40 percent less than the asking price. After a few days, the owners agreed to sell at that price.

We never expected the owners to take our offer; it was just too low. I had already started doing mental site preparation on the second of the two pieces of property. That property could have been bought for less than we had budgeted, so it was easy to make the mental transition.

Now I’m having to make a second transition, back to the original property we considered. Once it’s ours, we’ll walk the property lines and find the center, where we expect to locate the house. We’ll get our level out and see how much slope there is and whether we’ll have to have a basement. (Leah doesn’t want a basement. I’m neutral.) We’ll figure where a driveway goes. There will be much use of a chainsaw and an axe during this period, along with a 100-foot tape measure, yellow tape, and actual, physical marker pins.

Then we’ll start looking at house plans. Once my mother’s house sells, we’ll start construction. We hope to get a lot done, but the rest will have to wait till we’ve sold our current house. At that point, we should have a driveway, well, septic system and a temporary power drop at the new site, plus perhaps the foundation and some additional work. Once our house sells, we’ll move our travel trailer up to the building site and live there while we finish construction.

Leah is not looking forward to this, and, to be honest, it will be inconvenient. To say the least. But it will be a strong incentive to keep the construction moving along.

Right now the broker is preparing a contract. Unless something goes wrong, we will soon end up owning five acres down the street, and we’ll be looking at starting a process that will be long and a little intimidating.

I contracted our current house, and did a significant amount of manual labor during construction, including a good deal of site prep, digging and framing footing forms, moving and packing dirt and gravel, putting in the subgrade sewer lines and acting as the framer’s helper. My brother and I lifted many five-gallon buckets of concrete into a 10-foot-tall form where the wood burning stove hearth is in the basement. I contracted the plumbing rough-in, the electrical work, and the floors. Then with some help from family and friends, I finished the interior: paint, stain, trim, doors, bathroom vanities, toilets, and sinks. So I have a pretty good idea of what the process will be like.

That’s both good and bad.

 

Dogs dogs dogs

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Leah and I have lost count of the number of dogs that have been abandoned on the mountain since we moved here. We have managed to get almost all of them adopted, but we still worry about the next time. Wednesday morning we thought it was the next time. At about 5 AM we heard some strange noises outside, right about the time Zeke jumped up and started barking. I went to the kitchen window and heard what I thought was some kind of hound baying not too far behind our neighbors’ house. Then I heard what sounded like a clumsy deer crashing through the yard. I caught a glimpse of a black and white dog running across the driveway, but he disappeared into the night. We went back to bed, hoping he or they would have found their way home by the time we got up. No such luck. When I took the dogs out for their walk a few hours later, this is what we saw.

dogsdogsdogs

There are actually three basset hounds, two females and a male, although it’s hard to see all of them here. The younger female looked like she had given birth recently. I figured the male, who was unfixed, was the father. The other female had gray hair on her muzzle, so maybe she is grandma. They were friendly, the younger female especially. Zeke is typically frantic to get to any person or dog who comes to the gate, but he was not too bad this time.

I opened the gate to check the dogs out. The female jumped up on my legs, but by the time I was able to get a photo, she was already on her way back to Earth, ears flying.

flyingears

None of them was wearing a collar, of course. Leah and I were dreading the process of finding the owner, if he was not responsible for dumping them, or a new owner if he was.

We thought we should check with our neighbors down on Fouche Gap Road, since that seemed to be the direction they had come from. I wanted to walk our dogs down there anyway, but I didn’t want three hounds running along with us and possibly getting hit. I was relieved when they didn’t seem interested in following us, but before we had gone far, the younger female appeared behind us. She was apparently the pack leader, because the other two soon followed.

It turned out to be a good thing in the end. Our neighbor said they were, indeed, missing three dogs, and I turned around to point them out just as they were coming down the driveway to their house.

Our neighbors had found the three wandering a few miles away near some commercial buildings. There was an ad about the dogs in the local newspaper’s lost-and-found section. According to our neighbor, the owner said that the dog I thought had given birth was actually still pregnant.

In any event, the three bassets should soon be heading home, and I hope the owner takes better care of them in the future.

Truck retrieval on the mountain

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Monday afternoon around 4 Zeke, who was out on the front walk, let us know that a young woman had come to our front gate. She was panting from exertion and looked ready to cry. She told us that she, her mother, and her baby sister were stuck in the woods down at the end of Wildlife Trail.

They had been looking for scrap metal to earn money and had decided to drive down the overgrown road that leads into the woods and down to the bottom of the mountain. The girl said they were about a half mile in and that they had driven over a dirt hump and then got stuck on the other side. I was hoping it was not the “dirt hump” where I turn around on the infrequent occasions when I walk the dogs that way, but, of course, it was. I turn around at that point because beyond there, the road becomes so much rockier and steeper that it’s hard even to walk. The truck was truly stuck, probably closer to a quarter of a mile in. When the girl tried to back it up, all it did was spin a tire in a cloud of rubber smoke, even with me on the back bumper.

I thought for a while, and the only plan I could come up with was to see if our neighbor Gary would be willing to use his tractor to pull the truck out. Fortunately, he was at home and was willing to give it a try.

The road close to the truck was too steep for the tractor, so we pooled our chain resources and got sufficient length to stretch from the back bumper of the truck to the back of Gary’s tractor.

tractor

The picture doesn’t do justice to the slope here. The younger woman said it was 90 degrees, but in reality, it might have approached 30 degrees. Not vertical, but steep enough.

Gary and I thought if we got the truck up to the dirt hump, the truck would have enough traction to back out by itself. That was not the case. Gary had to drag the truck almost all the way out of the woods. The road was covered with damp pine needles and leaves and even when the slope was not as bad, the truck still couldn’t get enough traction to back up on its own.

truck and tractor

All of us eventually ended up back in civilization. Gary drove his tractor home, the older woman pulled into our driveway, and I followed. I think their truck was running well enough for them to make it back home.

Gary and I had left the young woman and the baby with Leah while the mother (We are unclear about the exact relationship among these three) accompanied us to drive the truck. That gave Leah and the dogs a chance to spend some time with them. She told Leah she thought most people would have told them to go away. The life story of the three was not happy. It involved a double-amputee husband, drug use, jail time, and health problems, along with a lack of money to pay for treatment and not qualifying for Medicaid (probably as a result of our governor’s refusal to accept federal money to expand Medicaid).

The girl told Leah she wanted a job doing something to help children, like being a pediatrician. While they talked, she got a phone call from someone who said that she could borrow money and make a career, all she had to do was first send them some money.

They seemed like nice people who had never had much of a chance, just the kind that vultures like to prey on. I suspect that if they had had to call a tow truck, it would have been a financial catastrophe for them.

The older woman (Leah thought the young woman said the older woman was 39 or so, but she looked older) fell in love with Zeke. She got down on the floor with Zeke and wanted to take him home.

She had already hugged Gary and shaken my hand in thanks. When they left, she asked if she could bring Zeke a bone for Christmas.