Fun and quiet day around here. Van and I worked around the house most of the day and took a hike at Bamforth Ridge… It’s really beautiful

Tonight we made a small batch of Latkes For Hanukkah… We used purple potatoes at work from the VYCC. It was so cool looking

Yum !

Speaking of latkes ..Ben sent us this nice seasonal vid

Chappy Chanukah ya’ll !

Nite all, nite sam

-me

Ha… Friday night. I don’t know why but my work has been busier than ever lately… So I am so grateful when it’s finally Friday.… Do you like me like tonight was fun and special because we had a zoom hang out with our friends Karen and Jeff… Some of our oldest friends… They were Our good friends… And Jeff was my coworker when we lived in England in the mid-1980s.…. Every time we see them it’s like no time has passed

It was so good catching up

Nite all, nite sam

-me

Crazy happenings here the last couple of nights. Last week Kyle heard something running over the ceiling at her room. We assumed it was minus so we put our small live trap mice catchers up there. We have a long history of escorting these mice to a place far away where they can live out their lives not in our house.… There are some days that we have two or three mice that we escort out though… I have to credit Diane for really sealing up the foundation of our house better than it ever has… So we’re down On our mouse catching

Anyway… We put the small traps up in the attack and decided to also put a wildlife camera to see if we could find These pesky mice….

Were we in for a surprise!

Well… After a day or so we didn’t catch anything so we got a larger have a heart trap… Thinking that it might be a rat… His house has had some rats the size of cats

While we were up In the messing around with the camera

We heard a huge clump and sound… It scared us both because we thought we were alone in the house… Men were we wrong. We ran over to the other side of the attic in time to see one of our small green traps being pulled across the floor up against a bundle of carpets… I couldn’t resist so I poked my flashlight up into the carpet and there was…

What?

We have since found out it was a flying squirrel… The poor thing had gotten his finger hot in the live trap… And so it was dragging it around… It was losing a little bit of blood but it wasn’t hurt badly.… I managed to use a ski pole to release the trap in the thing slinked back into the cloth.

Now what ?

I put the have a heart out with some peanut butter crackers… And waited… Next morning, nothing… But I did check out the wildlife camera and I cannot tell you how cool it was what I saw. I’ll try to find some pictures. The little guy had managed to pull the crackers out of the trap without setting it off… And then he came by the camera to show it off.

The next day we got a little bit smarter every day and smeared the peanut butter all over the trap so it wasn’t as easy to pull something away.

That was last night… And we got lucky. We caught him… That was about 10 o’clock at night..  we grabbed some squirrel food put the guy in the car and drove about a mile to an abandoned building that we knew… And we let him go. He was happy to escape. We thought we were done… But we decided we’d leave the trap out just to see

http://johncohn.org/base/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/img_3676.mov

Then we went back home… We put the trap out and before you know it a couple hours later we heard it go off again.

One more time in the car and down to the abandoned building. We thought OK… There must be a pair will be happy to be together in that other place. No flying squirrels do not hibernate and they live outside all year round up here so they should be OK

Then at 3:30 in the morning we had another plank… I somehow managed to wake up and drive the poor little guy to his new home. What the heck? Three of them?

Fast forward to today This evening Diane Max Gabe and I were making Christmas cookies together and lighting the first night of Hanukkah… At one point I went upstairs just to check and sure enough… Number four!… I bundled him up and again took him to his new home down the street.… So now we’re wondering how many of these creatures are up there…

Anyone want to guess?

Happy Hanukkah everyone

Night all, night Sam

– me



Last night we had our winter fathers forever get together. Fathers forever is a group I belong to of dad’s who have had a child that has died.. It’s the worst possible reason to have a club… But I still love it. It’s so nice to be able to talk to people I’ve been down close to the same road…. It’s always hard when we have new arrivals… Last night we had Jaime. We spent a long time discussing what do you say to someone… “Glad you’re here”… Just doesn’t feel right. We settled on “welcome”… As always, it was great going around the room and hearing how people were doing. The holidays are generally a hard time for most people. So… A bird and share it as a burden lifted or something like that.

It does sound like something someone’s grandmother would say… I’m not sure it makes sense

It was very interesting to hear how all of us we’re doing with the pandemic. People with recent losses were really struggling because they didn’t have the comfort of family and friends but most of us had. I was taking though, how many of us were kind of enjoying the quiet time with our families.

Another thing we discussed was some of the other benefits of these social distance times… And though none of us are crazy about zoom meetings… It certainly made it nice that we could all get together including those of us who don’t live in Boston where the group is based

I hope that’s something we hang onto when things get back to normal…

But come to think of it… Nothing for this group ever gets back to “normal”.

Nite all, nite sam

-me

I’m so glad that I have these guys to rely on.…



For the last couple of years I’ve done this in person