I am a TRUE Maritimer now!

"Why?", you may ask.  It turns out, my kind neighbour Eddie had given me fresh fish.  Being the frugalista that I am, I couldn't turn them down. I became the recipient of TWELVE mackerel, which I gutted, cleaned and cooked, for the FIRST TIME in my life! I am so proud of me.

I put on very long rubber gloves, spread an empty grocery bag on the table, and stuck the knife into the small hole in the underbelly of the fish. I had seen my father do it often enough. However, from that point on I had to deviate from standard practice, otherwise I would have ended up chucking all those mackerel into the garbage!

My stomach heaved whenever I saw the entrails. I kept gagging and gagging.  Silly really.  As a mother, I have cleaned up more disgusting stuff than fish guts. It HAS been a long time though.  With time, you forget all those wonderful mothering moments. :)

However,  I k-n-e-w I was going to be sick if I continued. Soooooooooo.... I stuck my hands into the bag, and more or less gutted the fish as if I were blind. Then I withdrew my hands, saw what I had missed, and removed those really STUBBORN, clingy, slimy, small parts off quickly.

My "Rabid, Politically INCORRECT" brother, (His words.. NOT mine!) was sweet enough to package up all the entrails for the garbage. They are sitting in my freezer, awaiting pick-up day.

Voilà! The fruits of my labour - a delicious dinner for RPI bro and me; a true Maritime feast.

WHO are you going to call? GARBAGE BUSTERS!!!

I hate picking up garbage that has spilled over.  It is D-I-S-G-U-S-T-I-N-G!

Yet, that is what I ended up doing last week. My neighbour and I were both chatting outside when the garbage truck drove up. It hauled up our neighbour's trash can, with those LONG hydraulic arms. Unfortunately, because the bin was too heavy, some of the trash spilled into the street. The garbage truck kept on going, of course!

I looked at Eddie and said, "I am NOT picking that up!" I could see a white, torn trash bag on the ground, along with a lot of other smaller items.  I could just imagine the contents of that bag.  However, dear, sweet, kind and generous Eddie says, "We CAN'T leave it all there."  She was right, OF COURSE. It was Jim's garbage, but he was gone to work. It was early in the morning. The trash couldn't be in the street all day now, could it?  OF COURSE NOT!

With a big sigh I replied, "You're right!" Dammit!  "Do you have a dustpan? I will go get my old broom."  Eddie comes out with a HUMONGOUS RAKE.  By this time, my sister-in-law (my belle-belle soeur)  has arrived.  I still am shaking my head, thinking, "Gees, I can't believe I am doing this. We need proof to show Jim, so he won't think we are making this up, AND ALSO, so he doesn't load up his trash bin so much next time."  We need a picture!

Well, what HAD spilled all over the road were NAILS, all kinds of nails, BIG ones, LITTLE ones, LONG ones, SHORT ones. We raked them and swept them up, but we ended up walking up and down the street, picking up the ones that had flown far and wide. Quite the job!!!!  Thank goodness we did it though. Can you just IMAGINE all the flat tires there would have been, had we NOT picked up every single one of those nails?  Jim was replacing the siding on his house, and had inadvertently put too much rubbish into his bin. The nail bag had  BURST open on impact with the pavement.

What can I say? It was the neighbourly thing to do.  Do unto others....

I

Coming full circle... le cercle se ferme!

I am coming HOME!  Is there a s-w-e-e-t-e-r sentence than that, especially when you have been gone from "home" for close to forty years? There is no explaining what calls us home... la belle baie, notre langue et culture, notre jeunesse, nos parents, nos vieux amis, nos racines, notre patrimoine, notre connection? The pull is so strong... the heart just calls us home for all those reasons, and so many more that just can't be explained, I think.

 

My oldest brother (YOUNGER than me, the brat, but the oldest of my three brothers), has just come home for good... lock, stock and barrel, after being out west all these years.  He and my sis-in-law, along with their two cats, Ziggy and Zoey, will be staying with me until they move into their new home in less than a month. Being the prepared and organized person that he is (my four siblings and I are ALL alike in that respect) the ground work was all done out west, and the house bought two days after their arrival here. AWESOME!!!

 

He drives a Harley, so other family and friends with motorbikes have been rolling by. My neighbours are probably thinking... OH NO, that old lady who just moved in is a drug dealer?  There goes the neighbourhood!!!

 

So the circle closes for my oldest brother and his family. Welcome home!!!  A double rainbow two nights in a row, in your honour bro!

 

 

Something else has come F-U-L-L circle. Remember when I had cat urine problems in my apartment, and spent almost all of the five months I was there, trying to get rid of the smell? Well, thanks to all the advice I received from friends and family after my posting about my unwanted tenant, the GROUNDHOG, under my shed, I figured out what to do.  Thanks MG in BC, for the best link.  Thanks to her, let's just say I pretended I needed to give samples at the hospital lab every morning for a few weeks, except I saved them all. Yup!  Then I saturated his burrow under my shed, waited a few days, and did it again! 

 

I haven't seen HIDE nor HAIR of the critter since, and he hasn't eaten any of the new growth on my sunflowers.  So..... I am keeping my fingers crossed. 

 

 

 

 

Speaking of nesting...

that is what I have been doing lately, in my "forever" home, as a former teaching colleague so aptly called it.  After almost three months, I am still unpacking, sorting, pitching, donating, filing, placing, organizing and remembering, as I find things buried that I haven't seen in almost two years.  There is no future in nostalgia, but objects can evoke memories of a certain time and place.  These memories can sometimes be bittersweet, but more often ...j-u-s-t sweeeeeeet!!!

I digress. Nesting is the subject here.  I soon figured out after I moved in, that there was a previous tenant, not paying rent, who had stayed behind when the previous owners left. Aren't I lucky?

I couldn't see him, but I knew he was around. There is a big hole under my shed, the latter of which backs onto a wire fence. There isn't much room there, to squeeze in between the fence and the shed.  I managed to pitch a handful of mothballs in and around the hole.  The heavy rains soon after melted those at the entrance, and as for the ones in the hole, I couldn't see them, but I soon found out the "varmint" had not been deterred IN THE LEAST. I had placed a BIG rock to block the entrance, and that darn nuisance MOVED it aside. I couldn't believe it.  A bunny couldn't do that, so I crossed "rabbit" off my list.

Then, I noticed that my ONE, lovely head of lettuce and my ONE tomato plant my thoughtful sis had given me, which I had transplanted, were suddenly looking rather pathetic.  The next morning, the ENTIRE lettuce was GONE! There was not one shred of evidence that a lettuce had been there.  Not even any roots!!! As for the tomato, the stem had been chewed so much that it keeled right over. There went my garden for this year!!! Geez!  I only have a small mint plant left.  He doesn't like mint, obviously.

I had planted sunflower seeds, which had started to grow.  I was so PROUD! I had maybe five plants, eight inches high, when I returned from my relaxing weekend (LOL) at the beach.  The next morning, this is what they looked like.  ALL the leaves had been almost completely chewed off.   NOW I AM GETTING TICKED OFF! 

My problem is though, I don't know my opponent.  Is it a raccoon, a skunk, a groundhog?

The mystery was solved last night. One of my dinner guests identified my adversary. Roger had gone up to use the bathroom, and spied the critter sitting up on the platform in front of my shed.  A BIG, FAT groundhog.  Une marmotte... maudit.  I guess I should be grateful.  Better - that - than - a - skunk!

So, now that Natural Resources doesn't lend cages anymore, and you have to PAY someone, I have to get creative.  The nice lady at DNR suggested hot pepper flakes, so that is my next plan of attack.

Any suggestions out there?  I know I can also Google and get endless possibilities.  I don't want to kill the creature, I just want him to move away.  I paid for this place, and that GROUNDHOG wasn't included in my offer of purchase.

 

All creatures bright and beautiful!

"Can you dig a few worms from your garden or flowers, put in a plastic container with dirt?"

 

That is the text I received from my sister on Canada Day.  I had just come back from my first, and great, golf game of the year.  I was getting ready to join her at a cottage she has rented for two weeks, by the water. My brother-in-law was only coming Sunday night, so I was going to help keep her company and have a great weekend of relaxation.

 

Oh!  I did say RELAXATION? Nothing could be further from the truth!!

 

Why did my sister need worms and dirt?  To try to save four newborn baby starlings that had had their nest disturbed by the cottage owner, when he was fixing the eavestroughs.  My sister, a lover of all God's creatures, was distraught at the sight of this uprooted nest. She tried to put the nest back where it had been. However, the mother wasn't coming back to feed her babies.  One of the four fell out and died before I arrived. My sis put him to rest and said to me philosophically, "They are going to die. THIS is too much yin to my yan vacation.  I can't take care of them." I came back Saturday afternoon after a run into town, only to find that she had changed her mind, and was a woman on a mission. SAVE THOSE STARLINGS!

 

To make a long story short, (I know... I have a hard time doing that!) she spent all her time taking care of them. She fretted, she fussed. Another one had fallen out of the nest Friday night, so now we are down to two babies.  Lou decided to move the nest to a sheltered spot in the shrubbery.  I helped as much as I could, however, I cringed when I had to pick them up to move them. They were so fragile, and... baby birds are UGLY! Poor little things!  Lou finally listened to me when I told her we should soak a rag in milk, and hover it over their beaks. It worked. One held on to that dish rag for all he was worth, while we scrambled to soak another corner and get it into the other baby's beak. Now with their beaks opening, we were able to shove in tiny, tiny spoonfuls of

dog food soaked in milk. Goggle is wonderful!! It knows EVERYTHING!!!

 

Other people in their trailers by the beach, must have wondered what two women were doing every hour on the hour, crouched down in the shrubbery, with their butts in the air! 

 

My sister even got up at FOUR AM THIS morning to go feed the two remaining babies. They survived the night, buried in a boot box, and covered with logs!  We knew they were going to live, so the search was now on for expert help. Calls to the Hope for Wildlife Centre in NS, the Atlantic Wildlife Refuge Centre in NB, a posting on the SPCA website in the Chaleur area, and general inquires, resulted in some angels coming forward and offering to take in the starlings.  How do you spell RELIEF?  My sister delivered the babies to a safe place not far and can now enjoy the rest of her vacation.  I don't have to drive four hours to deliver the babies to a refuge that would happily have taken them if we could bring the starlings there.

 

All is well that ends well! Dieu merci pour les anges comme ma soeur, et tous ceux qui s'occupent des animaux.

 

 

 

THEIR NEW DIGS - LUXURY!