Apropos of Nothing v.4

Happy Late Birthday Katie! I hope you got to enjoy your day.

Happy belated/early birthdays, Katie and Holly!

Melissa, I am so envious of that white tree. I love the really "fakey" ones- white, silver, even pink. LOL! I wish I had one, I would totally make room for it so we'd have three trees!

I love the cave, too- man, my cats would go ape over that. hehehe.

OH GOSH, Happy Birthday Holly!!!! Pixy, I remember your cave from last year - how cool!!!!

Happy birthday to all! So maybe we just need to have a club whereby we all simply overlook that 50th birthday. Deal?

That would have been a great idea 7 years ago!!!! Whoops, just told my age.

It's never too late to forget, Lynn. :)

I think the 50's are the BEST years of my life. I have the finances, time, work, personal improvements, and outlook on life that I never before have had. I welcome you Kathy to the world of 50. Holly you with your youth will appreciate the fifties in about 20 years. Happy birthday! LOL

Birthday greeting and wishes to you both. And very best wishes for the entire coming year. I am sure that your days coming so close to T'Giving make it easy to put them a bit in the background. Of course that will be even truer for the birthdays yet to come in the now current month.

Yes my daughter's is on Dec 20th and she never wants it mixed with Christmas.

Happy Birthday to you katie and you also mauryhill. Fifties are all good years. I agree with Sofer. Living gets easier for most.

Thank you all. I just figured early on that Thanksgiving WAS all about me, so it's never been a problem that the two dates are so close. I love that the whole of the U.S. is celebrating FOR ME by getting together with their families and eating. LOL

Aside from the joint pain and vision deterioration, I'm happy to have gotten through my 20's, 30's and 40's. Don't want to do that again. :-)

The best thing about my mother dying very young is that it has now been 20 years & I don't think about it so much.

Though it seems I may never recover my ability to eat like a normal person -- food was something I associated with her, mostly. And, like you guys with the singing, my piano. I will always have one but probably will never play seriously again.

I find it soothing to do the things that I associate with my Mom. She loved to cook, bake, and garden. Now I do too. I guess it makes me feel like part of her is still with me.

We sang to my mom in the nursing home at Thanksgiving. I had to stop every now and then to wipe the tears from my chin. They were tears of enjoyment, grief, gratitude, sadness - all at once. I didn't want to be crying. But as hard and emotional as that hour was, I wouldn't trade that time or experience for anything

I don't know if she'll recover, but I will think of that experience many, many times in the future, I'm sure, and will cry every time. I don't think she would want me to stop singing. I think I'll just have to hope that other people will understand.

And, judging, from the experiences and feeling you all are sharing, they will . . .

About 35 years ago I lost a brother and a sister in a train crash that happened the day before Thanksgiving. Our family suffered terribly for years, and my parents put away all photos of the two of them. Then, maybe six or seven years later, the photos began reappearing one by one. Now we are all ok and remembering the good times we had with them - my sister was 23 and my brother was 21. It took a long time, but we did heal, and are a very close family. Once in a while I will think about it out of the blue and get teary. It is something that will always be with us, but it's no longer painful. My parents are amazing people, and very emotionally strong.

Happy birthday Katie & Mauryhill! I hate to tell you, but the 50s are not the best years - the 60s are! I feel like everything has fallen into place, my kids are all out of college and doing well, some are having their own kids, I survived a stressful corporate career, and now I have time to do the volunteer work I have always wanted to do. Sure there are aches and pains, but you just float with it and strap on your snowshoes and grab the dog and head for the mountain. Life is good.

Well, then, I'm looking forward to that. Thank you, Judi!

It's amazing how strong we all really are. Which is good, because there's a lot to handle. I'm sorry for your family's trial. I can't even begin to imagine that.

My youngest brother died a couple of years ago under bad circumstances. We don't really like to think or talk about it -- Mark is like a frozen pond that my thoughts skate over for now. Someday, maybe, like with Judi's family, it will be OK again.

So sorry . . .

It always takes time, no matter what. It seems like the joy and the pain just kind of merge together sometimes. I hope it gets better for you soon, Summerkid.

Hugs to all of you who are feeling things for the ones you love. Loving is the best thing we get from people.

If I had the means, I would happily commit genocide on raccoons. It would fill me with vengeful glee to wipe every last one of those vermin off the face of the earth forever.

I'm sick of them trashing our property. I'm sick of finding my plants dug up and scattered all over. I'm sick of my pond being destroyed. I want them dead. All of them.

They are SO lucky I'm not a mad scientist.

Pony - you need to read the forum on Wildlife - There is a woman that is finding much joy in her family of racoons
BUT I do understand your frustrations - I do not have as much for them to destroy as you
I do have a puppy to protect at night - birdfeeders - holes dug throughout the yard - and daylilies that seem to take a
walk - and once I was trying to scare one off my birdfeeder and it charged at me -- scarey -
I also have a thing with squirrels - chewing on my log cabin - and of course the birdfeeder -
I have often consider getting a paint ball gun to shoot them ---

I always remember waking up one night in my tent on an Island in Puget Sound to a racket on the ground in front of me. A huge raccoon was trashing my cooking stove and fire pit. It stopped when I raised up my head and turned to charge me. Well right in front of my face my Jack Russell Sophie came from the bottom of my sleeping bag and hit him. She and He battled for about 30 seconds with lots of biting and fighting. He retreated to the top of a fir tree and remained there until after we left 2 hours later. I cleaned up my Sophie and fed her a warm scrambled eggs and Ham breakfast. She has since passed and I have a statue of a raccoon all scratched up and placed in the tree above her grave.

^_^Good story. I sympathize with your feeling about the raccoons pony. That is very aggrevating.

They are much more dangerous than they look. And they aren't as afraid of humans as they should be, either.

I saw a piece on the news last night about a local woman who was walking her small dog. An owl picked him up. The only thing that saved him was that the dog was on a leash. She held on tight and hit the bird with something.

That would have been a sight to see . . .

Yikes! I hear great horned owls up in the trees at night here, but never see them. I wish they'd carry the raccoons off and eat them. Then again, the raccoons here are pretty danged huge. It would take an awfully big bird to be able to grab them.

Last night they dug up my big flowerbed again and scattered a bunch of my dahlia tubers around. I found them frozen solid this morning, lying on top of the dirt. *sigh*

They're not scared of humans at all- they'll run when I get close and throw heavy things at them, but as soon as I step back into the door of the house, they come right back. I chased them out of the pond several times last night.

I think that everybody needs a Sophie!!

Seriously, though, I had three in the back yard under the deck last month. My first thought was to get the dogs into the house so I could avoid a huge vet bill. At least if I get bit, my ER visit is covered. I thought at the time that if I'd had a terrier, I don't think I could have convinced her to leave the raccoons and come into the house. I banged on the deck and then used the hose to finally drive them off.

Read this article: http://www.nola.com/pets/index.ssf/2009/10/raccoons_maul_florida_woman_74.html

Okay, when I read that I initially thought that you had found the raccoons "frozen solid and lying on the top of the dirt". I'm sure that's what you wish you'd found . . .

You could try a motion sensor light - I've had some success with that. Also, here are a couple of other devices that might work. Lastly, you might bury cayenne pepper or citrus with the dahlias and see if that isn't a deterrent for them.

There are ultrasonic devices as well as sprinklers to keep pests away. I found lots of suggestions at this link: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=raccoon+repellent&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

Read this article:

http://www.nola.com/pets/index.ssf/2009/10/raccoons_maul_florida_woman_74.html

LOL I wish I had found frozen raccoons- I'd have danced a jig. ;)

I've done plenty of research on repellants and such. Judging from the reviews I've read, success is rare with most of them, and the ones that do at least work somewhat are too expensive for me.

I was thinking of sprinkling garlic powder all over the flowerbed that they keep attacking... worth a try, I guess.

That article is scary. There are more and more incidents of raccoons attacking people- they're nasty creatures.

Wild animals, for sure. And it doesn't help that they're are so handsome. It's really just deceptive.

I've heard that the females with babies can be somewhat docile if you're feeding them. But I've been told that the males travel in pairs to hunt and that they are the dangerous ones.

Good luck!

The dog & I frequently have to chase raccoons out of the kitchen. They are not above rifling through the cabinets if no one is here.

They certainly can evoke a murderous rage in pond owners.

Raccoons are the temperate version of monkeys, with their intelligence & dexterity & brashness, I suppose.

I have a lot of admiration for Racoons. Somehow, I really like them, even though they almost destroyed my pond a couple of years ago. They are so smart and their little paws are so dexterous. Still, I can understand your frustration with them.

I wonder if the same thing I use to protect the pond would work with your garden beds. I use fishing line all the way around the pond. You'd have to put it at two different levels, probably close together, but I wonder if it would deter them because they'd get up against it and not be able to see it. It has deterred them from trying the pond again. (But the deep water helped on that score as well.) It also has deterred herons so far, knock on wood.

I do want to try to do that with my pond- I just have to figure out a good way to anchor it on the back side where there's nothing to shove stakes into reliably. The stakes for the electric fence always fell down back there.

Oh, and they shredded all the water lily rhizomes I was going to bring you. :(

That's okay,, I have plenty of water lilies. Too many, really. I use rebar to attach my fishing line to.

I also use rebar, hope those might stay put for you, Pony.

The dogs were making an awful racket for quite a while in the evening last night, around 9 or 10. I didn't have the energy to investigate, but see this morning that two of my bird feeders are down and the shorthairs are torn between checking things out and hanging close to the house. Last time this happened, we had a bear and her two cubs in the neighborhood. That or we now have raccoon problems too. Whichever, it is scary.

We have no squirrels, raccoons, rabbits, or any other pocket pets in our neighborhood. We have a neighbor who is on the bottle and by afternoon she sits on her deck with a rifle and shoots anything that moves on the ground. Montana is a good place for drunken hobbies. Hence my fenced-in 3 acres and Invisible Fence. My dogs are at least safe.

Sofer, Are you serious? Wow!!!

PNW, BE CAREFUL!!!!! My goodness, what else are you going to have to worry about?

Yikes. Sharon, I hope it's just a raccoon who's passing through. Please be careful. Eek.

Sofer, I can't say that's the first such story I've heard about Montana... crazy stuff.

I'm sure rebar would hold fishing line quite well- my dilemna is that I have nothing to anchor the rebar in on the back side of the pond. This will take some engineering, which I haven't got the energy for at the moment.

You can easily tell the difference between a bear in your pond and a raccoon. A bear once cleaned out our large Koi. The plants and water were splattered for a long ways. And a wide path of wet led away from the pond into the woods. Where we found the back half of one of the fish on a stump.

Eep! I'm glad we are too urban to have bears. Raccoons are enough of a problem!

Unfortunatly true. She is a nice person but when she gets looped she gets angry and like to pretend the squirrels are her husband.

Yikes! That's putting the word 'character' mildly..