Ladybug postscript

Just in case I have an entomologist reader who was interested and maybe even excited by my ladybug observations, I have decided to update that post. Four days ago it happened that I had not plucked any ladybugs from my four big south-facing windows. [Sometimes I just get bored with it. Other times I get too busy.] I was sitting in my chair three feet in front of the windows about noon, the sun was pouring in and the bugs were all crawling around as usual. I got very hot and cranked open the window on the east side about 3 inches. I later went about my business and forgot that I had opened the window. About sundown I became cold, remembered about the window and closed it. Only six ladybugs remained. Had the others--A. crawled out the window to the great outdoors? or B. felt a draft and crawled into the cracks around the windows? When they had not returned for two days, I favored explanation A. The third day was Easter and I was gone for the day. Today at least thirty, maybe forty bugs are back. [They're hard to count from the chair without plucking them because they move around so much.] Because they are back again I am now favoring explanation B., although they could have come back in from outside I suppose.

Classy pencils

I get a garden supply catalog that I just love from Lee Valley. They have good things at good prices. Lately they have been sending me their woodworking catatlog too. I am really a klutzy woodworker, so I am sadly unable to buy any of their beautiful tools. But I like to look at them anyhow. A few weeks ago an entry in the woodworking catalog caught my eye. It asked if I had noticed that the quality of pencils has been going downhill. Yes, I have! I get most of my pencils from my dentist who has a cup of new ones on his receptionist's desk for patients to take. [He means the school kids, probably, but what the heck. He charges enough.] I am very fond of pencils. I need them for crossword puzzles of course and I just generally like to write with them. For a long time it seemed that the dentist's pencils were superior to Ben Franklins'. But lately even his cause problems. When I sharpen them the new point is often already broken and falls off. Ben Franklin's pencils are made from some junk wood that gets all peely when you sharpen them. These are exactly the problems that Lee Valley also noted. But they have solved the problem. From them you can buy pencils made of fragrant cedar wood. Their graphite is not soft and gray. It is hard and black. They come in different lead sizes just like pencils always used to in the good old days. "A number 2B writes like a Belgian chocolate tastes." Finally I was able to order from the woodworker's catalog. I selected the sample pack of six pencils of all the different lead sizes and a box of 12 2Bs of course. [I love Belgian chocolate, or any chocolate for that matter.] My pencils have arrived and they are all that I hoped they would be. The ad said nothing about erasers, but the erasers are excellent too. The pencils are a dark pine green color with Lee Valley inscribed in gold. And get this, the classiest touch of all, farther down the pencil, in smaller letters also in gold--made in Great Britain.

Ladybugs

Even though I know from experience that I never use most of the garden gadgets that I order from my seed catalogs, the gadget section remains one of my favorite parts of my catalogs. It is with great amusement that I read the entries for ladybugs. For only $10.95 you can buy one third cup or 1500 ladybugs to eat other, more harmful bugs in your garden. The catalog offers hints on what you can do to entice your 1500 ladybugs to stay in your yard. No thank you. For the past four years my house has been crawling with ladybugs. Each fall our local papers tell us not to worry. They only want to share the warmth of our homes for a few months. Come summer they will leave of their own accord. This is true, but not the whole truth. They smell bad. They do occassionally bite when they get mad. And they have a high mortality rate. Lots of little beetle corpses lying around lets everyone know its been awhile since you've vacuumed. Like most people who like to read, I have favorite authors--a few whose books I buy sight unseen just because it's them. Annie Dillard is one of mine though I haven't heard anything from her for some time. In one of her early books she wrote about the bugs with whom she was sharing a cabin. She never killed them. She just watched them. For awhile I tried to emulate her, but only for awhile. There are just too many bugs around here. Fascinating as they are, I would rather they stayed outside. I have been observing these ladybugs though. How can I help it? They are always a few feet away on my favorite windows. Last year, as my golden retriever, Molly, lay dying, there were thousands of them. I remember talking to her and trying to cheer her up several times a day while vacuuming them up all around her. This year the invasion is much smaller. We have between forty and fifty on our front windows at any given time. I have been taking a glass cup with about and inch of water in it and plunking them in it about three times a day. They can't seem to get out of water. New ones start crawling out of cracks when the old ones are caught, and eventually there are forty or fifty again. Why is that do you suppose? Do they defend territories? Do you only assume you're always seeing the same bugs when they're actually coming and going in and out of the cracks? Why keep the exposed number at a steady forty to fifty? [Last year there were many more at a time.] I briefly considered going into the ladybug business, but rejected it. People who believe in them probably want live ones. Mine die at an alarming rate. These are Asian ladybugs, imported to help defend crops. I have noticed not having many bug problems in the garden lately, except with Tatsoi and Chinese cabbage. I can't grow them unless I use a floating row cover. Is that a Clue?

Spring

I have been absent from the blogs for some time trying to catch up on the things I fell behind with during my cabin fever time. As soon as I got busy, what happened? Spring. Early spring is a subtle thing in the north country. Almost every bit of ground is still generously covered with snow. Last week we had night time lows of zero or below. This morning at 5 a.m. our temp was only 2 degrees. But still we know that winter has passed away. For one thing the quality of the snow is very different, It's airy, icy, rotten if snow can be such a thing. Back here in the woods it's still very white and clean, but it's sinking and pulling back from the edges of things. It can't hold on because our days are getting so much longer and the sun is higher and stronger. Even if the temperature stays below 32 degrees, ice melts and comes sliding off our metal roof in big chunks. The pine grosbeaks who only visit our feeders in winter have left. The Warroad Pioneer says that the crows are back, though I haven't seen or heard one yet. A really neat bird, the pileated woodpecker, lives here year round, but we have usually seen them in our yard in spring. One has been coming to our suet feeder everyday this week. If Bears sees it, she chases it away. I thought that might keep it from coming back. They seem to be very wary creatures. But this one must really love suet. They are huge for woodpeckers--sixteen plus inches. Their bodies are black. Their head is a sharp, narrow triangle with wide white stripes. On top they have a brilliant red wedge cap. Ravens are circling our yard more than usual. This may be a macbre sign of spring too. Perhaps the snow has started to melt away from the corpse of poor Black, the goat, which was hauled into the woods behind our house last fall.

Brown, the goat

When we moved here we had a crude chicken coop already on the property. It seemed a shame to just let it sit there so eventually we got ourselves some chickens. As winter began to threaten, we began to wonder how we would keep them warm in this harsh climate. One evening when we were having coffee after a church gathering we mentioned our problem to a farmer who had lived here many years. He advised us to get some larger animals and put them together with the chickens for the winter. Our property had also come complete with a small barn and a corral. What animals could we get that would be large and warm and cheap? First we found Betsy, the goat, and her son Bucky. Betsy's name was fanciful. Bucky's name was appropriate. We've been in and out having animals ever since. At present we are down to two outside animals. Poor Hen, who is the sole survivor of her flock. (There is a marten lurking in the woods.) And poor Brown, the goat, whose brother, Black, died suddenly for unknown reasons this last Thanksgiving week-end. Black's mother had decided not to feed him when he was born, so the farmer's wife had bottle fed him until he was weaned. This had made him a gregarious, people-loving goat. He always came to the fence and nickered when he saw us in the yard. Brown always held back. We seemed to make him very nervous. Black always got first dibs on all the food. (Maybe that had something to do with his early death.) When we all went for a walk, Black ambled along amiably between my husband and me. Brown followed along warily. Our border collie seemed to sense his subordinate position and pestered him without mercy. Black and Brown were always together, whether eating or napping or having their afternoon headbutting contests. In the back of our minds we wondered if Brown would die too, without his brother for company. He and Hen seem to get along fine together in their winter quarters--an old ice fishing house back by the woodpile. It is closer to the house than the barn and my husband rigged it with electricity. He turns on a heatlamp bulb for them on the coldest nights. But I think Hen is not enough company for him. He has become better friends with our dog Bear. They tussle around together and chase each other. And slowly but surely he has warmed up to us, even me. My husband is extremely patient with animals. I can't say the same. We've been having some beautiful days with bright blue sky and strong sunshine, but winter doesn't want to let go. It's been cold for March. So we've been going skiing the last few afternoons, and Brown sometimes tries to come along. I do not like this. He steps on the back of my skis sometimes and causes me to suddenly stop. He passes me and then stops and won't move. He turns around and tries to engage me in a friendly game of headbutting. My husband says, "You go ahead. I'll make him go home." I know this is not true. My husband is just being patient, with Brown and with me. He'll just try to keep us separated. And so it happens that when we come to the part of the trail where you either pop out on the road and ski on home or turn around and have a longer ski by retracing your route through the woods, I tell them to go on ahead so that I can go back thru the woods alone. I am happy and sad, free, unemcumbered and a little lonely. When I eventually arrive home while pondering these things, who do I see sitting on the trail at the edge of our woods, waiting patiently for me? Little Bear, who endures my impatient outbursts more than anyone, and yet she adores me. We all need each other, husband and wife, goat and dog, and even Hen, I guess.

What holds things up?

I just read in the paper that after the Department of Defense decided to send U.S. troops more bulletproof vests, it took about 167 days for the troops to begin receiving them. Soldiers who ordered them directly from the Michigan manufacturer got theirs in about 12 days. This mimics my experience when I had a job ordering books for the W.J. Niederkorn Library in Port Washington, Wisconsin. Books ordered from the U.S. Government Printing Office came in dead last. I wonder exactly what it is about government that causes this molasses effect.

The cabin fever-end of winter time blues

I've been in a bad funk. I don't want to blog or read blogs. I don't want to ski or go for a nice walk. I don't want to sew--upstairs on shirts and pants or downstairs on my quilt. I've had three gallons of paint upstairs for almost a year, but I don't want to paint my bedroom. I hurried to get off my seed orders in plenty of time to plant the early things indoors, but now I don't want to. The empty, washed out milk cartons are waiting for the onions and the plastic mushroom boxes for the pansies and thyme, but I don't plant them. My heavy duty house-cleaning that was started has come to a halt. My houseplants get thirsty and my birdfeeders get way empty before they get filled. I am only interested in a few things--reading, working on crossword puzzles, looking out the window, having a cup of tea and a Hershey bar. If I cook we eat it. If I don't my husband has a braunsweiger sandwich and I have a bowl of cereal. My husband says, "Don't go icefishing. That will only depress you more." Because we have been doing that. We paid $100 so that we could drive out onto the lake on a four lane, always nicely plowed ice road anytime we want to all season. At the end of February when all our licenses expired, we got new ones for husband, wife, and fish house. Our truck is always loaded with gas-powered ice auger, heater, radio, lantern, five-gallon buckets, shovel and poles, etc. So we go. Husband still has faith, I think, but I don't. We drive out to the house, drill open the holes, shovel away the ice chips and then we sit. Hour after hour and not a thing happens. You can turn on the radio, read a book, go through your mail. But right in front of you is that hole, that floating bobber, and nothing happens. One afternoon, a neighbor from the nearest house came over to give us his minnows. He reported that though fishing was admittedly slow he and his friends had caught one nice one and some little ones. Is it because we have been married for almost 45 years, or was it just the perversity of human kind that caused us both to instantly have the same thought? "He's lying, don't you think?", my husband asked me. "Yeah", I said. How to explain then, when you drive up the steep ice bank onto the resort parking lot, what's going on in the fish cleaning building. Young men, their jackets off, sleeves rolled up, filet knives flashing. We slink home, old unskilled worthless fisherman and woman. But I noticed today while looking out the window on this sunny, cold bright blue sky day that the pussy willow bud are swelling and white.