Sunday, July 12, 2009, 06:44
The Drought Continues
The little bit of rain we got two weeks ago must have been an anomaly. Thursday night the sky clouded over, there was thunder and lightning -- and we got about six drops of rain.
Friday night the sky clouded over. There was lightning in the distance. And we got nothing at all.
Saturday was a bright, clear, sunny, windy day, almost 80 degrees, and very low humidity. The combination of heat, wind and sun was very hard on my peas, tomatoes, lettuce and petunias. I've got a couple of petunias planted in containers, and they looked like there were at death's door. The lettuce looked about dead, too. The peas and tomatoes were slightly better. But everything is now desperate for water again.
We drove 40 miles to my sister and brother-in-law's place to haul home 150 bales of hay for Isabelle and Kajun. We saw many corn fields. Those without irrigation were suffering from lack of moisture -- spiky corn with rolled up leaves, trying to conserve what little bit of water they could. The other corn fields, with irrigation, looked better.
But the sight of the irrigation did nothing more than make me upset. How dumb is that to run irrigation on a bright, sunny, warm, windy day? People are endangering the water supply for us all by irrigating on a day when they lose half of it to evaporation -- just for their profit? As my mother would have said, "they must have more money than good sense." Using all of that electricity to pump water so you can lose half of it? What's wrong with running the irrigators at night when they might at least do some good, even if they are still endangering the water supply for us all?
Anyway, since the garden plants looked so bad, I decided to use my captured rain water Saturday evening to water the garden. Maybe it will help to keep things from dying completely while we wait for the humidity to come up or for some rain to fall.
And here I was really hoping that rain we had gotten was a signal that the drought was drawing to a close. But at the moment, it would appear not.
LeAnn R. Ralph
Wednesday, July 08, 2009, 06:33
Trapped. . .
There I was, in the barn Tuesday morning, feeding Kajun his senior horse feed and alfalfa crumbles when I heard it.
Ka-chink!
I looked at Kajun and he looked at me.
"That sounded like the live trap," I said, setting down the bucket of horse feed.
Randy had set up the live trap between the barn and the row of pines on the north side of our property. Any raccoon coming to the barn would most likely use that route, and it was, in fact, right there that Randy trapped a raccoon only last week.
I went outside. There was definitely something in the live trap.
It was my gray tom cat, Gabriel.
He was panic stricken.
"Hold on, Gabriel. I'm coming!" I said.
I hurried to the live trap. The cat looked up at me with eyes filled with terror. He tried to get out the top of the trap but could not. From the way he was acting, I knew he was not even seeing me and probably did not realize I was there.
"It's okay, Gabriel. I'll help you."
"Raa-owwwww," said the cat.
I knew there was some sort of catch on the front of the live trap to release the door. But where?
In the meantime, the cat continued his panicked attempts to find an escape, meowing pitifully.
"Hang on. Calm down. I'll help you," I said.
As I tried to find the release, I briefly thought about racing to the house for my cell phone so I could call Randy to find out how to open the trap. But then I decided that would take too long. From the way Gabriel was behaving, I was afraid he would have a heart attack before then. The vets tell me that when cats are stressed, they release all kinds of stress hormones. The vet in town tells me he has had cats die in his arms when attempting to draw blood from them for tests because they were so stressed.
Finally I figured out how to open the trap.
"There. You're free," I said.
"Meow!" Gabriel said. He immediately saw the opening the zipped out of the live trap.
And just like that, he relaxed.
"You're okay, now Gabriel. You're fine," I said.
It occurred to me as I walked back to the barn that if Gabriel had gotten in the live trap a few minutes earlier or a few minutes later, I might not have realized he was in there. If I had been drawing water or had been taking hay to Isabelle, I would not have heard the door slam shut on the trap. And if I had not heard it, Gabriel would have been in the trap all day, out in the heat and the sun. The other thing, of course, is that any of the kitties could have set it off and would have been in there until someone discovered them Tuesday evening.
Randy also has a homemade live trap. It is made out of plywood with only screen on the front. It seems to me the solid wood trap is better because the animals are probably not so panicked when they cannot see out so much, except in the front.
All I can say, Gabriel's guardian angels must have been watching out for him Tuesday morning.
A short while later, when I was finished feeding the horses and had gone back up to the house, Gabriel was waiting in his customary spot on the steps, looking for a handful of dry kitty food. Last winter, he spent much of his time in the house, curled up in the rocking chair where he was safe and warm. But now that the weather is nice, he likes to be outside as much as he can. I don't blame him. The time will come soon enough when we are all cooped up inside again. . .
LeAnn R. Ralph
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