Who is the better conservative?
July 10, 2009
Compare the leaders.
If you read Ignatieff’s speech at Whitehall this week, you’ll agree that he came across as a model of decorum and statesmanship. He still made a critically important point, though. He explained that Canadian conservatives have traditionally adhered to the liberal-democratic model. By inference, the CPC’s fixation on divisive regionalism and narrow ideology is a departure traditional conservatives should not accept.
While Stephen Harper acted the buffoon on one world stage, Michael Ignatieff showed himself the better conservative on another.
More trouble with Daphne
July 4, 2009
In an email retired MNR guy Brian Anderson suggested I protect my walnut seedlings by putting out a blood-scented bait to scare the deer out of the field. Opening day of bass season produced a supply of fish carcasses, so I placed them around the field, producing immediate results: within a couple of hours the fish-heads were widely dispersed as though a litter of coyote puppies had played with them. From then on I saw no more damage to the seedlings in the back field.
Then came the episode with the spotted fawn E. T.’s visit to our orchard last Sunday. Yesterday morning over my pancakes I watched E.T. and Daphne’s Mom grazing in the neighbour’s soybean field, about six hundred yards away. Fine. No problem.
This morning after a heavy rain I looked over the walnut fields on the way to the woodlot, then settled into a casual mushroom tour on the Ranger. I picked three different types of oysters, one in quantity, so now I need to determine if the things are edible.
On the way back to the house I looked down into the new 5 acre patch of seedlings, and there was Daphne, cheerfully munching on one of the priceless blight-resistant plants the butternut people entrusted to my care. Yelling and waving my Tilley, I gunned the Ranger to the rescue across the 700 feet to the culprit and her victim.
Daphne was not impressed by my wild west routine. She simply retreated into the tall hay about a hundred feet, turned and stared blankly at me. I stopped by tree #WP92-23 and shut the machine off. If you’re interested, #23 is located at
N44.39.720′
W76.13.561
441′
She raised her eyes and ears above the hay, looked at me and my Ranger, and slowly started to walk toward us. Again, she walked up to about forty feet from me, licked her lips, chewed her cud a bit, and looked quite frustrated that I had put myself between her and her breakfast. It doesn’t seem to matter to Daphne that the whole world around her is green with potential food for a deer at this time of year. When she sets her taste buds on one particular tree, that’s the one she intends to eat.
She tried several circles downwind of the Ranger. My one-sided conversation with her seemed more to intrigue than frighten her. Growing a bit tired of the standoff, I tried dismounting from the Ranger to give her a scare. She just did her gallop-into-the-tall-hay bit, then turned around and returned, tail held high, and gleaming in the sunlight from the dew on her flanks.
She’s a beautiful animal, but I couldn’t notice how, while walking in silhouette in the hay, she has moves a lot like a young Michael Jackson in his early dance steps. That jerky, but fluid step?
So we’ve established that Daphne has a very strong will, fixates on a particular plant that she wants to eat at that time, has some decent dance moves, and that she’s also not very afraid of me. The fact remains that she’s poised to damage a priceless bit of the Canadian genetic heritage, and the only way I could get her to give up on her breakfast in time for me to return for mine, was by running after her across a five-acre field until she eventually gave up and ducked into the woodlot to await my departure.
I guess the only solution will be to bait the butternut seedlings with fish heads and hope she develops a taste for Glen Baker’s soybeans. Time to go fishing. Now that’s a plan. Thanks, Brian.
UPDATE: July 11/2009
Another encounter with Daphne went somewhat better for both of us. When I came upon her she was firmly ensconced in the middle of my neighbour’s wheat field. She looked up at my approach, froze, and stared me down until I grew bored and drove away. Hey, she’s not eating my nut trees, so what’s the harm? Hope you enjoy the wheat, Daphne.
E.T.
June 28, 2009
Sunday afternoon Bet called me to the back of the house: “Something is making a distress call out there! I don’t know if it is a bird or a cat up a tree, but something is in trouble. It’s making kind of a bleating noise.” She wandered down the stairs into the orchard. “Look! There it is!” she whispered. Bet pointed at a two-week old fawn, standing lost and bewildered on the edge of the lawn. I tried to calm her down and get her to come back into the house before she frightened the thing out of its wits, but she kept babbling away, all the way up the stairs and into the kitchen.
Our son Charlie had heard the commotion and made his own way to the orchard. He stood there, stock still. Apparently pleased by the company of these strange animals, the fawn began gamboling about the orchard, trying out the unfamiliar, closely-cropped turf. Suddenly he noticed this tall animal with strange hair, and so he bopped over for a visit. Then came that great E.T. moment: the fawn, legs braced like a little, spotted saw horse, nose stretching, stretching out to the man’s fingertip. The merest touch, a flip of the tail and E.T. was gone. Well, not really; he went for another lap of the orchard, then posed for a photo and gradually faded into the vegetation along a fence row. At least he was quiet after meeting Charlie.
E.T. seemed in excellent physical condition, so we were pretty sure he wasn’t the fawn orphaned by the accident on Hwy 15 this week which left a doe dead. I had looked at the carcass, if only to make sure it wasn’t Daphne, the featured character in last week’s column in this space. This doe was twice the size of the winsome yearling. In fact, I suspected that the victim might have been Daphne’s mother, but the good condition of this fawn and my increasingly ragged walnut trees suggest that that very large doe is alive and well and living in the shadow of our barn.
Daphne, on the other hand, has given up ownership of the back field. This might have something to do with the new player, a coyote who has just arrived. I haven’t met the critter yet, but the signs are all there. To my great relief, nothing is eating the walnut seedlings in the back field now.
But Daphne’s mom may have moved her fawn into the tall orchard grass just below the house to hide from the new predator. The trouble with that stuff is that it’s easy to get disoriented in 7’ high growth, and maybe E.T. got away. Or perhaps there’s a second fawn.
The point of telling about all of this confusion Sunday afternoon is to underline a basic principle of environmental management: in theory, many things sound wonderful which don’t taste so good in practice. Take, for instance, the idea of coyotes keeping down the deer population to the betterment of the herd and the ecosystem. That sounds really good on paper, and the picture of a coyote eating a couple of dozen mice causes no one alarm. But the local coyote-popularity poll took some wild swings today while E.T. tore around our orchard looking for a playmate.
Why do the blasted things have to be so cute? Or why do they have to act so vulnerable and foist their family dramas off on the humans in the neighbourhood? Deer have a genius for doing that, all the while munching their way through prized shrubs and orchard growth.
Indian Lake Marina owner Wayne Wilson still chuckles about the doe and two fawns who spent opening day of deer season on his back patio one year. And of course you can’t drive through Chaffey’s Locks without a few eye-to-eye encounters with local whitetails.
Take the family of three deer which stroll at will around the lawns of Newboro at the moment. They must have learned urban living from Canada geese.
So the rest of the day was an uproar of worry. If it wasn’t bad enough for Daphne’s Mom to foist off her half-grown and quarrelsome adolescent on me, now she has to make us kid-sit the little one?
This week I bought my deer license, and hope I win a doe tag in the draw. I won’t pick on the little ones, but if Daphne’s Mom or her current swain show their ears around here, there’ll be cutlets-a-frying, come November. That’ll teach her to dump her family problems on the neighbours.
Bambi
June 28, 2009
Quite a show here this afternoon: Bet heard something making distress calls and wandered down into the orchard to see. Turns out it was a young fawn, lost and lonely, but unhurt. It flounced around for awhile until it spotted Charlie, standing there still. Over to him it gamboled, assumed the E.T. pose, nose to finger tip, then thought better of it and bounded away. I got one picture with a 35 mm on a long lens, then it faded into the greenery to await rescue from Mom, I guess. It’s a lot easier to talk about coyotes controlling the deer population when it’s in the abstract. When Bambi is in the orchard, the votes swing wildly in favour of the deer.
Stone House Reno 5: moving the tools out
June 25, 2009
The end of June
All my life the end of June has been the time to say goodbye, take a rest, and start on a new project. I suppose it’s fitting, then, that today I moved the tools out of the stone house we’ve been renovating since my retirement in the fall of 2004. My shop, refuge, and storehouse for the last thirty-five years has now officially become a dwelling. One floor still needs some sanding and the whole thing needs varnish, but the days of muddy boot tracks to the bathroom have now come to an end.
I’ll miss the time I could put visitors at ease by chiming the house rule as they came in through the door: “No boots in the shower, but they’re optional in bed.”
Bet’s done her best to remain tolerant of my mess for the last few months, but I tend to believe actions more than words, and the two hours of frantic vacuuming upon each arrival at the farm for a weekend sent a clear message: it was time to get on with it.
She even helped me move the tenon cutter out of the living room. It’s a heavy relic from a pre-war factory, and the only way to move it without destroying the floor turned out to be by winching it up to one of the timbers I had installed as a room divider. Once I set it on a heavy plywood dolly with a chain hoist, it was pretty easy to move around. We managed to wiggle it out through the front doors (weeks of work on those doors) and into the bucket of the waiting loader.
Today two saws, a jointer, and my prized Poitras shaper made the trip to the barn. This made me sad. It was like leaving the comfort and security of my childhood home. Funny, the beds, the food, two computers and a television are still there, but it’s the shaper I miss. And I haven’t even had the thing for that long, only about three years. But it’s had a hand in everything good or interesting I have done in this renovation: the flooring, the cabinets, those muntined glass doors Bet insisted upon, the passage and entrance doors, the windows, the baseboards, the stairs, the crown moulding over the doors and windows, even the ceiling and window paneling – it all came off that shaper.
So now I face the grueling task of cleanup. The floor is littered with scraps of walnut from the stair-railing project and a lot of pine shavings from the final door casing in the bathroom which went on this morning.
Oh well, once that’s done I get to drive my floor sander around for a day or two. The old Clark drum sander is far from my favourite tool, but it’s heavy, loud and powerful, so it should stave off nostalgia for a little while until the varnished-floors regime becomes oppressive and I lay out the foundations for a new shop.
For other articles in this series check:
https://rodcroskery.wordpress.com/category/renovating-a-stone-house/
The trouble with Daphne
June 21, 2009
Daphne came into our lives when she was abandoned the day her mother gave birth to a new fawn behind the barn. The yearling white-tail was left to wander, and she seems to have fixed upon the walnut field next to the woods as her new home.
This has done no good for the seedlings. For a hundred-foot radius from Daphne’s bed, the taller seedlings have been trimmed back to the bark and the shorter walnuts have had their tops nipped off. For some reason Daphne prefers her meals served in the open, and from knee to shoulder height. The earlier leaves from a hundred young butternut trees kept her happy until the walnuts came on, but now she won’t be separated from her favourite food for long.
Take this morning, for example. In a rage yesterday I had chased her clean out of the field. I drove back this morning to see if this moment of uncharacteristic energy on my part had had any effect. No. Daphne greeted me with wide eyes and perked ears, but she didn’t stop munching on a tender walnut seedling until I drove up close to her. Then she moved away. I expected her to pick up my scent, flip the tail, snort and run away, hopefully to the other side of someone else’s woods. But no. She walked away about a hundred feet, then turned and started to work her way back toward me, bobbing her head from side to side and doing that alert-stupid thing deer are so good at.
O.k. It’s the running engine. I turned off the key, fully expecting this to produce panic and flight. Nope. On she came. About forty feet from the Ranger she suddenly took flight – until she thought better of it after a couple of leaps. Then she threw up her tail and dashed in a semi-circle around me and towards the woods. But she turned and came back to take up station on the other side of me. Obviously my vehicle and I were occupying the very spot on this earth where she most wanted to be, and would we please leave?
She made a couple of more attempts to crowd me out of her territory, jumping, stamping her feet, and letting out these little snorts before setting off on another hell-for-leather rush to the other side of the Ranger where she started up her inquiring looks again. With seven hundred walnut trees in this field, why does she particularly want to eat this one? And it’s almost all gone.
Eventually she gave up her attempt to frighten me off and stepped over the fence and behind a large tree to await my departure.
Daphne’s rapidly growing into a beautiful animal. Her tail’s still not fully-fluffed, but she’s the lovely tan colour of a fully-grown deer in summer coat now. We’d actually love to have her around if it weren’t for the way she Hoovers my walnuts. I have spent three summers planting, mowing, watering and coddling these little trees, and she mows through them at an incredible rate.
Even camping in the field won’t work if she keeps coming back to her spot to put me out. I remember two summers ago a young coyote had his bed in another field near the woods. I nearly ran over him with a riding lawn mower one morning while on my way to trim around a line of spruces. Young fellow was a very sound sleeper. The coyote pup, as well, deeply resented my intrusion into his territory, and when I later mowed the field, he spent the day circling to try and find a safe way back to his bed, his favourite bones, and a rubber chew toy.
But he was a coyote, and defined by society as a destructive varmint, even though he caught and ate mice everywhere he went and did his best to keep the squirrels and chipmunks honest. No fate is too terrible for the local coyote. Poison, traps, grayhounds, even running down with vehicles – all are acceptable. Daphne, on the other hand, is protected by law as a natural resource, even though she is cutely chewing her way through my livelihood. Now which one is the varmint?
Stone House Reno 4: Making a railing
June 18, 2009
Soggy, but a good day for staircase-building. I’m putting a railing 56″ long along the hall next to the stairs. 1.3″ square plain balusters are fitting into the flooring and up into the rail at 34″. After much thought I decided to cut 1″ dowels into the ends of the balusters, then drill and glue. Surprisingly, the dowel-cutting went very well in the walnut stock: a 1″ diameter plug cutter mounted in the drill press machined the stock secured in the vice so as to cut between the jaws to get the end grain without splitting it. No problem, virtually an instant 5/8″ tenon, so little remained to do but cut the pieces to length and try the same thing on the other end of the 11 pieces. No extras. I missed one measurement by an inch, but caught the goof on the check before sawing. Whew!
To clear the cuts I set up a jig on the band saw to allow only a 5/8″ cut. Then I just sorta circumcised the ends, leaving the dowels exposed.
Then I hit the spreadsheet to calculate the distance between the posts so that I could lay out the floor for drilling. That went well, except that after layout I had a need for 13 posts. Hmmmm. Better not drill yet.
Turns out for each station I had added by 1/2 the post’s width when I should have added by the whole thing. Ready to start drilling 1″ holes in the floor now, but am feeling a bit lazy, so I checked mail instead, and then wrote this.
“So, Rod, how good is the staircase?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“Depends upon how good the story about it turns out to be.”
………
Back at it the following day. I had drilled the flooring for the balusters yesterday, using my trusty 6″ dial caliper to scratch arcs on the flooring to intersect a straight line down the middle of the planned railing. This time the count worked out, so I firmed up the marks with a marker pen and transferred them to the railing to run above. Just to be safe I did a rough set of marks with a pencil by laying the railing alongside the floor marks and roughly scribed them across. Then I established the one most likely to be correct and measured the other marks for holes in the railing off it with the caliper. Not surprisingly, these marks corresponded quite well with the rough measurements, but this precaution left me confident throughout the drilling that I hadn’t done the whole thing backwards.
The drill press is much steadier than my arm, but that advantage disappeared as soon as I rounded the top of the railing. Instead I clamped the railing firmly to the bench and had at it with a hand drill and a 1″ Forstener bit. While the hole depth isn’t critical with shouldered tenons, it’s still vital that there be adequate space for the tenon itself and any glue accumulated in the bottom of the hole. Several of the holes needed more drilling to provide adequate clearance. The holes, while not perfectly vertical, seemed to work adequately. None of the posts fell out when I glued them in.
Realizing the risks of gluing above a long run of wood to be stained, I left the balusters upturned in the railing for as long as I dared before moving them to the hall for installation. I still needed to be able to manipulate them a little bit in their sockets before they set hard. With an assistant I nervously flopped the eleven posts and their rail onto the hall floor, grinned hopefully when the whole thing did not fall apart, and then slid the assembly into the glued holes provided for it in the upstairs hall. In it went. No drips, no spills, no fuss.
Huh???
Next up, fabricating a hollow newel post.
For other articles in this series check:
https://rodcroskery.wordpress.com/category/renovating-a-stone-house/
The Quebec Construction Holiday Factor
June 17, 2009
What would happen if they held a general election during the third week of July? That’s the week the construction sites in Quebec shut down for a holiday. Now let’s say we held the vote at that time. What would the turnout be, and who would vote? Would the Quebec voters punish the two centrist parties and favour the Bloc? Would disgruntled Ontario residents favour the NDP or the Green? I would love to read an analysis of where the votes would likely go on a July 24th vote.
Passive aggressive Olympics
June 16, 2009
Let’s say that Harper and company have deep reservations about stimulus spending on any level, and have been forced into it by the combined opposition parties. Then let’s say that the leader of the opposition identifies the insincere effort and demands clarifications as a condition of further support. What better way to blame the opposition for cutting off the spending than by annoying them into bringing down the government? The election-shy media are accusing Ignatieff of passive-aggressive tactics, but they can’t compare with Harper’s on this one.
If a tree falls in the forest…
June 16, 2009
We all know the rest of that one, but how about this:
If all of the media in unison say that Canada doesn’t want a summer election, does that make it true? or does it just reflect their fear that they’ll lose their precious months at the cottage?
the Walnut Diary 