Zebster-1 Brambles-0

before

After I'd hacked down 1/4

I've had this "mission" in mind for a couple of years, hacking down my mother's raspberry and blackberry patch.  The raspberries have not been doing well lately and the blackberry bushes are getting so tall they fall out into the yard and grab my ass when I'm mowing.  Seriously, some are as tall as 12-15 feet.  And to complicate things more, the whole patch is "overrun" with a kudzu type vine that's intertwined amongst these very prickly stalks, especially the blackberries.  Some of the thorns are 1/4 inch long.

So with the help of my trusty implement of destruction, I started after it at about 9:00 this morning.   After about two and a half hours, I was pretty much done but the patch was only 90% cleared.  So with the help of another friend, see pic below, I managed to bull through to finish it.  One end of the patch was about 12-15 feet wide and the other end was 25 feet wide, and it was probably 50 feet long.  I should probably say that we'll check the final score of this battle in the morning, just in case it took a toll on my back.  Stiff right now but should be fine.




implement of destruction

 

done

Deer-1 PT Cruiser-0

This is a misnomer since the poor deer did get the worst of it but this is how I was feeling about the following incident yesterday as I posted it to Facebook.  What follows is my explanation of what happened after I got home last night, followed by a few pictures that I just took this morning.

The deer hit me instead of me hitting it, 5 seconds after I'd avoided her boyfriend who'd run across in front of me. She glanced off the middle passenger's side, then hit the rear part of the rear wheel well and bumper pretty hard. She laid in the road for 5 minutes trying to get up while I was directing traffic and calling the police. Then she completely laid down, thought she was dead; but when I got to her, she walked back onto the lawn she came from and stood there for 5 minutes, looking like she was going to give up at times, then she laid down and after a few minutes put her head down.. So I finally had a chance to walk back and quickly look at my car. I looked at it for 60 seconds, looked back and she was gone. I went to the tree line and couldn't see her. The officer came, and he and I and another guy spent 15 minutes combing the woods for her, to no avail. So I have a dented car and no deer meat. Hopefully she's in better shape than she looked. I'm thinking her hooves hit the side of the car, which caused her to fall towards the rear wheel well. Instead of a broken neck, maybe a concussion and shoulder injury. (probably wishful thinking)
 

 You can see my squatting reflection taking this pic better than you can see the scratches from her hooves but they're there.

From the last 3 pictures you can see the back part of the wheel well is folded over, the bumper is knocked back and out towards the picture, and there's a hole in the inside wheel well.  So the combination of those things is going to make that hole and back bumper act like a sail going down the road.  There's also a piece missing out of the hub cap.

Popham Beach to Reid State Park

Despite a weather forecast that predicted, at best, overcast and windy weather and likely rain in the afternoon, we (being yours truly and his two best friends) struck out to do some sightseeing at parks on the coast of Maine, specifically at the mouth of the Kennebec River.  As it turns out, the weather was much better than predicted.  It only got windy and a little cold at our last stop, which served to make the ocean waves more dramatic crashing on the rocky coast.
As I've done before, you can see all of the pictures I took yesterday at the link, and I'll share a representative shot of each place we went.  Mixed in between we found a neat hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant in Downtown Bath for lunch (hole in the wall in the sense that the place was maybe 12 feet wide with a counter against one wall that sat four people and a two-person table in the corner) and finished our day with Blizzards from DQ on the way back through Bath.

Popham Beach State Park above at low tide.  This shot is taken along the beach but I took others looking out toward the ocean but I've never been anywhere where the beach, meaning the sand, was so wide, upwards of a 1/4 mile at low tide.

Fort Baldwin, with three batteries and a tall observation tower.  I took a couple of shots standing atop these batteries looking toward the ocean but the trees are now in the way.  Back in the day you would've been able to see for miles.  If the trees hadn't been in the way, I would've been able to take pictures of Fort Popham, which replaced Baldwin, that lies between this fort and the coast.

Standing on the site of the Popham Colony looking eastward over the bay.  The first ship built in what is now the United States was built here, called The Virginia.  The entrance to Fort Baldwin is behind me by a couple hundred feet.

Fort Popham, where I also took some pictures looking out toward the ocean.  I think these old forts are kinda neat.

Reid State Park, where I took several pictures of the coast.  They came out pretty good, I think, particularly of the little old bridge near the entrance.  At the end of the pictures you'll see three taken at a place near Reid State Park called Todd's Landing, named after our furry, four-legged friend -- well, not really but it's a pretty place.