Welcome to the Neighborhood

We have a new pet. It seems he came with the new house.

His name is Hoppy. Alannah gave him the name. We do not know if he was ever given a name by the previous family who lived here.

Hoppy is a squirrel.

To be quite honest, Hoppy does not truly reside on our premises. In fact he only uses the back rail of our fence for commuting between the walnut tree he scavenges and the maple tree he lives in. Both trees are in the neighboring yards.

Hoppy uses our back fence like commuters in Chicago use the El train.

He is quite industrious. He constantly makes trips from the maple tree, across our rail, to the walnut tree. There he collects a green walnut in his mouth, and travels our fence back to the maple.

As he crosses our yard on the fence rail, he hops over the fence posts that protrude higher than the top beam.

So Alannah calls him Hoppy.

I guess now we all call him Hoppy.

But Hoppy does not have free reign. He has competition. A bully squirrel we have yet to name; perhaps we will call him Sluggo; likes to ambush Hoppy, and contest him for his walnuts. Hoppy usually prevails. No fights ensue. And then Hoppy makes another trip.

This morning, Darlene was sitting on the deck having a morning coffee and reading the paper. Hoppy was returning from the walnut tree. Sluggo was waiting. Up popped Sluggo, and off ran Hoppy, walnut in his mouth. The got to a corner of the fence, and all that could be heard was the trickle and thud of the walnut as it fell down the wooden fence and hit the ground below.

Shortly after, Darlene saw Hoppy emerge to the fence top with the dropped walnut. There was no sign of Sluggo. He hopped a couple of posts, and then flopped out on the flat fence top – all four legs sticking over the side – as if to say, “"Whew! That wore me out!!” After a minute or so of resting, he hopped back up and finished his commute.

Later this morning, on a subsequent trip, Hoppy had two walnuts. One walnut is bigger than his head. Some how he had snagged two, most likely by a joined stem. He stopped in mid-trek, put one down, and proceeded to eat the other.

All the while he was watching us watching him.

We had several squirrels at our last house. They sat in our crabapple tree and ate nuts from the neighboring yard. The nuts are still green, and they turn the nut like we would turn an ear of corn, chomping circles around the nut until the nut is consumed. All the while, a green dust falls like sawdust from a cutting saw.

Darlene turned and said “Look how pretty Hoppy is”. I turned to look. “His fur is nice and full and shiny, and his tail is so fluffy and soft”, she continued. I knew where she was going. The squirrels at our old house had patchy fur and scrapes and scars from battling the neighborhood pets. One’s tail had been broken and carried bent and crooked. They were tough squirrels.

Hoppy looked so soft and clean, you might think he was a house pet.

“Amazing how you can tell you’re in a nice neighborhood, eh? Even the squirrels are of a better quality.”

After I came in, Darlene continued drinking her coffee. She was reading her latest Nora Roberts novel. She heard a “Thumpity- Thumpity- Thumpity- Thumpity- Thumpity…” from the pool deck. She looked up.

There sat Hoppy – thumping his hid foot like Thumper from Bambi. When he had Darlene’s attention, he looked at her and dropped the walnut right there. He turned to hop away behind the pool to the fence. But after two hops he stopped to turn and look back at Darlene – as if to say “It’s for you – go ahead”.

I’m not sure how this relationship will evolve. I have fears of little squirrel houses and feeding schedules. I worry that I will wake up to find the girls holding Hoppy like a cat in the living room – stroking his fur while he … does whatever squirrels do when they are content.

But it does prove to me that we are in a friendlier neighborhood.

Even the wildlife drops by to welcome you.

Our New House Honeymoon

We have been in our new house for four weeks now. We still love it. We still have to rub our eyes to believe we really live here. We are still in that “honeymoon” phase.

But I can feel the honeymoon starting to come to an end.

We have had a few experiences over the last four weeks. New home owner experiences.

We have had an overflowed toilet than ran down through the ducts into the basement downstairs. That was a mess, but we understand better now and are again quite content with the washroom.

We discovered and destroyed a hornet’s nest in a scrub bush in our back yard. It was right next to the girl’s clubhouse slide. It was huge and actually a masterpiece. The civilization that resided in this nest had been terrorizing the whole neighborhood and was as sophisticated as the Incas in their day.

We have a drain in our backyard – as do all other yards in our neighborhood – by city bylaw – that seems to be a nesting place for mosquitos. I have not figured out a remedy for this calamity yet, and would appreciate any suggestions you might have.

So after dark, I cannot sit in the back yard and listen to my Tiger ball games. And this is not an acceptable condition.

We also seem to experience a high rate of electrical power outages. And when the power goes down, the surge seems to spike more than I have known before. A set of three of these surges has blown out our LCD monitor, and caused the computer itself some questionable “issues”.

But then we had the pool mishap.

We have a 21 foot above ground pool. The back deck has several teirs and hangs over the pool like a dock on a lake. It’s quite nice.

The other night we were out cleaning up some yard mess; weeding, watering, and the like. In passing Darlene asked me to put the hose in the pool, “it looks a hair low” she said.

So I got the hose out, put the end in, and turned on the faucet. Then I went back about my business.

That was at 9:30 at night.

At about 11:30, it was raining heavy outside. And I could hear the heavy rain in our bedroom.

“Man, it’s pouring out there”, I said.
Darlene woke up from a deep sleep.

“Did you turn off the hose?”

“Oh crap!” I said. Okay, I did not exactly say "crap". But now I knew why it sounded like it was pouring rain outside.

Oh crap.

Out the back I ran. It was lightly sprinkling. But the backside of the skimmer was pouring out water like Niagara Falls.

Thunder boomed in the distance and heat lighting was going off like bulbs at a paparazzi festival.
And the hose was still running.

I ran over to the faucet and turned it off.

Then Darlene came out.

“Back-wash! Back-Wash! Back-wash!” she was yelling.

I unraveleled the flimsy blue back-wash hose and ran it into the drain in our yard. I fished it down far enough to be under the water level. Meanwhile Darlene was flipping the filter lever around to the back-wash setting. She flipped the motor on.

“Gerbeda-flubeda-thppppp”, said the hose as the air bed out of the hose and through the drain water.

"Blubeda-blubeda-blubeda…” said the hose as the backwash started its steady flow.

Luckily the hose was loud enough to mask our explatives as we scrambled in the now pouring rain, in the dark, stepping on rocks and pricker weeds.

"Blubeda-blubeda-blubeda…..”

About 15 minutes later, the pressure in the flimsy blue hose proved too much, and the hose gave way with a pop like a balloon. It burst about halfway to the drain. The yard started to flood.

We turned off the motor. We looked over our mess. We were soaked. We were unhappy. And we were certain we had destroyed our wonderful pool.

“It only took us three weeks to wreck it”, said Darlene - almost sobbing.

We stood in the pouring rain, and had a smoke.

And then we went back to bed.

The next morning we examined the damage. It was still raining. But the water in the pool was very cloudy. The good news is that the pool, the motor, the yard – all seemed to have survived our forgetfulness. There was no damage.

All was fine.

All but the flimsy blue back-wash hose.