We were awakened this morning by what sounded like very timid knocking at the front door. We have no doorbell, so if anyone ever did visit us, they’d have to knock on the glass door. But it seemed unlikely that our first unannounced visitor would arrive just after dawn. Still though, I went down and checked, finding (thankfully) no one at the door. This was a relief, because what I was picturing in my head, based on the weak knocks coming at such an odd cadence, was some sort of zombie, severed at the midsection, having crawled up the porch steps and up to the door. Knocking half zombie made sense to my still sleeping brain; still does, actually. After returning upstairs, the knocking started again, so back down the stairs I went. This time I found the cause of the knocking: a robin. Specifically, a robin charging at the dining room window repeatedly, fighting his reflection in the glass. The sun rose at 6:44 this morning. It’s now 13 hours 20 minutes later, and that damned bird is still fighting his reflection. I’ve scared him off easily 100 times, only to have him return, moved stuff around to block the window, put a radio right against the window, put tape across the window to interrupt his reflection, and hung dazzlers in front of the window. Nothing. I was annoyed earlier, now I’m grudgingly impressed. I’m going to turn this into some kind of farm aphorism, maybe “That boy is as persistent as a robin in spring.” All suggestions appreciated.

On a somewhat related note, Tilex works to keep nesting starlings out of your bathroom exhaust vent. For a while.

One thing I miss about Facebook is the opportunity to share photos with people . I don’t have many followers on Twitter, so posting there is unfulfilling. Flickr seems to have petered out, so where does that leave us? Dunno. I’m just going to post this here.

Is it fish? Is it chicken? The labels fell off the boxes in the walk-in, so what’s in ’em is anyone’s guess. We’ll fry ’em up and let you figure it out . . . if you can.

We have hawks nesting in our woods, and crows roosting in the trees along one meadow. Woodpeckers tend to pound on our eaves, and you already know about the pesky starlings. There are also an alarming number of vultures cruising our skies, but this morning we saw the strangest sight yet:

What is it, you ask? That is a freakin’ helicopter trailing a COLUMN OF SPINNING CIRCULAR SAW BLADES! The power company has been trimming right-of-ways (rights-of-way?)since we arrived in January, and we were already pretty impressed by their trucks with huge circular saws mounted to extendable booms, then we saw this madness. Holy smokes. Here it is in action:

It’s going to be difficult to top this, but I’ll keep my eyes on the horizon.

Dr. Evil and I spent our Wednesday doing our level best to bolster the economy, this time by purchasing a truck for the farm (okay, for me). We bought it from Carmax, and it’s been a fairly long process, in that the vehicle had to be shipped from another Carmax location to the one closest to us. Note that I say “closest” and not “close.” We had to go all the way up to Columbus to seal the deal. Going up was fine, we took some backroads and had a look around. Back was another story. Although I’ll never forget what rush hour looks like in actual metro areas, I had forced the memory into a cold, dark part of my brain. All you city dwellers, lord love you.

The overall Carmax experience wasn’t bad. They have no-haggle pricing, and the vehicle was fairly represented. They gave us an acceptable price on our trade-in, and the process was relatively painless, but there remains this nagging feeling when dealing with car dealerships: am I being hustled? I can’t find any areas where we may have been hustled, but the sense of it lingers in the air, like a sickly sweet air freshener.

Any car buying experiences you’d like to share? Meet me in the comments section.

You know how it is when you get your heart set on a certain something to eat and nothing else will satisfy? Well, that was us this week. Ohio may not be known for its barbecue, but there is a local establishment with a good reputation. Dr. Evil and I had a look at their menu online and we were lost from there, brother. It was going to be barbecue come hell or high water. We invited Dr. Evil’s folks to join us Wednesday, with a 6:30 dining time. Everyone was ready to get out of the house because it’s been raining for days now, and Wednesday was the first day with more clear skies than rain. We arrived at the appointed time to find the restaurant’s security gate halfway down and music blasting from the the back of the shop, telltale signs of a recently closed restaurant. Crushing. I walked casually to the entrance to find a sign “New Hours: 11-6PM.” We ended up at an alleged Cuban restaurant, and it was fine, but it wasn’t pulled pork, ya know?

Which brings us to Thursday. It turns out that I had lit quite a barbecue fire in Dr. Evil, because on Thursday morning when I asked her her thoughts on a farm project (more on that later) she wondered if that wasn’t a subject best discussed over barbecue. Cut to: Closing laptops, brushing of hair and teeth, the dust trail of a speeding car. We were barbecue bound, baby. We are still getting to know our way around here, so we were pretty proud of ourselves for remembering to approach the barbecue joint from the east to avoid a majority of traffic lights encountered when coming from the shorter western approach. Then it happened. The Sign. ROAD CLOSED AHEAD. We were a quarter mile from pig heaven and the damned road was closed. All that rain i mentioned? It drove the normally placid Hocking River from its banks and right onto State Street, our pathway to pork. Deflated but not defeated, we circled back to the western approach and found . . . you guessed it: flooded on that side too. Double crushed. This time we substituted burgers and local brews, and while it was tasty, it wasn’t brisket.

I’ll relieve the tension that each of you must be suffering by now—Will they? Won’t they? Did they? What else could go wrong?—and tell you that (after first calling to see if they were open) we had barbecue today. It was good. Very good, even. More importantly, though, it scratched that barbecue itch, and we are now free to obsess about something new. Maybe the weather.

In Charleston, we were located a few miles from the National Weather Service’s local office, so their radar image was our radar image, and we had up to the second accurate storm information.. Now we rely on a NWS radar in Cleveland, some 200 miles away. So last night, when a massive wind hit us just after dark, all of our scrambling for more information was pointless; Weather.com assured us that it was in the fifties with 9 MPH winds. Brother, these were 50 MPH gusts and 30-some sustained winds, or my name isn’t Surly. I don’t know why, but an hour into the vortex, after a dozen or so alarmed looks exchanged between me and the Doctor, I shined a flashlight out the window to check on the chickens and found that their coop had flown the . . . coop? (Gotta work on that one some, I think.) It was on its side about 15 feet from where it had been, and as the coop has no floor, this meant the chickens were free, free or blowing towards Columbus at highway speeds. Dr. Evil and I scurried out, flashlights in hand and found one, two, three, four . . . all six chickens huddled together where their house had once been. How does one feel such relief at discovering the safety of a creature too dumb to even so far figure out their coop has a second, sheltered floor? Well, one does, because I assure you we were quite happy to find them all safe. Having no desire to stand in the gale and try to repair a coop that was designed by high morons (morons who were high, not exulted morons), we secured the coop to the fence and brought the girls back into the basement, much to their very apparent relief. They got a treat of dried mealworms and bedded down in their childhood bedroom. We were able to repair the (stupid) coop today, but it looks like the girls are going old school soon. We are going to repair the rickety old coop on the property and build a new run for them, which I think will make for happier hens. Tireder Surly Farmer, but happier hens. I guess it’s a wash.