Paradise afternoon ponders...

Paradise afternoon ponders...  I made good progress today on the mud room electrical work.  Three outlet boxes are wired, and the most challenging bit (tapping into power for the lights, and wiring up a 3-way switch on the existing indoor switch) is finished.  Remaining: mounting the plates for the exterior lights (I've started that, but there's much to go), mounting the box for the chandelier, and wiring the three remaining outlet boxes.  I'll finish tomorrow or Tuesday, unless something bad happens.  I did have to make a run to Lowe's today for some parts; that always eats up more time than you'd think (two and a half hours today)...

I set up the trail cam yesterday to see if we have visiting deer at night.  The setup is shown in the photo at right – the trail cam is strapped to the tree trunk on the right side of the photo.  The salt lick is the orange blob hanging by a rope.  So do we have deer visiting the salt lick?  The answer is plain to see below.  Also plain to see: I've got the camera too close to the salt lick.  I'll fix that when I take the SD card back out.  The one color picture was captured during the day; I included it just to show the “other” mode of the trail cam.  In daylight, it takes nice color pictures.  At night, it uses an infrared flash (which the animals can't see) and takes black-and-white pictures.  As always, click any photo to embiggen...

I mentioned the other day that we'd received the rock veneer I'd ordered from Stone NW in Portland, Oregon.  I didn't show you what it looked like, though – so here it is:

I had a nice walk with the puppies this afternoon, a quick march on our usual route.  It was wall-to-wall blue sky, 62°F, a light breeze, fall color in every direction, and the lovely scent of drying hay wafting to us.  The puppies had a grand time chasing butterflies and crickets, and lunging hopefully at every song bird that flew within a couple hundred feet.  They studiously ignored a big red-tail hawk circling overhead.  Upon spying the remains of an exploded Mylar balloon, they suddenly got very cautious – they approached slowly, head low, and when the wind fluttered it they leaped back about six feet.  Then they'd approach again, ever so slowly.  Finally, Mako dared to touch it with his paw – and when it didn't fight back, the two puppies leaped upon it and within seconds had it in tiny pieces.  We came across the two giant mowers we saw working yesterday – these they ran fearlessly toward, and started snuffling everything within reach of a puppy nose.  With the dogs for scale, you can see just how big these things are.  The stair to the cab particularly interested them; something good must have been rubbed on there. :)  Along the walk we passed a little sign I've seen hundreds of times now, but which frustrates the heck out of me.  The sign wants me to protect a survey marker (generally a bronze plaque set in a concrete post) – but I can't find the darned marker!  I've searched the area around this sign probably 20 times, but I've never spotted that marker.  There are piles of weeds there, so it's entirely possible for it to be there ... but invisible to me.  Oh, well...