Lewisville Wildlife Sanctuary

We are running the Lewisville Wildlife Sanctuary. Well, not exactly, but some of the local wildlife would like to make it such if they had their choice.  In what seemed like a never ending battle with the neighborhood furry rodents (i.e. squirrels), we removed at least two dozen squirrels from our attic over a several year period and transported them to a park in Corinth.  That doesn't count the squirrel that clawed its way through the wallboard behind the bookcase in the loft.  One of our cats, although very surprised but very determined, held him at bay until reinforcements could arrive.(Way to go, Wendy!)  The squirrel made a mad dash for the great outdoors after the Frog opened several doors and removed the cat.  None of the suggested methods (coyote urine, flashing lights, etc.) were successful in scaring the squirrels out of the attic.  The great squirrel wars were finally won several years ago with the help of ABC Pest Control.

We had to shoo an opossum out of the garage when she thought the space behind the workbench would make a nice home for the winter.  That was in addition to the opossum that Lewisville Animal Control removed from our backyard.

One of the greatest animal adventures was the removal of a mother raccoon and her seven two-week old babies in April 2001 (see picture) who had taken up residence in our chimney.  The chimney sweep was able to get the kits out of the chimney and into a box.  We left the box on the ground in the backyard where we could see it from the house.  Mother raccoon recovered the babies (one-by-one by the scruff of the neck) once it got dark. Hopefully they found a happy, but more appropriate, home somewhere in the neighborhood.

I believe it was last fall that I found an abandoned nest of small eggs in a large flower pot in the corner of the garage.  Based on the size of the eggs (see the quarter in the center of the picture) and what I could infer from what was left in one of the unhatched eggs, I am guessing this was home to one of the neighborhood geckos.  (When I looked up gecko removal on the web, it suggested you get a cat.  I am not sure whether our cat, Alex, considers himself old enough to be retired from such duties or he is just not interested, but obviously he wasn't holding up his end in terms of gecko deterrence.)

Now we have something totally different.  Two weeks ago we had begun discovering a few honey bees in the house.  In most cases they were dead (on a windowsill or on the kitchen floor), although I was stung by one that I stepped on in my bare feet in the bedroom.  I was hoping it was some random event, but I continued to find one or two each evening.  Then I cleaned up five dead bees from the window in the kitchen on Thursday night alone. Clearly the situation was not getting any better, and if anything was getting worse.   If this was going to require a major effort, I wanted it resolved before we left on vacation later next month. After a couple of calls on Friday, I found a professional bee removal company that would send someone out on Saturday morning.  Sure enough, there is a beehive in the attic above our bedroom closet.  It is the large light colored blob covered with black dots hanging from the underside of the roof in the middle of the picture to the left.  Apparently it is quite large for this type of thing.  The bee removal dude (BRD) estimates it weighs at least 30 pounds and would have taken the bees many months to build.  The BRD will be back on Monday morning to remove the hive.

To be continued...

See the USA in the Geocache Way

After I wrote the title to this post, all I could hear was the old Chevrolet jingle "See the USA in a Chevrolet" going through my head.  Uck!!

Not much new to report on the "Yellowstone or Bust" vacation plans. I did begin to look at potential caches we might try to find on this trip. We have done very very little caching in recent years.  What we have done has mostly been on the terracaching.com site instead of the geocaching.com site. Despite our tight schedule at the beginning of the trip, hopefully we will be able to add a few new finds to our totals on both sites.  Click here for a list of our current cache finds on geocaching.com  That list will update (as well as the stickers below) as we register new finds on the respective sites.



More importantly, I hope we can add a few new states to our found list. Below is a map showing those states where we have found at least one geocache from geocaching.com.  I did not do a separate map for terracaches.  Of the 98 terracaches found so far, I believe all but one was in Texas.  The other one was in Illinois (a brief diversion while on a business trip in Chicago).



What can I say other than....aiming to make EVERY state a RED state!! New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas....hopefully you are all next!

As required to use this map program, here is the way to create your own visited states map

First Post

As we were preparing for our vacation later this summer, we decided it might be fun to create a blog about our adventures primarily for us to revisit later, a scrapbook if you will.  However, it would also serve as a way to share our adventures with the rest of the family.

Our "adventures" are fewer and more far between than sometimes in the past, but nonetheless still fun and exciting for us.  If you intend to follow this blog, don't expect it to be very regular. The entries will be sporadic at best and primarily clustered around our vacation or rv trips. 

So here it is....the first post for our new blog.  That is the big event for today, the creation of this new blog.

We also made reservations for our trip to Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park next month.  We have been spending a lot of time over the last several weeks looking at maps and deciding what might be possible in the time we can steal from work.  We don't leave until the end of July, but we wanted to get reservations in place since those two national parks are notoriously crowded.  The remainder of the trip is firmly set in jello, but we hope to see the Beartooth Highway, Devil's Tower National Monument, Mount Rushmore, and more.  We have much more research to do on potential places to visit and things to see.  We also have hopes of grabbing caches in each of the various states we will be visiting since we do not have finds in most of those states. We will need to identify potential caches and get the coordinates loaded ino the gps.  Finally, I won't let the Frog get too close to any of the wildlife we hope to see (think moose, bison, and bear), but he will definitely want to take pictures.  Therefore he is contemplating some new zoom lenses for the camera. 

As you can tell, there is much to do in the next few weeks to get ready for the trip.  I will try to update the blog occasionally as decisions are made.