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disposable diaper in the yard
Thursday, May 21 2015
Gretchen had to do some sort of morning literacy-related thing, so I took the dogs for their morning walk. Temperatures were in the 40s, though with a jacket it was good weather for strolling in the forest. I brought a light field camera in case there was something interesting to photograph, but alas, there was not. There weren't any bear or porcupine incidents either. It seems that this season there are either fewer bears in the forest or the bears have retreated to more remote locations. (I'm assuming its the former, since, like all organisms, bears reproduce until they completely fill all niches that they can reach that they find tolerable.)
Back home in our freshly-mowed yard, I found a disposable diaper lying on the grass. Evidently it had been brought there from somewhere else by one of the dogs (I'm going to go ahead an assume it was Ramona). Dogs love human shit in all its forms, and a soiled diaper would be at least as attractive as a Seven Layer Burrito from Taco Bell. This particular diaper didn't actually looked soiled, though it had been ripped into pieces and it's possible that any "soil" would have been meticulously licked away by the same tongue that I permit against my face. The feces of other humans are about the most repulsive things in the world to me, and I didn't want to touch that diaper. So I dug a deep hole near the asparagus patch, gathered all the bits of diaper with a spade and a stick, and disposed of it all beneath the ground. The diaper consisted of plastic, cotton, and what I took to be absorbant beads. Years from now when I next encounter that plastic, I'll pull it from the ground, rinse it off, and put it in the trash. I will rely on the kashering ability of soil microbes to render it clean enough to touch.
Meanwhile, in the northmost tomato patch, the large tomato that I started back in the Autumn using grow lights has finally produced a red tomato. Today I harvested it, sliced it up, and added it to a sandwich that also included soy mayonnaise, saurkraut, peppered Tofurky slices, jalapeños, and spicy brown mustard. It wasn't a loud flavor in that context, so I can't really say that it was good or bad.
I did a bunch of garden work today that I should have done earlier (but, as you know, other things such as a vacation, a broken car, and an illness got in the way). I transplanted kale seedlings to give them more room, planted lots of lettuce seeds in two tomato patches and along the side of the asparagus patch, I planted more cabbage and broccoli seeds in the cabbage patch, and I sewed many edamame soy bean seeds in the main garden patch. I also did a lot of weeding, extracting a number of large weedy root masses. In so doing, I found a huge partial rawhide buried in the southmost tomato patch. I turned it over to Ramona and I think she managed to eat the entire thing within a couple of the happiest hours of her life.
Down in the brownhouse, I happened to look down into the shit bucket and see an unfortunate mouse running around atop the toilet paper and other things it had accumulated. He or she had apparently fallen in, and there was no easy way to climb out. So I found a nice rough stick and leaned it against the inside wall of the bucket and left the brownhouse door open for a couple hours. The next time I looked for the mouse, it was gone.
[REDACTED]
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