MichaelG, my assumption is you are referring to the bobcats?

Egad!!

I’ve spent a fair amount of time admiring the bobcats at the Ft Wayne Children’s Zoo, and they look like jumbo-sized, muscular kitties in their containment….if I saw one of them on the loose, in our backyard, I don’t think I’d be less petrified than if I saw a large cargo jet plunging from the sky toward our home!!

C’dad - great story. Just a reminder that no good deed goes unpunished. We never had more than 12-15 chickens at a time. They were locked in their house at night and ran loose during the day. I was never aware of possums as predators but I’ll again defer to the greater experience. The worst were the bobcats who showed up during the last six months or so that we were together. There was no stopping them and we eventually had to give the surviving chickens away. The mother is the only one I’ve seen and at a good 2.5 feet long and looking like 25 lbs she seemed huge to me. My untrained eye has probably caused her to grow but even so . . . So far they haven’t bothered the goats. Talked to my ex the other day and she reports that current population is mom and two wee ones. Obviously, dad’s not far away.

Oh Tom the toad, oh Tom the toad, why did you hop out on the road?

One of those songs I learned from Garrison Keillor’s Dept of Folk back in the early 80s. Even bought the songbook.

And we’re supposed to get that same front through here for Friday, which is the night the older ones (including my Little Guy) stay overnight. We’ll be hyper-cautious, i promise (we have NOAA radios and a dining hall — new one, not the old one that’s now a winter lodge in the picture — that has a basement designed for tornado warnings).

Plus a generally paranoid dad who’s also a twenty year Cub Day Camp staffer watching the skies . . .

I wish i had one of these digital camera things, because about a mile from the camp entrance is an old farm house where they’ve been taking siding, older siding, and sheathing off, to reveal laths and some residual plaster, which left — 1820’s era yellow poplar squared logs, the real deal for the earliest houses in this area. Could be older, but the sawing of the square joins on the corners looks . . . whoops, i keep almost driving off the edge of the dirt road, but i’d say 1820 to 1845.

A few weeks from now, the pioneer log cabin will disappear under new siding that spreads across the original structure and the new ell (1880s i’m guessing from the window shape/arrangement). Did the owners know they had a log cabin when they started? Who will know when they’re done?

How does anybody get off. These assholes are murderers, and they aren’t committing murder for any reason but some some vile political enhancement.