1.) Possum Kingdom
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| Photo courtesy of our trail cam. |
Once again, we have Opossums eating the chicken feed. Feed was being consumed at a much faster rate than usual, and there was lots of scat that was DEFINITELY not chicken droppings on the floor of the feed house.
We'd been seeing some evidence of an opossum infestation for a week or two already when Chris saw someone down the road from our house releasing another one into the ditch. Then it markedly increased-- food vanishing at an even faster rate, and significantly more scat lying around.
I need to rant about this for a second: we live literally in a several dozen square mile patch of dirt. The crops are just barely poking out at this point, and there are NO natural water sources (creeks, ponds, whatever) nearby. Literally the nearest source of food, water, and shelter from where that poor animal was dumped was our chicken run.
I don't know how many of my readers deal with these pests, but if you happen to catch one, the most humane thing to do is to kill it. Animals have neighborhoods and routines just like humans do, and dropping a random one off in unfamiliar woods is like blindfolding someone and dropping them off in a random country. They don't know the turf, they don't know where to find what they need, and they might be in a bigger animal's territory (I'm not a huge fan of the movie The Fox and The Hound, but that scene where Todd is dropped off in the woods and keeps getting chased away from shelter from the rain by various other animals is actually pretty accurate as far as that goes).
If you don't believe me on this and you still prefer to trap and release, please make sure the area you release them in has lots of natural shelter, food, and water, and is at least a couple miles from the nearest house. Otherwise, the poor thing will just end up on someone else's property as their problem and won't be any better off.
We caught one several days ago (summarily dispatched with a .22 and tossed into the field), and caught photo evidence of another, but haven't caught it or caught any more footage of it with the trail camera. We're hoping it took the hint of seeing its associate caged and moved on.
As an aside, I highly recommend a cheap trail cam as a source of entertainment. Set it out near a food source and see what critters roam your neck of the woods at night. It can be surprisingly engaging.
2.) Shoe Renewal
Little Girl and I went through the kids' shoe stash today.
I pick up decent used kids' shoes (boots, anyone?) as I spot them, either from hand-me-down batches or at the thrift store. Shoes are some of the hardest things to find second hand, and they are almost ALWAYS overpriced new, so I keep a box of decent ones (and still in decent shape ones that the kids have outgrown) in the closet.
One now-too-small pair of Little Girl's sandals were still in decent shape, except for the obviously worn and tattered cloth flowers on top.
I took a look at how they were attached, saw that they were sewn rather than glued, and decided to get out the seam ripper.
They almost look brand new. Simpler design, but still pretty and presentable enough to wear to church.
3.) Baby Shower
My aunt and cousins decided to throw me a baby shower this past weekend, and it was really nice.
A lot of my extended family came-- several first cousins once removed, two great aunts, as well as my grandmother, aunt, and her daughters (my dad's family is pretty tight knit, and has been for several generations). My Mother in law and Sisters in law also made it. (Everyone in the room who was vulnerable had been vaccinated, in case you were wondering).
Several of these women I hadn't seen in a few years, and it was genuinely nice to get to visit with them a bit. There's a long standing tradition of the women in the family socializing and being close, a tradition that I've really wanted to be a part of but for various reasons haven't been able to be. It was really an honor to finally get to take part in that a little bit.
There were gifts of cute baby clothes and blankets, but most of the women who came knew that this was my third kiddo, and so there were also lots of disposable diapers, packages of wipes, and a few restaurant gift cards.
4.) Give Hallow a Holla
I've actually managed to keep up with learning Spanish on Duolingo (for the most part...I miss a day every now and then) and I decided to add another app, Hallow, to my daily line up.
I'm cheap, so I use the free version, but even that has been pretty easy to use and enriching. They have a daily lectio divina meditation that's ten minutes long- long enough to feel like I'm actually spending some time in prayer, yet short enough that I can generally squeeze it in before Little Girl gets out of bed in the morning.
So...I think it wins out over the Laudate app. A big part of that is because it does so much of the work for me by having the meditation available with a single tap and read to me rather than scrolling through, finding the correct passage for the day, and reading it on my own (what can I say? I'm a little lazy). So it gets a recommend from me.
5.) Library
I'm beginning to have a bit of a love-hate relationship with our weekly trips there. Still mostly love: the kids genuinely seem to enjoy reading, and we even have a few moments the afternoon of library day where Little Boy gets home from school and both him and Little Girl crack open the new books and quietly read for a bit.
But man...it is really hard to keep up with everything sometimes. The past two times I've left something pretty substantial behind instead of taking it to be returned (the first time it was all the "grown-up" books I've gotten for myself, the second time it was all the DVDs), and it is downright inevitable that at least one book will vanish under or behind a piece of furniture, have to be renewed to avoid incurring a fine, and then be the subject of a near all-out manhunt to find the darn thing.
Still worth going, but not without it's penitential aspects.
6.) Prepper Stuff
I don't really respect doomsday prepping: I think it tends to reflect the dark sides of politics and fundamentalist religion pretty heavily, and it's a very macho, snobbish, superior culture. The people I've seen online in these groups are not people I'd want to hang out with socially. At best, it seems to be an expensive and time consuming hobby ("Invest in an intensive wilderness survival course for you and your family!!"), at worst, it's a bunch of people openly stroking their egos ("look at all the sheeple, hur hur hur...").
But I have found that living a frugal and moderately prepper-ish lifestyle (which turns out to go hand in hand) has seriously saved our bacon more than once in just the first seven years of our married life. We've managed to survive a sudden unexpected loss of our only income for two months (about a week after I gave birth to our first born!), the ensuing pay cut at the new job (we live on about half as much as we did before-- with the addition of two kids), a hurricane evacuation, a pandemic buying panic, and a freak "hundred year" freeze relatively unscathed because of the way we manage our finances, material resources (food, clothes, etc), and pantry. I've had the experience of watching my neighbors get in their cars and line up literal miles for free grocery relief while we still had a relatively stocked pantry at home: it was really surreal, unpleasant, and I hope I never see that again, but it was a relief that I didn't have to be one of those people.
All this to say, I don't really think doomsday prepping is the best use of mental, emotional, or financial energy, but I do think that some basic self-sufficiency precautions and resource management techniques are a good idea. The big scale disaster movie stuff may never happen, but smaller scale disasters do, and it's really a relief to be at least moderately prepared for them when they pop up.
I've written on this before, but the reason I'm bringing this up again is because I found a website this week that falls more under the heading of "moderate prepping" rather than "doomsday prepping." They explore things that I find pretty extreme (I still don't ever see myself purchasing several hundred pounds of grain and grinding my own flour), but most of it seems geared towards people who are relatively new to 'prepping' and looking to make simple, moderate changes to their lifestyle or to learn how to better handle emergencies that might actually pop up like job loss, floods, hurricanes, or ice storms.
Check it out if you're at all interested. They sell courses, but I haven't taken any of them: I recommend just using the search function to browse the blog posts ("food storage", "finances" and "hurricane" (or whatever natural disaster is likely in your area) are good terms to start with).
7.) Bedtime Battle
I don't want to intrude on my kids' privacy by describing the current battle in too much detail...but please pray for us. It's been pretty taxing and extreme, and both Chris and I are nearing the ends of our ropes.
Please pray especially that we can resolve it before Bitty Baby makes her grand entrance.
See the rest of this week's takes here.
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