A Confederacy Of Rascals (Part 1)

It's that time of year. The time for school fundraisers. I got a text from The Veteran a couple weeks ago. It was only a link. No message. I thought he meant it for Farmer H. They both deal in the same kind of merchandise with their businesses. I thought that's what the link was for. Farmer H said he did not recognize such a link.

I don't like clicking those things on my phone. I entered it in HIPPIE, and saw that it was a fundraising site for one of The Veteran's daughters. Of course I always contribute to such fundraising activities for the relative children. I looked for something to buy.

I don't need wrapping paper or overpriced candy. So I settled on overpriced dog treats. I realize that I'm getting very little for the money. But it's something that I don't have to worry about melting or being stolen or forgotten in the order. We made a donation, and that's all that counts. I also checked to have it delivered, so we didn't have to bother with Farmer H picking it up from The Veteran's house. His time is so valuable, you know!

On October 2, I got an email that my order had shipped. Okay. Usually, on the day of the anticipated delivery, I get an email from FedEx. Our orders come out of Rolla, MO. That's a 2-hour drive to Hillmomba. Sometimes later in the day, I get a 2-4 hour window of time. Sometimes the delivery doesn't happen, and later that night I get another notice that the order is delayed until the next day. Whatever. It was two little bags of dog treats. Not a big deal. I knew they had shipped from the fundraiser supplier on October 2.

I didn't get any further notices. I didn't dwell on it. Sometimes things take a while to get here. I didn't even check the tracking, I was so not concerned.

On October 4, Sunday night around 11:00, I started wondering about when the dog treats might arrive. I followed the tracking number.

WHAT? My package had been delivered on October 3, Saturday, at 3:38 p.m. 

I was in town at that time. Left around 3:15, and got home at 4:15. I had even passed a FedEx truck on the county blacktop road, on a curve over the hill from Mailbox Row. He had pulled off on a gravel road, and was tippy-toeing along the side of that curve to pick up a bright orange "come-a-long" canvas strap that had been there for two day. [Farmer H said he stopped, but it didn't have all its parts.] The FedEx truck made me think about my dog treats. I had looked at the porch as I came down the driveway, but didn't see a package.

Where was my package???

A Pepper-y Panic

We have an evening routine now. When Farmer H comes home, he takes off Pepper's collar and puts it on the charger plugged in by the kitchen door. Then he sits outside with the dogs, playing on his phone. I am at the table with my scratchers, and tell him when the collar is charged. It usually takes 45-50 minutes. The indicator light goes from a flashing, spinning, green circle of dots to a single green dot. The battery seems to old a charge of about 36 hours. 

When Pepper breaches the electronic fence, we get a notice on the app. The symbol is a yellow paw print. The problem is that our phones don't work well inside the Mansion. I blame the metal roof. Sometimes we don't get the notice until an hour after it happens. That's not a big problem. Pepper has always come right back into the fence after a shock. It's not like we would immediately rush out to search for him.

I hear the dogs throughout the day, thumping around, wrestling on the front porch in the morning. I hear them bark in the front yard. They spend a lot of the day lying under the carport, in separate holes dug in the gravel where Farmer H parks SilverRedO. Pepper's toys are often out behind the garage. I don't obsessively check the Halo 5 Collar app.

Saturday, I didn't look at it until around 2:30, when I was leaving for town. It showed Pepper's last known location to be in front of Shackytown Boulevard. There's a small sinkhole there. More like a collapsed little mini-cave. There's a solid bottom, and a bit of a top. Farmer H says they go over that way all the time, barking under the shacks. So I suspected Pepper was snooping out a varmint.

When I left, neither dog came running for a treat. I didn't hear them barking. That was odd. In town, I checked the app again. It showed Pepper still in the same place. The icon was not lit up. It didn't move to sync with Pepper's current location. When I squinted, I saw that under Pepper's picture it said 9 HOURS AGO! 

That worried me. Did Pepper's collar fall off? Or was Pepper hurt? I called The Pony to check on the app. The Pony said, "Hm. It says CHARGE BATTERY. So I guess that's just the last place Pepper was before the battery died."

Well. That was kind of a relief. But not. Because Pepper could be anywhere! He'd been 9 hours without any buzzers, whistles, messages, or shocks to discourage him from leaving the boundary. He's used to staying closer to home now. And he knows his way around. So I hoped he wasn't reveling in his freedom and traipsing all over the countryside.

I had seen Farmer H charging that collar the night before. I saw with my own eyes how he attached the charger. And how the light turned solid green after 50 minutes. It was easier to believe that he hadn't gotten the clasp closed. Pepper is wiggly with him when the collar goes on. I couldn't explain why the battery went dead around 7:00 a.m.

I DO recall that the collar was covered with mud. Farmer H thought Pepper had been rolling around after a slight rain. Maybe the connectioin wasn't good during the charge. It's magnetic. The charger itself plugs into the wall, but the part attaching to the collar is 6 or 7 little dots, which line up with such dots on the battery part of the collar.

When I got home, I was very happy to see Pepper come running out behind the garage with Jack. They jumped over the side, and raced into their trail in the woods. That was not making me happy. The dead collar would not discourage Pepper from breaching the fence there this time. Luckily, Pepper turned right, and ran behind the Mansion with his nose to the ground, rather than staying with Jack at the border of the neighbor's property.

I took off Pepper's collar to take it in for a charge. The connection area was very dusty. I blew on it and wiped it with my finger. It started charging. Took 1:15 this time. It was really most sincerely dead.

Farmer H came home, saying that Pepper hadn't breached the fence all day.

"You don't know that! Look at your app. Since 7:00 this morning, it hasn't worked. The Pony said the battery was dead. I just now put it on the charger."

"Huh. It DOES say the battery is dead."

"I don't know where you guys are seeing that. My phone doesn't show me."

Farmer H picked up my phone to prove me wrong. But also said it wasn't there. He fiddled around until he opened something that displayed the battery life for me. So now I can check.

The battery has worked fine all day. It's 2:00 now, and it still has 15 hours left. So that must have just been a problem with the mud and grit messing with the charging. I HOPE!

Pepper is fine. I think he was a good dog. I doubt he even knew he was free.

Scratchin' Tickets And Pickin' Bones

I have a bone to pick with the Missouri Lottery! It's about the new scratcher tickets that came out on Monday. No, not because they're CHRISTMAS tickets already. But because the new $5 ticket has a feature never used before. It's a QR code!

Ain't nobody got time for no QR code on a scratcher!!! At least this old gal. I want to scratch my ticket, and know if I won something. I don't want to pull out my phone and scan to see if I got a bonus prize. I only scan later, before I leave for town to cash in actual winners. I scan both winners and losers then, to make sure I didn't miss anything. I use the MOLottery app for that. I have no idea how to scan a QR code. That's just an extra, unnecessary step!

I asked The Pony how to do it. "[SIGH] Oh, Mother. I'll show you sometime." No. I'm not that curious if it takes an in-person lesson.

I looked on the MOLottery Facebook page, to see if other people were complaining. TRAITORS! Of the comments I saw, 80-90 percent of the people LIKE IT. But one of them said, "Not a fan. Not everybody is tech savvy. I imagine a lot of winners will be thrown away." I agree. I'm a technology simpleton. 

Anyhoo... I also found out, from the reply by the MOLottery official spokesperson, that the only time there's a winner on the QR code is when there's also a winner elsewhere on the ticket. AND that when you use the MOLottery app to scan the barcode at the bottom of the ticket, the result will inclue any QR prize that might be won.

So... as long as I scan the tickets in my usual pattern, I won't miss any QR code win. 

Good to know. Consider that bone picked.

Humans' Critters

The gory dead armadillo was gone the next day, as well as the turkey buzzards. In the fall and winter, those turkey buzzards hang out in the trees of Farmer H and Buddy's Badly Blacktopped Hill. Hundreds of them! We see them all the time when driving home as the sun is near to setting. I'm not sure when they'll return. Maybe they are always there, and we don't see them because we're home when the sun sets around 8:00 in the summer.

Anyhoo... this week I've seen two new critters down by the mailboxes, on consecutive days. They were lurking a short way up the gravel road, after I passed the three parked cars waiting for their kids to be delivered by the school bus.

The first was a cat. Fully grown, not a kitten. A gray striped tabby, standing on the left side of the road, who backed up into the underbrush as I drove by.

The second was a dog, a bit further up the road, by where there's a little waterfall in the creek, and a short path to get there. He was on the right side of the road, standing with all four feet on the gravel. He was definitely part German Shepherd, from his coloring. The other part must have been some kind of hound. He had longer legs than a shepherd, and a shorter back, and a less-feathery tail. He had a collar, with tags. As I passed, he RAN AFTER ME! Not alongside, barking, like a car-chaser. He ran up the middle of the road, following me. Like a lost dog, looking for his people.

I don't know anybody out here with a dog like that. If somebody dumped him, surely they would have taken off his collar and tag, which might trace him back to them. Maybe he was just curious and out roaming. 

I told Farmer H about the dog, so if he came to the Mansion, we could check his tag and see if we could find his people. Doggy stopped chasing after about a quarter mile, just before I got to the Badly Blacktopped Hill.

Farmer H said, "Did he look like Pepper?"

"No. I told you, he looked like part German Shepherd. He was brown and black. OH! I get it! Like the neighbor called you about a dog down by the mailboxes, saying it was Pepper!"

"Yeah. I guess she'll have to find somebody else to complain to about her dogs barking now. And you know, they never even said, 'Thanks for stopping your dog from coming over.' They ain't never gonna say anything good about it."

"Probably not. I almost hope some other animal makes their dogs bark at night!"

We're terrible, I know. It's our responsibility to keep Pepper from annoying people. But still, I refuse to admit that the barking problem was solely due to Pepper.

The Drag Boys Come For Fave

There were some old cars parked at the pumps of the Gas Station Chicken Store on Saturday. It was a bit unusual. I wondered if there might be a car show in town. When I entered, three great big guys were standing at the register. Beefy guys, late 20s, in shirts with sleeves cut off. Shorts, crew socks, muscular tanned calves. TALKING LOUDLY!

Also, the two guys waiting were antsy. You know, when people sway from side to side, shifting their weight, doing a disorganized waltz step while marking time. The guys were perfectly polite, having assorted conversations with Fave, talking over themselves while filling in parts of the story.

Apparently, they were from out of state, in town for the drag races. They're held on the "flats," which are tailings left over from the lead mining days. Back when I first met Farmer H, and we were tooling around in his Fred Sanford truck, with me spotlighted in the one painted door, we went to the drag races. Several of us from our apartments would load up a cooler and lawn chairs. It wasn't frowned upon to ride in a lawn chair in the back of a pickup truck back then. 

Anyhoo... since those days, some apartments have been built near the drag strip. There's also a Super 8 Motel there. From eavesdropping (which was unavoidable at the decibels they were exuding), I gathered that Fave lives in those apartments, and had been awakened by the loud revving of their race vehicles. Though you would think most of them would have been hauled on trailers.

It was all I could do to stay there in line. If I was less addicted to my scratchers, I would have left. I don't like big loud people milling around in tight spaces. There was nothing wrong with the behavior of the drag guys. I'm just an old lady who has retired teacher ears, and unstable knees.

My interaction with Fave was short that day, as two of the guys who had left came back in for something else. Fave made up for it the next day by asking if I was still losing weight. Flattery gets her everywhere!

Apparently, Fave's dad is doing okay now. She said he told her: "You know that 23 pounds you lost? You look like you've gained it back." Poor Fave. I told her that didn't need to be mentioned, heh, heh. Oh, and Fave won $60 on the tickets I gave her Thursday. Things seem to be looking up.

I Wonder If That Varmint Got Peppered

Pepper has been adjusting to his new boundaries, with the assistance of Mr. Zapper. Mr. Zapper packs a stronger punch than Mr. Shocky, who was used to train little Jack not to chase the neighbors' horses. Mr. Shocky was controlled by hand. Funny how the boys also tested Mr. Shocky on themselves, before deciding on a setting for Jack. I'd put the collar on him when I started my driveway walks. 

Juno and Jack loved those outings, and would rove up and down the driveway with me, wrestling each other. Then Jack might make a dash across the road into the horse field when we got to the end. I'd yell, "JACK! NO!" If he continued into the horse field, I pushed the button to give him a "reminder." It only took a week of walks for Jack to completely stop his chasing.

Mr. Zapper will not be ignored! After the unfortunate SilverRedO incident, Pepper has only received that shock four times. The last was two days ago, and the squirrel-hunter breach was two days before that. Pepper hasn't even gotten the turn-back at the warning track notification for two days.

The last breach was on Monday morning. It was down on the other end of our property, in an area with cedars where Farmer H keeps the grass mowed. Not in the woods, not on the gravel road. Just the property line where The Pony has set the fence. Over the weekend, Pepper had been in that cedar area, barking. It's past the Freight Container Garage. Pepper had also spend a lot of time over by the BARn. We could see him on our app, and he would come running from that direction to greet me at the driveway. We didn't know what the attraction was over there.

I think I know!

When I came home Tuesday afternoon, I saw what I thought were turkeys on the gravel road by that lower section of our land. Getting closer, I saw they were TURKEY BUZZARDS! As big as turkeys, but with that rubbery red head. They grudgingly moved out of my way. Not flying, mind you. Just kind of walk/hopping. As I went by, I saw why there were there.

On the edge of the gravel, barely over on the neighbor's side, was a dead armadillo! It was so fresh that the gaping hole in its side was bright blood red. I don't know if it was dead or dying when the turkey buzzards hacked through that hard armor-ish shell.

I wonder if that's what Pepper had been fascinated with in that area. We found a dead armadillo out by the carport weeks ago. Farmer H says that when he's outside, sometimes the dogs are obsessed with something under one of his Shackytown Boulevard structures. So maybe that armadillo has been living here, and Pepper stalking it. Probably chasing it when he breached the fence over there on Monday.

I don't know if maybe Pepper got ahold of it and injured it, then it crawled across the road. Or if another animal like a fox or coyote got it. I don't know if their mouth is even big enough to do damage to that shell. Pepper's mouth is pretty big.

That's just my theory. I think the other armadillo was already dead when they drug it behind the carport. It didn't show any sign of trauma.

A Sticky Problem

I'm so glad I chose the right bandaid to cover up my ugly arm hole during time spent in public. I knew I had finally found a kind that didn't make my skin turn red and itch. I just couldn't remember WHICH kind. I knew it was some type of supermarket bandaid, not the real brand. The problem was, I had two varieties on my kitchen counter.

Don't go thinking I use my food prep area for treating wounds, heh, heh! Even though the last few pictures were posed on my cutting board. The kitchen counter is where I charge my phone, so handy to pick up up and take a photo there. Also, the kitchen is where I'm most likely to need a bandaid in a hurry. It's not like I'm going to injure myself in the bathroom, and fetch one out of the medicine cabinet. By the time I made it to the bathroom with a dripping wound, there'd be a suspicious trail of blood across the carpet. Maybe I should stash some bandaids on the mantle of the fake electric fireplace!

Anyhoo... here's the best-ever bandaid for my papery thin old lady skin:

I found this kind at 10Box. I think I've figured out why they don't make me itch.

See that last line before the fine print? "Not made with natural rubber latex." I think I might have a sensitivity to latex. Or natural rubber. I need to read the package for that clear tape I used around the gauze bandage. Because that made me VERY itchy, just like other bandaids.

Here's the other bandaids that were on the kitchen counter. I need to move this box to the bathroom medicine cabinet. Farmer H can still use them. He's not at all sensitive, heh, heh.

This came from Country Mart. Of course I didn't know at the time I bought them that they would make me itch. Both boxes say "Comparable to Johnson & Johnson"(this one), or "Comparable to Band Aid" (the other box). Both referring to the Johnson & Johnson Band Aid brand. I don't know if I've tried the actual Band Aid fabric version to see if I can tolerate it. No need, as long as I have my 10Box bandages.

No mention of natural rubber latex on this one. Or should I say no mention of not containing it.

I don't know when my skin decided it was allergic to the stickiness of bandaids. I never had a problem when I was younger. I guess it's like with the ampicillin reaction, and the cefprozil reaction. I wasn't allergic until I WAS.