Schnoodle near the window well outside

Last night it was my turn to let her out.  I imagine taking care of old Schnoodle is sort of like caring for a newborn baby. So I let her out and she ran around in the fresh snow in the backyard.  I wait until she barks to be let back in and in a few minutes she did bark.  She wasn’t at the back door though.  She was about 10 feet off and standing near the window well.  I could sense what was about to happen.  She thought that the edge of the window well was the back step.

I put my slippers on and started to go outside to stop her.  Sadly there was no way I could have gotten to her in time.  She fell straight down into the window well.

She hit with a thud and then let out a yelp.  I ran inside and downstairs as quickly as I could.  I wasn’t sure how bad a 3-4 foot fall would be on our poor old Schnoodle!  I called for Cassie and opened the window in the basement. She had already gotten up so I figured she wasn’t too bad off.  I got a towel and wrapped her up and took her inside.

When I saw her fall head first and heard that thump, I really though that was the end of poor ol Schnood.  Amazingly, though she is doing just fine today like nothing ever happened.

We tried calling our bee guy, Jose again, but he apparently didn’t have time or didn’t want the work, so we thought we wouldn’t be able to get the rest of the bees out this trip. Then we lined up the plumber to work on the sink in the studio cabana (we’ll write about that later) and just happened to tell him about the bees in the house. He said that while doing plumbing he often runs into bees in the water lines/boxes and knew of a guy who loved bees and could easily remove them for us (for a fee).

Staying away from the bees-at the beach

And so that is how we met Enrique. Enrique definitely does love bees and was enthusiastic and ready to remove all the rest of the
three hives right then and there. He went in to do the job with no bee suit, no gloves or any protection. He apparently just tore down the wall panels where the bees were located, grabbed the queen with his bare hands and the rest of the bees followed into the cardboard boxes. He made really quick work of it.

He told us they would be agitated in the move and that we might want to leave for a few hours to avoid being stung.  So in that time we went down to the beach and hung out, got some food and came back. In the same time it took the methodical, cautious and precise Jose to remove one hive, Enrique took out three! We returned and there were a lot of bees still buzzing around but Enrique assured us that it was safe to go into the house to see his finished work because the remaining bees wouldn’t sting if they didn’t have a queen to protect (I was still a little freaked out by all of them buzzing around my body).

He had removed all of the bees from inside the walls as well as their honey and comb. He offered us to keep the honey and comb, but we weren’t sure what to do with it. We did get to taste it, and it was really good -sweet and waxy! Britton managed to take a little video of Enrique showing us the removal and the honeycomb afterward. We are definitely relieved to have the bees gone and hopefully by tomorrow all the orphaned ones will realize their queen is gone and they will scram as well.  Although we are a little sad to not have all the thousands of little pollinators working on our fruit trees. Maybe someday we’ll get a hive of our own…just not inside our house

Rental Car This Morning

The weeds appear to have grown quite a bit in 8 months.  It’s about what I expected to see though and isn’t too bad.  We were able to drive the car right in over top of the ‘weeds’ and park.  I went into the small cabana not exactly knowing what to expect.  It looked about the same except the paint on the ceiling had continued to flake off, so there was quite a bit of paint chips on the bed and floor.   A quick sweeping took care of that.  We dusted off the bed and got out our covers/blankets we stashed from the last visit.  Other than a few weird noises we went to sleep pretty easily.

The Concrete “Cabana”

I feel that the first order of business will to be to get a trimmer and maybe some paint / paint supplies from the store.  That way we can start to carve out a nice spot for ourselves, then expand the spot as we move along.  We also want to get some plumbing done and maybe some more bees removed while we are here.

The bees that were removed on the last trip have stayed gone, so that’s a good sign that it won’t be a futile attempt.

After looking into it, I found out that he is apparently trying to promote some sort of Wildlife Museum in San Juan…although others say he is sending a message to his political opponents. I just thought this was the strangest and yet oddly cool Christmas card I have ever seen. If a huge wildcat were devouring its prey right in front of you I don’t think you would smile so calmly and pleasantly. And check out the little girl on the left- she is just the cutest smug thing.

Original Video – More videos at TinyPic

In this video he explains how it was part of the Museum promotion (although nowhere on the card does it say that) and how so many people have been superimposing themselves on the Internet with the killing scene. He said it is because Boricuas (Puerto Ricans) have limitless imagination. I do have to say that it is one of the most unique holiday greetings and they say that there is no such thing as bad publicity. So kudos to that.

In other odd holiday cheer closer to home (in our home), check out Schnoodle with really long arms. haha

Have a bizarre (and fun) Christmas one and all!

The other day the wind picked up and broke a few panels on our greenhouse.  I wasn’t able to get a hold of the company that made it so I had to come up with my own solution to fixing it.  I tried small screws, I tried glue and a few adhesives but nothing was working to well.   The screws seemed to work about the best but it wasn’t a good fix.

Our Hobby Greenhouse

I figured I’d try a rivet tool.  I found one at the store for ~$10.  It worked great.  Just drill a hole, put the rivet in, squeeze the handles and bam.  Done!

Installed Rivets

I am not sure how much longer this greenhouse will survive, but I figure I can keep it together for at least a few more years.  It serves as a chicken home in the winter and a place to grow fun stuff in the summer.  I bet I can find all kinds of uses for this new tool too! 

Rivet Tool

We have had a small coffee plant for the last few years.  In the summer we put it in the humid greenhouse and it grows well.  Then in the winter we bring it inside, where it lives..but doesn’t exactly thrive.   Just this year it started to bloom.

Cassie played the role of the honey bee and pollinated some of the blossoms by hand.  We hadn’t thought much of it until just the other day when we saw….Coffee beans!

Colorado Coffee Beans

We will continue to let them grow and I doubt we’d have enough even for a single cup of coffee, but it’s still fun and having tropical plants around us invokes thoughts of Puerto Rico.  Of course the coffee plants in PR are a hundred times more fragrant and bigger!  Perhaps if we have enough beans/seeds we will try to grow another tree or two here in CO.  When we get to PR we might plant a whole acre of them!

This is a coffee bush in Puerto Rico (makes our Colorado coffee beans look silly)

First thing we saw when we woke up this morning!

What happened? Well, apparently poor old Schnoodle had something wrong with her. The night before there was a little blood on the carpet, but we cleaned it up. We thought maybe she was just getting over her urinary infection. We had only about a week ago taken her to the vet. She was diagnosed with an eye infection and cornea problems, cancer or some sort of cysts, bad rotting teeth, a urinary tract infection, lymphoma, arthritis and some deafness. (Remember she is about 14 years old or in her late 80′s if she were human.)

Old Schnood

So I gave her a piece of an aspirin to help her with some of her pain (thinking that she most likely had some). That was a big mistake!  While we had just a little blood two days ago, this morning, it was like a massacre! There was blood not only on the pillow that she sleeps on top of on the floor, but also…

A bloody wall…

Bloody carpet...

And a Bloody Kitchen

But we still didn’t know what had happened to cause her to bleed so much and all over until we saw this:

Her water dish was bloody which meant that something had happened in her mouth. Perhaps she lost another tooth? We have no idea and she won’t let us look in her mouth. But the aspirin probably wasn’t a good idea in hindsight as it thins the blood.

It was pretty disgusting. And we were joking that it looked perfect for a Halloween haunted house!  We managed to get most of it out of the carpet with oxy-clean. Unfortunately it bleached part of the carpet. We’ve been talking about getting new carpet and I think this probably seals the deal. We are going to wait until we know what to do with Noodle though. We wouldn’t want another episode like that to happen. And tenants wonder why we charge more for pets! Yuck