telling a deer what not to do Friday, June 14 2013
While Gretchen was in the woods walking the dogs, I happened to look out in the yard at some point and saw a deer. Because of the dogs, the scents they leave, and their constant patrolling, it's rare to see deer anywhere near the house. But this one was lackadaisically eating foliage from a wild Multiflora Rose on the north edge of the yard, along the line where I stop mowing in hopes that trees will grow and block the view of the road. I went up onto the laboratory deck and watched the deer as he (and I could tell it was a male by the developing antlers) nibbled his way towards the garden intra-tomato-patch garden. When he went to take a bite from something in that garden, I shouted out to him and told him to stop. He studied me with a puzzled expression and then went to try again, and again I shouted. This was enough to cause him to turn around and browse along the west edge of the yard, where there is a narrow strip of woods between our grass and the farm road. I kept wondering what would happen when Gretchen returned, but eventually Sylvia the cat (who hadn't seemed too interested in the deer) scrambled up the roof to the solar deck, and the noise of her doing that spooked the dear and he ran off towards the farm road. I recorded part of my interaction with the deer:
For some reason Gretchen and I decided to have a french press of decaf coffee late this morning.
At some point this afternoon I drove down to where a locust tree had been cut up by the Ulster County Highway Department along Hurley Mountain Road. I was hoping to retrieve it, but it was just my luck that the section of road where the tree had been cut up was temporarily a one-lane road, complete with flaggers, as the Highway Department did other tree-related work. So the errand was a complete waste of time.
Later I investigated the bad strut that Mavis Discount Tire installed above the rear passenger-side wheel about a year ago. I'd complained to Mavis about that strut multiple times, and they kept acting like they were fixing it until their warranty ran out (evidently that's just how they do things). Initially I thought I'd have to remove the entire rear seat to get to that strut, and I managed to do precisely that before realizing that the strut is actually reachable by removing the plastic interior panels inside the trunk. Getting that seat back into place was a total bitch and I did a half-assed job of it, only managing to install one of the bolts that had been holding it in place (whoever had installed it in the past had similarly only reinstalled a subset of the original bolts, though I managed to reinstall even fewer). As for the strut, I couldn't really see any adjustments that I could make to it. It's been sounding gradually worse and worse and at this point when it gets jiggled it makes a scraping metal-against-metal sound combined with an upleasant clunk.