News From Hawkhill Acres

Does anyone else have “issues” with their spell checker? Mine keeps changing words on me. I write “poltroon” and it suggests “pontoon”, which is just silly. Pontoons don’t have livers as any rational person knows. Poltroons, however, do. A poltroon, I’m not, but lily-livered, I am. A species of lily is one of the supplements I take on a regular basis for my formerly wonky – but now pretty healthy – liver. It looks like I may outlive the warranty on my new toaster and may even go on past the sell-by date on Geek Daddy’s latest package of snack cakes.

Of course, this all depends on whether the rest of my vital organs can withstand the rough and tumble of life chez Hawkhill Acres and its environs. This week has given my heart and brain a real workout and made an impression on my largest organ, my skin, too, with a heat rash. It all started when the ol’ Durango started blowing warm air instead of cold air from the AC vents. I made the mistake of mentioning it to Geek Daddy and before I knew what was happening, he had the hood up and was charging the AC with some refrigerant he bought at a yard sale. I didn’t think this was a good idea, but there isn’t much you can do to stop GD when he’s on fire to save money.

He said it was working fine when he was done with the recharge, but that wasn’t my take on it when I drove it to town the next day. Something was making a loud noise every time I turned on the AC.  And because the AC is somehow involved in the defroster system in my Durango, I couldn’t use defrost without that jet engine noise either. I turned off the AC and sweltered all the way home, where I made an appointment with my favorite mechanic, Alan, for the next day.

Alan is a mechanical genius and charges very reasonable rates, but he has an even bigger talent that is the reason that Daughter insists on going with me every time I go there. When you hear what this talent is, you’ll want to take your vehicle to him too. Alan has taught his Golden Retriever to do something that I’ve only read about in books. As a matter of fact, I thought it was a myth until I saw his dog, Biscuit, do it.

Alan places a dog biscuit on Biscuit’s nose and has her stick her nose straight up until he claps his hands. When he does, she flips the biscuit into the air with her nose and then catches it in her mouth, almost faster than your eyes can follow it. While I’m not a big fan of teaching dogs party tricks other than the basic obedience ones, for some reason this just tickles the heck out of me and Biscuit seems to enjoy the heck out of it too. I’m not saying I jump for joy when my car starts making a funny noise or pulls to the left, but it does take some of the tedium and pain out of car repairs when your mechanic moonlights as a dog whisperer.

Another thing that has been amusing the easily amused is a spider who took up residence on my driver’s side mirror for awhile this summer. She’s thick-bodied and black and Daughter noticed her about a month ago as the little arachnid crawled along her web as we breezed along at around 35 mph. As you’ll no doubt remember, Daughter is a scientific type, into animals and ecology and has a love for critters great and small. Even ones with 8 legs, unlike her arachnophobic father. (Of course, if you read about Geek Daddy’s unfortunate encounter with an arachnid with attitude, you’ll understand why he’s not a big fan of the octopods.)

However, Daughter and I have no beef with spiders, as long as they don’t get under the bedclothes or behind the toilet tank – we remove them if they do – so we were fascinated to find that one had set up housekeeping on our car. We were a bit worried though about whether Herself would be able to hang on at high speeds and we wondered what would happen to her web when we whizzed down Rt 95 to Portland or New Hampshire. We needn’t have worried. Even when we went on vacation and  jittered down the washboard roads that lead from Greenville Jct to Kokadjo (population: Not Many as the sign says), the little lady just crawled behind the mirror to re-emerge and make repairs to her web when we stopped for the night.

Every morning for four days, when we left our motel, we’d check to see if she was still there and she was, with a new web woven while we slept. She made it through thunderstorms, blazing hot temps on the 4th of July, dust and grit and pebbles thrown up by the tires and even a direct hit by a small boy’s head when he walked into the mirror because he was watching a fire engine go by. Daughter and I began to take her for granted, but we kind of wondered how she’d do when winter came.

I also wondered what would induce a spider to stay in such a place. Why, when we parked near a nice hedge or field didnt she leave for greener and more stable pastures? What possessed this spider to have such an adventurous streak? Was she, perhaps, born on an RV or did her mom lay her eggs on a tractor trailer truck? Was Papa a rolling stone or did he live on one? I’ll never know. Neither will I know why, the day that we came home from getting the AC fixed and parked in the garage, she apparently decided to leave the mirror for a dark corner next to Geek Daddy’s workbench. When we parked the car, she was there, just emerging onto her web. The next morning, she and the web were gone.

When we searched the garage, we found many, many spiders, but only one that looked like our spider. We’re pretty sure it’s her and want to believe that it is and that she just decided that it was time to settle down and leave the road. Maybe she’s going to lay eggs. We hope so. Maybe someday when we get into the car, we’ll see another web on the mirror and it’ll have a smaller version of her in it. Or maybe Geek Daddy will notice her and call me to remove her. If he does, I think I’ll put her in the basement behind the washer so that I can visit her when I do the laundry.  I guess I’d better let Geek Daddy know where I put her though. For some reason, he has a thing about spiders. And they’re such gentle creatures too.

Throwing caution (and concern about gas prices) to the wind, Daughter and I decided to take a roadtrip yesterday to the bustling metropolis of Bangor. Home to Stephen King, a huge statue of Paul Bunyan and a pretty nice Annual Folk Festival, Bangor is also home to over 31,000 people. They’re sprawled out all over Bangor’s 34 square miles and – as far as I can tell – every one of them keeps their yard light on all night. What is this with the yard lights? I’m lucky in that I live in a very isolated spot with no neighbors nearer than a half mile through heavy woods, so it’s nothing to me if my neighbors want to mount klieg lights on their sheds.But for those who pile into neighborhoods together, it’s getting so that night time is bright time, instead of when our eyes and bodies get a much-needed respite from bright lights. Research has shown that breast cancer rates are lower for women who sleep in darkened rooms and it just makes sense that, as mammals, we’re programmed to thrive with sunny days and dark nights. Else, why would the human race have survived this far? How much longer we’ll survive is anyone’s guess if we keep behaving like those early humans who huddled around the fire, or kids who are afraid of the dark. Turn the lights off and go to bed, I say, and let everyone else have some restorative darkness.

But I digress. I was talking about stick insects. Well, okay, I was GOING to talk about stick insects. They’re sneaky, folks, make no mistake. Did you know that they drop their eggs onto the ground where ants mistake them for seeds, carry them to their nests and eat the outsides, so that the little stick insect can get out and start a family in a new place? Yup. This may be why there are stick insects on every continent except Antartica. (And I think they just haven’t looked in the right place there. They’re probably lurking in one of those old boats the early explorers left behind. Take another look, scientists, and get back to us.)

Many stick insects are also stinky if you disturb them when they’re dropping eggs or give them the hairy eyeball or something. The common Walking Stick, for instance, can release a toxic spray that will temporarily blind an adult. Who knew? Do you know how many of the little critters I’ve let walk over my arm over the years? Too many, now that I know what I know about their sneaky ways. I should have realized that anything that cons you into thinking it’s part of a branch is capable of anything.

I call the marsh mammal mysterious, because it showed up outside the window of the Bangor Borders Bookstore, in a little pool. Daughter and I looked out the window to check the sky, because it looked thundery, and there was this little brown head poking out of the water. We watched, trying to figure out if it was a muskrat or a beaver, as the animal swam around, . Why a beaver should be in an area where the nearest trees are saplings is beyond me, but it looked like a beaver. The pool had an outlet that led under the road, and from there to another little drainage area that eventually hooks up with the Penjajawoc Marsh, which runs into the City Forest. (I think every city should have a forest, but, surprisingly, many don’t.)

Daughter and I theorized that this might be a young, callow male beaver who was kicked out of the family home in the marsh and was trying to establish a home territory as best he could. (We’re good at coming up with possible scenarios, no matter how farfetched. It’s a knack we have.) Then, we saw another beaver, if beavers they were, swimming near the first one, so it looks like beavers are thriving in Bangor. That’s good, because they’re often chivvied from pillar to post (or aspen to apple tree, I guess would be a better analogy) when they flood roads or cut down trees people don’t want cut down. Apparently, they’re also prone to falling down wells (who knew?) and fall prey to birds of prey (apt, that, though unfortunate) and get run over crossing roads.

If you’re ever confronted with beavers in your backyard, cutting down your Japanese Maples and flooding the veggie garden, don’t panic. And, whatever you do, don’t buy one of the popular but ineffective “Beaver Bafflers” or “Beaver Deceivers” that you’ve heard so much about. (I believe I saw William Shatner touting them on an infomercial, but it could have been something else.) No, walk right back into the house and call your local Wildlife Service or whatever you have where you live and tell them that you have a Problem Beaver. They can help you install a flow device to unflood the garden while leaving enough water around their lodge to keep the beavers happy. Relocating isn’t a good idea, because other beavers will just move in or the local beaver population will explode (beavers self-regulate their numbers depending on food and nearby beaver populations), so they’ll move in as fast as you move them out. Sort of the beaver version of the old game, Space Invaders. (I bet you didn’t know that one Native American name for the beaver also means affable. Neither did I, but it does, which shows you what Native Americans thought of them.)

When watching marsh mammals palled, Daughter perused the books and chose one by Daisy Meadows, who is reputed to be the hottest of hot stuff with girls 8-12, who are heavily into fairy stories. I read one and it didn’t do much for me. I found the writing very simple and the plot thin, not to mention that I’m not big on fairies. (If daughter knew what I know about REAL fairies like you find in Terry Pratchett books and old Celtic tales, she’d drop Daisy like a dead duck, but I figure she doesn’t need to know that stuff right now.) However, I don’t censor what Daughter reads and we always discuss the books, so we talked about Daisy Meadows’ ouvre on the way home.

This morning, Daughter googled Daisy Meadows to find her web site and was not amused by what she found. The yowls brought me up from my basement study. (Let’s not forget that Daughter is the child who suffers from Dramatic Fever from time to time.) She was yowling because she found out that “Daisy Meadows” doesn’t exist. Four authors, including the woman who wrote “Bend It Like Beckham” of all people, write the books. That doesn’t surprise me. I figure they saw a chance to grab a piece of the pre-teen fairy lovers market, probably when they were having coffee in their publisher’s cafeteria, and ran with it. However, now Daughter isn’t sure that she wants to read any more Daisy Meadows books, so they may have lost a reader who buys a lot of their books. Or not. The pull of fairies is strong. Oddly enough, it’s the same in Pratchett novels, only he writes much better than Daisy Meadows, even with the beginnings of Early-Onset Alzheimer’s. But that’s another, and much sadder, story.

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Daughter often accuses me of providing TMI (too much information) and yesterday was no exception. It started when I came in from starting the car to warm it up for a trip to the big city. The temperature outside – or rather lack of one – was minus 3 so I didn’t linger. I raced outside, inserted the key, turned on the car’s heater to blasting and raced back in.

“Boy,” I said to Daughter, who was drawing at the table, “I am so tired of this constant tinkling.”

“TMI, Mom,” she said, putting her hands over her ears.

“Well, that and this permanent wedgie I seem to have developed today,” I went on even though she wasn’t listening. “Talk about getting my knickers in a twist.”

Evidently she heard me and I got a “ooohhh, that is SO gross, Mom” back.

Believe me, this was a highly unusual conversation chez Hawkins. Maybe because my kids don’t go to school and I’m not big on making fun of bodily functions, we rarely make fart jokes or snicker at someone’s really impressive burp. Even when I was a kid, I didn’t get that kind of thing. Too practical and down to earth, I guess. So someone burps or passes gas. Big deal. Wedgies? Only if they’re potato wedges, thankyouveddymuch.

But my undies were feeling like they were two sizes too small and every time I’d gone outside that morning, I heard this weird tinkling sound. When I filled the bird feeder, it was there in the background, as if maybe the red squirrels had started wearing chandelier earrings or the chickadees were sporting ankle bracelets with tiny charms on them. It was driving me mad and I was beginning to think I might have a case of tinnitus when I realized what it was.

Before I went out the first time that morning, I’d taken a shower as usual. However, I was in a hurry, so I didn’t dry my hair completely. I hate the hair dryer, so I only use it when I absolutely have to – like when it’s minus something outside and I have to go out. So I’d gone out with slightly damp hair and it froze. The tinkling sound I heard was my frozen hair, which had turned into little strands of icicles, hitting my glasses and my earrings and probably my thick skull. Sheesh!

The wedgie? Well, I didn’t sort that out until I took off my clothes for the night. As I threw my dirty clothes in the hamper, I saw the writing on the underpants, as it were. The printing said that they were Daughter’s size, which is two sizes smaller than mine.

This morning, I told her about it, expecting to get a TMI and some eye-rolling. Nope. She snickered and then she snorted and then she laughed hysterically and ran to email her friend about it. Since her friend’s mother is the local equivalent of CNN, I suppose by lunchtime, everyone I know will be talking about the idjit who wore her daughter’s undies for a whole day and didn’t know it. Well, I for one think that’s just TMI.