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ANOTHER DAY SHOT TO HELL – Marilyn Armstrong

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Not so much a bad day as one of those days where you don’t get to stop. Didn’t get to comments. Haven’t opened my email. Haven’t taken any pictures. Other than the one I wrote early this morning, I haven’t written anything today.

Because? First, there were the phone calls. I didn’t make them yesterday and absolutely had to make today. A long conversation with our trash collectors, leading to my piece on garbage and a “senior rate” for collection. A discussion about bears because they have been sighted in the woods. Wondering about the price of bear-proof trash bins.

The current big plastic bins cost more than $100 each and that’s for the company to buy en masse. Bears are powerful animals who love trash. A 96-gallon bin that locks them out $671 on Amazon, but Jet.com sells the same bin for $377. I don’t know how good these are, either. An interesting price differential, too.

I have nothing against bears, but they are big and powerful and I don’t know if I’m ready to deal with them. The coyotes are enough of an issue, not to mention the skunk and wildcats and raccoons. Are we ready for bear?

Then Owen was here and off we went to buy groceries. Which was followed by unpacking and stowing all that stuff.

A glitch in Garry’s baseball channel that went on for hours entailed a prolonged wait on hold for tech support. To learn, as we suspected, they were having the problem, not us.

I needed to fix Garry’s broken email which wasn’t difficult but took a long time. Warning! Delete your old emails! If you don’t, eventually your email server stops serving and goes on strike.

Portrait of the man and dog

The family dropped by. And then, it was dinner time.

I made dinner. Steak, corn, and yellow summer squash. I’m not enthusiastic about zucchini, but I love big yellow squashes. Deliveries from Amazon: 20 lbs of dog food! No hungry kids in our family.

Realized I forgot to buy lunch meat and never found the lens cleansers, though I looked. Really. I looked. Garry says they are way up on the top shelf. I am short so my eyes never got there.

Home again

There’s a bad bearing on the front left wheel of the Jeep and I had to make sure it got fixed. Bad bearings get worse. We have a lot of driving to do this month and next.

The hospital’s automated equipment called twice more to remind us of our appointment with the doctor on Monday. They have called every day this week.

None of this sounds like a big deal and it wasn’t a big deal, but each thing took time. With the washing of the dishes, the day is done and I feel like it never entirely started. I knew this month was going to get weird.

I was right. At least it was better than yesterday. On my agenda for tomorrow? Other than housekeeping and vacuuming? Explaining to the doctor that Garry’s out of hydrochlorothiazide because Duke ate the container.

Duke

We aren’t sure what happened to the pills, but since Duke is fine, I have to assume he didn’t eat them.

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18 replies

  1. swo8
    08/02/2018 • 11:50

    No bears here at the moment but do we ever have a lot of rabbits. We saw two just walking the dog last night.
    Leslie

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  2. DailyMusings
    08/02/2018 • 06:18

    Bears in the yard is scary- my friend has a heavy duty with a giant lock on it- she had tried using a bunji chord to keep it closed but the bear took it off. Sounds like you are in a whirlwind of non stop activity!

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  3. evilsquirrel13
    08/02/2018 • 04:58

    I’m glad to live far enough in the city that the only local mammalian wildlife is the squirrels. I would not be in the mood to fight bears…

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    • Marilyn Armstrong
      08/03/2018 • 16:22

      No sane human is ready to fight a bear. Usually, they just want your trash. But sometimes, they will happily eat your other pets and that IS worrying. So far, so good, but frankly, I’m in no mental state to deal with any more crap. Life has not been kind lately.

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  4. Taswegian1957
    08/02/2018 • 01:21

    I read a post from another blogger not long ago who had the scary experience of a bear in the garden. Luckily no harm came to anyone but I can see why that would worry you. Especially with the dogs running around outside. I hope none of them would feel like they had to be a hero and take it on. (Talking to you Duke). It is odd that there is such a big price gap in the bear proof bins. Are they made of the same material? Do the cheaper company charge more for shipping? Is your garbage collection private or run by the city/county? When we first moved here there was no garbage collection and it all had to be taken to the local dump. That changed after a couple of years when the council brought in a weekly pick up and later a fortnightly recycling collection. Some residents complained about the extra charge on the rates or that their driveways were too steep and it was a nuisance to take the bins out but I was ready to kiss the wheelie bin. Not having to put garbage in the car was a win I thought.

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    • Marilyn Armstrong
      08/02/2018 • 01:24

      In order: I hope the dogs don’t try to scare them away. That would be very bad.
      The price difference is very strange. The bins are identical and made by the same company. Why? No idea.
      There’s no public trash collection. We all pay someone to do it. We pump our own water and pay for every utility ourselves. I sometimes wonder for what we pay taxes.

      Liked by 1 person

  5. Lwbut
    08/02/2018 • 01:15

    Sounds sorta unBEARable… hope you bear up! 🙂

    On a slightly related note, it is a big bug-bear of mine those people who use bare when they really mean bear as in: “Bear with me.”

    “Bare with me.” means something else entirely 😉

    Liked by 1 person

    • Marilyn Armstrong
      08/02/2018 • 01:21

      It’s actually a little worrying. These are VERY big animals, even though black bears (who are not always black) are the smallest of American bears. The Grizzley is at least twice the size or to put it another way HUGE. But we don’t have grizzlies out here. We have black bears. They still weigh a few hundred pounds. Long claws. Big teeth.

      Liked by 2 people

      • Lwbut
        08/02/2018 • 01:39

        We get the odd video/news coverage of your ‘small’ bears on our TV – the last one was taking a spa!

        Fortunately the closest we get over here is a cuddly Koala. (they actually smell of urine and can get grumpy when woken up and have some fairly decent claws, so a cuddle is not advisable for the wild ones!)

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  6. angloswiss
    08/02/2018 • 00:53

    It’s the lazy days of summer here. Too hot to go places, WordPress a little slow going and I don’t mind. If we get a bear in Switzerland it is big news. They get tracked and ringed
    And even given a code name so that we know where they come from and where they go

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    • Marilyn Armstrong
      08/02/2018 • 01:09

      They haven’t lived in this area for many years, but their natural habitat has been so disrupted, they’ve come down from the north to inhabited areas they abandoned a century ago. But they’ve been seen locally for a few months, but now, VERY locally. Scat spotted in local yards, so I think we really do have bears. And it’s a bit worrying. Our little dogs can’t take on bears. Even HUGE dogs can’t take on bears.

      Liked by 1 person