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attack of the friendly deer
Sunday, June 13 2021
There's been a deer hanging out in and around our yard for the past several weeks. The deer has been growing increasingly bold and no longer seems to care when I'm walking around nearby fifty feet away. The dogs sometimes chase the deer off, though even they've become apathetic. Gretchen has warned me that the deer is going to destroy our garden, a valid concern, and today I had plans to erect a makeshift fence using wire grids designed to reinforce sidewalk concrete. But I put it off and did other things like walk the dogs and investigate the Subaru's fluid leak. And then I happened to notice that the deer had hit the garden hard, taking a mouthful from each lettuce plant, eating most of all the tomatoes not in tomato cages as well as all the pepper plants. This forced me to immediately erect that fence. I didn't have enough wire panels to make a complete wall along the garden's south edge (where the deer is mostly likely to come from), though there was some vinyl fencing in the garage dating to the last time we had deer attacking our garden. While I was at it, I also mowed the lawn. It hadn't been mowed in at least three weeks.
As for the Subaru, I was distressed to see fresh fluid from its leak covering all kinds of surfaces of the car's undercarriage, including the transmission and the oil pan. Was the fluid leaking from several places? So I started up the car and put my head far under it to watch what was happening in real time. I hadn't done this before due to a phobia about climbing under idling vehicles. But that's what I needed to do, because I could see the leak happening at a steady drip-drip rate from a failure in the rubber hose I'd bought a replacement for. The drips were then falling onto the side of the transmission, and then running along the bottom of that due to surface tension and being flung onto the side of the oil pan. There really was only one leak, and it was in a rubber hose, which is one of the easiest things to replace (although accessing the clamp hardware might be a little tricky).
I did a number of other Sunday chores as well, including looking closer at the washing machine from the Wall Street house to decide whether it might be fixed. After salvaging its motor, I decided the rest of it could go to the transfer station. Another task was to hang a special screen in front of the front door to keep out insects. Instead of it being a screen door, the screen consisted of two flaps that would automatically close behind you via magnets. (Gretchen had seen this in action at Falafel Cathy's place.) The cats and dogs managed to figure out how to come and go through it fairly quickly, though it can't really work in concert with the pet door in the front door when it is closed, since the screen will probably keep a critter outside the house from being able to both open the pet door and get through it. For the pet door to work, we'll probably have to pin the north screen flap to the side when the front door is closed. Or we could remove the entire screen itself and put it away when the cold weather comes, as it's held on by generic loop-and-hook fastener strips similar to (but not the same as) Velcro®.
This evening after working her bookstore shift directly after returning from Massachusetts, Gretchen returned home completely exhausted, though not too exhausted to watch Jeopardy!.
A photo of the friendly deer from a couple days ago with the Subaru in the foreground.
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