We Catched Us a Wild Mountain Beaver!

We have mountain beavers ( Aplodontia rufa rufa )in our yard. This concerns my wife, since she doesn't like the idea that these rabbit-sized rodents are burrowing under our house, which they are. She's all shock-and-awe, suggesting we try flooding their burrows, deploying smoke bombs, poison and tactical nuclear devices to get rid of these furry phantom menaces. (What can I say? She's got sort of an old-testament thing goin' on there.)

I'm more of a "bring 'em back alive" kinda guy, so I borrowed a Havahart trap from my next door neighbor, and set it up with a fresh apple core for bait. The plan is, catch them here, then deport them a couple miles up the hill, at the end of the road, far, far way from our foundation and tomato plants.

Couple hours later, I got me a wire basket chock full o'some fresh, feisty mountain beaver! Yee haw. A bona-fied living fossil, the oldest living rodent on the face of the earth. A shy kilogram's worth of dirt-brown, warmblooded diggin' machine. A pest that will incidentally eat your garden, if he/she happens to have a burrow close enough for him to bother.

Mountain Beavers just gotsta be free.

And here is the part where we let him go:

Wash,wash, wash the car. Please remove ten years worth of dust and, yes, moss from the paint and rusty bits. we live in a freaking rainforest, people. What did you expect?

Faith and the Chevelle posing in our Pacific Rainforest driveway.



This is my lovely daughter Faith in my 1966 Chevelle Malibu. I've owned this car since 1978, I think. Long time anyway.

Lotta stories in this car, but here is the most recent one: I decided to sell it.

Yeah, I know, "You own a cool old piece of V-8 powered Detroit convertible iron for thirty years, then you decide to sell it?"

All the usual reasons apply ... it's not currently running; I don't really have time to mess with it; it needs a full restoration; my storage is inadequate (in this part of the country, that means it's just sitting there, getting rustier); cars like this are getting ridiculous prices on eBay; I could use the proceeds for a large down payment on a really fun car I could actually drive ... This thing has been sitting in my carport for ten years.

I'm thinking my wife would be really happy to get rid of it.

So I hooked it up with a rope to the tow hook on my wife's Subaru, and towed it out of the carport to wash (it literally had moss growing out of some of the rusty bits) it and get some photos; get it ready to sell it on eBay.

As I start washing it, my wife and daughter come out and say, "What are you doing with the Chevy?"

"I thought I'd get it cleaned up a bit and snap some pictures so I can list it on eBay."

"YOU ARE NOT GOING TO SELL THAT CAR."

Wives are kinda funny things. Back into the carport with you, Chevelle.

Faith. Red, White and Beach.



Here is my patriotic daughter Faith, at the beach on July 4. Like all our family, she's a true patriot, 100% Yankee Doodle Apple Pie U.S.A.merican. She's rough, tough and hard to bluff. When discussing foreign policy with her, don't ever ask her, "But what would the Paraguayan ambassador think?" She'll squint her eyes and say with imperturbable, steely resolve in her voice, "Ha. I sneer at Paraguay."

She's shooting off illegal Indian fireworks on the beach tonight, and she's darn proud of it.

Cut her and she bleeds red, white and blue.

On second thought, don't cut her. I'd hate to see that. That would make me very angry.

You cut her and maybe I cut you, eh?

Cats are her favorite animal and orange is her favorite color.

Bond Girls.

This is a shot of my daughter Hope (rt.) and niece Danielle one day when they were pretending to be secret agents in our tree house. It was one of those dry, warm summer days when the kids and dogs and cats and chickens are all running around barefoot together. One of those more or less perfect days.

I told them, "Well, if you want to be secret agents, you can't ever whine, because secret agents never whine. About anything." (At that age, they both had a bit of a whining problem, you see.) And from that, a new James Bond movie poster was born.

Be sure to click on the picture to make it full size, because the expressions on their faces are absolutely priceless.

This is the second post.