Death of the Hamster

The Death of Hamster:

Winter Kitty Visitor

Some day a dog may show up her again, at least a show dog, but for now we have this cat to show:

Fall Flight of the Fairyflies

Busy Day Over Dog Corners

Catbird Seat

shadow hasn't seen a dog in a week of Sundays

Ohwaowa Pears!

Over our head in pears:

Pressing News

IT'S HAPPENING:

Coon for Dinner

Table for one

Hickory Gets Tiger by the Tail

Hickory lost traxk of whose tail was whose, but there were no reperussions:

Trees They Are Watching Us

Trees, for the most part, do not have feet, but they have eyes, so to speak, and to speak they have wispeering tongues that keep no secrets.

Thought He Saw A Unicorn

Though there are no dogs here at the moment, there IS a Unicorn

Go Ask Froggie at the Fountain

Long before dogs appeared here, Dogs Plot was the domain of cats, but before that ... before horses and dinosaurs, chickens and YOU: frogs. Yup, frogs. And frogs can be very outspoken around here, but this one is listening. Listen!

Hickory's Frog Pond Meditation

Frogs at Dog's Plot? When everything's green, everything's a frog ... and that's okay with me 'n Hickory.

Dogs Plot Daily Dash

The Old Boy’s Little Golden Book of Life and Time One of the first things I do each day, after the coffee and before washing yesterday’s dishes (if I do) is to have a deep thought and write it down, hoping that will lead naturally to my next piece of work, which could be another book start up, adding to the many that I have going, this one e being: “The Old Boy’s Little Golden Book of Life and Time” which will need to be short if I am ever to get it done. But, as time goes on I am struck by how little of it there seems to be anymore. I know that isn’t because there is a global time shortage, and it isn’t even because I am well into my personal end times, but rather that it’s because I don’t get much of anything done in a day’s time anymore, and that despite the fact that I put so much into thinking about it all. Maybe I should get someone else to do that for me. As for today’s thought: I was thinking something like “The Truth is Funny,” but maybe not. Your thoughts? Be quiet though and don’t just blurt them out; instead write them down when you get the time, and send them to your congressman. Thank you for your service over the years.

Doged Blues

Cali is home alone mostly as her family is on vacation, so she needs an outlet for her lonesome, although she likes to sing just about anytime

House Rules and Racoon Behavior

Old Men With Scythes

Old Men with Scythes Traveling the roads of rural Austria by motorcycle in nineteen sixty two or three we would see old men with scythes mowing the ditch banks: their retirement careers, but a job done now days by tractors, even in the Alps and I leave the ditches to the tractors, except at the mouth of the driveway, but after that I am the old man with the scythe. I do have my grandfather’s Ametican scythe, but the blade is stamped-steel as we made them in this country. I use a scythe blade of cold-forged, folded Austrian Steel in layers of two types of steel that vary in hardness, which makes it easier to sharpen to a fine edge. Of course that means you will have to do a lot of fine sharpening. The time spent sharpening is proportionate to the ease of sharpening and the roughness of use. This here Dogs Plot is rough territory for mowing and I am too rough a tool user, not an old master, just old, so I generally use a shorter blade made especially as a ditch blade, midway between a brush hook and a twenty four or six inch wheat mower. I have several twenty-four inch blades which I have broken at he heel on trees, rocks, or half buried old farm machinery, and which my mechanic has welded - a couple of them twice in slightly different places.and they are stronger at the break than before even - but I just use the ditch blade. And this season I had not been stopping to hone it every five minutes like the book of Scythe says, The Master Mower carries his curved whetstone in a copper sheath looped over your bel and filled with water; so as to stop mowing every five minutes, stand and hone for five minutes then go back to mowing; which keeps the tool sharp, prevents the mower from overheating and blowing a seal, but ALSO and especially from becoming over inspired by the power one has with it that one become dangerous also to bedded fawns, trees, and the blade itself. Well I had not been good to the tool this year, had only honed to before setting out, not carried it along, had failed to stop often enough, overheated, nicked the blade, and never lasting more than half an hour. Worst of all I had not I had not even done the necessary, intermittent peen-hammering that these cold-forged blades need so that the sharpening stone will not be trying to put a low slope point on a blunt edge. The system wouldn’t work if things did not wear away, and with good behavior, the tool will last as long as the man. And so it had been wearing on me. it was past time for some cold forging. See it happen in the video with some of the misses and bad clangers clipped out. I had filed it first to get the nicks out. I didn’t file it enough. Today’s another day.

Hickory and Tramp work it out while Sylvia takes the bowl

Joy Blues

In the morning when the Salt Trucks rumble by I blow the harp pretty hard and then I fly off the deck . "Where's your bicycle?" Joe Long asked when I landed by his LONG POINT ORCHARD fruit stand. I usually ride my bike over there for fruit. I couldn't very well try telling him that I had flown, of course, nor did I need to, I just told him my grandson had it to fix which he does, and I didn't have to lie and say I walked the quarter mile over from Dog's Plot. I bought a bag of apricotts for a quarter, which was all I had, but it was a big bag, good deal.

Silvia came for Dinner

The Possum that regularly came to dinner after the cats was done in by a car. A pair of young Coon syblings showed up here onece, and then there was one...with silver ear rims as you see, who shows up in daylight hours, almost trusts me (who HAS shot rogue coons here) and she, almost, dines with the cats. Cats know that Silvia, being a Coon, is more closely related to Bears than to cats, and more closely related to humans than bears, to judge by their hands. I can't wait to see how the cats react when the octupus comes around for dinner!

Hickory the Vegetarian Cat

Hickory is not a true vegetarian, just a cat gormand, and like all cats, he likes his water flavored by what ever is living or has died in it. He particularly likes the little frog pond here that has all the duckweed growing on it, and Duckweed is called that because some ducks like to scoop it up with those flat bills made for just such a thing, but Hickory has no problem with lapping the Duckweed off the water, which leaves a little lake of open space for clear drinking, but then he eats some more Duckweed, and after eating a lot of Duckweed one needs to do some exrtensive scratch/stretching, I read that there is some promise in the possibilty of raising duckweed as a forage crop for other domestic animals, and I have tried it myself, but for me, it would need some processing, maybe through a Duck. I would never knowingly eat a cat, unless I were on Noah's ark, could find no land, and had already eaten the other animals from Ant, to Ant Eater to Zebra.

Sure, sure you're a cat enough

scots pine decline

hanging in there

Sealing the Deck

Mnetha had to replace a couple lenghts of decking, but this will be finished tomorrow, then we start on the trim.

High Pressure Painters

Mnetha and Paul are pressure washing the Dogs Plot deck, sealing it, staining the rail, then painting the house, but I am hoping to keep them from pulling the rug out from under me for a while at least. And it sure is fun to watch the pressure washer do it's thing, properly handled by a pro, unlike a friend who nearly lost her thumb to one of these high pressure machines...the spray has such power. You are fortunate that I have, at least tried to turn off the audio in this because the machine is an obnoxious, polluting monster, although painters like fumes it seems. Our particular problem here is that our well is good for about forty five minutes, or less, of water, then the pressure washing is over for most of the rest of the day. That is a reasonable pace. Working remotely from my chair in my private Think Tank endevour, I found great satisfaction in going out every once in a while to watch the wood come clean and the oil stain drying on the rail, as the sun finally came out. My brother and two grandaughters dropped by and watched with me, sitting on some of the furniture we took off the deck: the first public performance I have attended since the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra came to the Morgan Opera House.

Howlin Davey WeatherBear

You can see that Howlin Dave is sufferin: putin his mouth harp up his nose and all that jive, plus blasting it out so loud that the neighbors from up the road came by and dropped two bucks, saying they were trying to have a party, so could he please hold it down.

The Dogs Plot Hustle

Hurry hurry hurry; what a life!

chicken house down there somewhere

I think you can find your way there. Or just follow the chicken.

What the Coyote said to the Loon

You may know the story of the Lewis County man whose snowmobile hit a boulder in a drift softened by a January thaw as he was on way to his cabin near the Lake Bonaparte State Forest quite a few years back now: about how he lay there unconscious for he would never know how long, but it could not have been too long, because he didn’t die; and he didn’t die because the next thing he knew he was deep in a talus cave with a sow Black bear who had dragged him there by the hood of his snowmoblie suit …. the story of how he escaped, which was not too hard as the bear had reentered the hybernation state and the cave was not far from his cabin, of how the she Bear came looking for him when next she turned over in her cave, of the unprescented relationship between the two that resulted … and so on. Well anyway, I wrote the story. I mean that I literally wrote the story, not that I lived it, but it is surprising to me now that I have NOT been dragged off and adopted or eaten by a bear myself, considering that in my early middle ages, heedless of that particular danger, I made so many bicycle trips between Ithaca and the Adirondacks, even to Boston and back, pulling off the road at so many bridges over so many creeks, to roll out my sleeping bag, maybe make a lttle fire on the creek bank to cook my favorite rehydreded oxtail soup or if it rained, just rolling the plastic ground- cloth around me, and eating a stick of cheese. So a bear attracted by my cooking or my cheese-breath could well have come along and dragged me off or eaten me right there like a burrito; and somehow that never happened. In the Summer if sevety eight when I arrived at the banks of the Slate River in Colorado, it was probably someting like four or five in the morning. I had walked the last mile or so after being left off by my hitched ride, a guy on his way up to wrangle trail horses he kept at the foot of Crested Butte. Eric and Kathleen’s cabin was on the other side of the creek, along with a few others, all reached by a foot bridge where their several cars were parked. I decided that I shouldn’t come knocking at their door like a bear in the night so I got out my sleeping bag rolled it out there by the bank of the Slate and sat up, not expecting to sleep before morning broke, excited as I was, with mountains behind me and mountians sloping steeply up from just across the river flats, and about a mile further above sea level than I had ever been, it wasn’t so much the sky above me, as my head was in the sky with the unblinking stars. So THEN I heard the call of a loon: familiar enough to me from the East; but the call of the loon echoed off one or the other or both the mountians across the river and behind me; and then a COYOTE answered the Loon. And sure enough the loon answered the Coyote …and to remove all doubrt, that went on for a while. And I am sure that if I had ever leaned what to make of it, that experince would have by itself changed my life forever, but I didn’t and much to my surprise when I woke, I had been lulled…or somethinged to sleep. Since then Coyotes have become common in the East, but I have only heard them conversing with Dogs. And though I answer to them, they do not answer to me.

Know I am there

I always know that I am there, because this rude guy announces me everywhere

Nest of my Nest

I had tied Bones, the scarey B. word Bird up in the nest I made in the Cherry Plum tree to maybe keep others....like the neighborhood tiger for instance...from squatting in it, because that is my damn catbird seat.. But I go up there...and what do I find? A little nest in my nest. It is lined whith cherry plum blossoms, whatever bird not impressed by old Bones. Okay then. Okey Dokey. Think I'll see how things look on the roof where the Grackles have been bowling horse chestnuts. Then take a walk.

Pinhead Catches the Rays

The air was cold, the sun was intense, and about as soon as Pinhead left the shadow of the chicken house this morning, she flopped down in that radiance looking like a bird that had died crossing the deseert, but for her gently breathing feathers, and then the great kerfulffel when Blue Jay came by.

Weeping Birch Chicken Blues

She thought she saw a Fisher Cat:

WTD Howl

Pinhead Be With You

Pinhead the last only cicken abides:

I have colonized close to two hundred naturally occuring....foreign invasive if you want to put it that way...pear trees on these four or five acres and that is too many to control, but I am doing a few more this year, and here is one that took well last year. You can see what is left of the wax I used to seal the wedge in split graft. I like the natural bastard trees too, every tree an individual, all descended from French Jesuit Priests, so to speak.

That Snow Spring Chicken

A good time to be a feathered biped.

Bull Roarer Experiments

i experimented with two different sizes of bull roarers that I have recently made. What is a "Bull Roarer?" you ask. It is an ancient instrument that creates a sound, much of which is below the human range of hearing...more down there with whales...but which can affect our brains without a conscious level of hearing. BullRoarers have been used to for long distance signaling, for scaring the bejezess out of superstiious people, for altering your brain waves, or, of course, for rounding up whales. You should try this at home. Might be useful for decapitating dandilions when gathering them for making dandilion wine. But watch out for your brain.

Polarding the Willow

This Willow by the chicken house pond was once just a little whip I cut and brought from the Ithaca City Cemetery, but now it is getting all out of scale with the pond and all, so I took out the bigger shooting branches since the last cut, using my Dewalt ak47 demolition saw, and if that doesn't sufice, I will cut it clear across at the top of the stump as with a proper polarding, and I mean business.

setting free the island

Dog's Plot Studio

Here in the secret garden grove out behind the stately Dogs Plot mansion is the cottage studio where I labor long into the night and where so very much is accomplished

Call Me Bullroarer

Oh sure, the hugely popular internet influencer, musician and detective, Christopher Malloy plays both a conventional stringed harp the size of a church window, AND the humble mouth harp too ... but does he play the WIND HARP? Well my ROOF harps the wind, and so do I...me using the traditional wind harp used by Shamen, wise guys, savages, and children of many and most primitive and neo-primitive cultures...In English most commonly called a Bullroarer. It can be used to amuse, to signal, to communicate with whales, to summon spirits or to horrify the superstitious. It is best to know the science of its sound though before doing damage to yourself or others: The Bullroarer produces sound in a low range much of which is well below the human range of hearing, and more in synch with that of whales and Elephants; but that we, or most of at are not AWARE of those lower sounds, does not mean that we are not AFECTED by them........be cause we are. Profoundly. Or so I have read. Anyway ... do I seem any different lately? Can you hear the sound of my bull roaring? That Seaton based one I made so long ago was probably based on an Ojibway model...maybe I will carve another in that shape, using some of my apple or pear wood. Or you can. I made my first one at around age twelve, more or less following the specifications in an Ernest Thompson Seaton wood craft book, which guided much of my early life, but it was of an odd shape compared to most I have found on line, , as you can see from the picture of it and my newly made one, and it never worked at all, mostly because I made it from a light weight wood: a cedar shingle. Some heft is necssary, and I can heft it.Call me Bullroarer!

First Bee 2021

y June last year I had not seen more than half a dozen honey bees. Here is my first one of 2021, and on my first flowers - snow drops- but she seems darker than a honey bee is supposed to be. No jokes about Queens, or Afro American bees please.

Pinhead's Spring Solstice

Yesterday, February 26, Pinhead, our only chicken, not only stepped out of the chicken house when I opened it, but went up onto her special rock on the ridge and sat there in the sun all day, during which I discovered that over the last couple of weeks she had resumed laying eggs and produced a clutch of eight...non-fertile of course, their being no roostes about, not even pheasant cocks, so I brought the eggs to the kitchen...and even she will get back her share. But when it got near sundown, Pinhead was still there on her rock, so I went away and came back later and she was still there. So I got closer, and we had a little talk. I will not repeat here what was said, but you can see that it worked out. And then I went to bed.

Dog's Plot Studio Reveal

You might think that a guy living alone in an big old three wing, fourth generation , fourteen room farm house would not need a separate building for a studio, but I do need such as a resort if I am to get a whirl wind of work done without practical junk and ordinary people things getting in the way. And you are not invited to visit me there, not only because of the Pandemic thing, but really mostly because I want to be alone there; but here you have a virtual visit. It was very very busy here today, busier than the day the pig fell into the well

Snow Shoes Last Tromp

Pinhead's Tipi

I went down to the chicken house to feed Pinhead, The Chicadees , the Little Brown Jobs, and the Jay birds, stood there still and cold as a snowman for a while , then came back, but its pretty cold yet and I won't be hopping onto my skis real soon, even though there seems to be chocolate coated candy drops all over the snow....rabbits you know. PinHead, the last lonely Chicken, who has chosen NOT to come out of the chicken house to feed or for any other reason, did not even come to the carry-out I had carried out...and brought in to her, but I heard a brief rustling in the corner where a while black I had put some rigid foam panels I need to use there, tied up in an industrial black trash bag, so that the chickens would not eat the foam, because chickens all like to peck and eat those white styro beads, like popcorn, not that it has ever seemed to do them any harm, and anyway the others and she have already put a door in the bag and eaten most of the styrofoam, so now I see she is in the otherwise empty, black bag tipi and she doesn't want to come ouf of her chicken tent right now just fora plate of dried tomato, basmati rice, oat flakes, chicken soup noodles, whole and cracked corn, wild bird mix, cat food sweepings, or the regular layer ration garnish;

Shadow Walker

Snow Exit Here

There's no way out of here

Stink bug, spider gonna get you

How I make a living here:

Nasty Night Visitor

It was hard to get a high quality image of the low-flying , polysexual, being that visits the desert island irregularly and at night; but to all appearances, this one-horned, imp with a tail like a dog and tits like sweet potatoes, has done everything but impregnate the lone Cocoa Palm... and maybe it has even done so. Nothing good can come of that.

A storm foretold

Trees and rain belong OUTside the house: