Sow There!

I’ve had a bit of traction on writing about household pets. Tiggy, the wonder kitty, recently hunted down a mole. We don’t have pets currently, but other people’s pets for some reason are strangely attracted to Tommy.
My birthday is coming up on Monday and Tommy is busy phoning everyone in my personal address book and inviting them to a picnic in the park this weekend. As usual, he has specifically said no presents will be allowed. However, this year I’m changing my mind on that.
This year my goal is to gather $500 in donations for the Butte Humane Society “Mutters Day Stroll.”
If everyone who reads the column sends in $5, I should have at least $15 by May 13. Then I’ll just have to rely on my friends and family for the other $485.

Arf, arf
Speaking of pets, including “man’s best friend,” I tracked down a Web site called dogsinthenews.com.
It has articles about the biggest and smallest dogs in the world. Another article claims a dog saved a woman by performing the Heimlich maneuver. One story talked about a German Shepherd/Husky mix who saved a 2-year-old baby by snuggling it. The tyke had wandered away from home wearing just a T-shirt in freezing conditions.
Other headlines include “Pit bull saves two women from cobra, dies wagging his tail.”
There’s also Belle, the English beagle who was trained to bite the number nine on a cell phone to save his owner who was having a seizure. You know who that guy’s best friend is.
The site also has a poll of readers who determined that two-thirds of dog owners who visited the site let their dogs sleep on the bed.

Enjoy it while you can
Our garden is pretty much at its prime right now. To enjoy it while I’m at work, I’ve been bringing myself bouquets and placing them at my desk.
Tommy spent his day off plucking pretty much all of the remaining Velcro weed (which flowered early this year) and mowing and edging the lawn.
I must say, there is nothing sexier in a man than arriving home to see the yard looking beautiful and a happy smile on your shirtless, sweaty guy.
Alas, we already know the grandeur is not going to last. While putzing around, Tommy found a fresh gopher hole. He ran the hose in there for about 45 minutes and it never overflowed. That gopher must have a system of tunnels that stretches from north Chico to Durham.
A reader named Roxie sent a sweet card with a purple bookmark gift enclosed. Her note said to try putting a stick of Juicy Fruit gum in the hole. Supposedly this causes the gopher to get blocked up and die. However, the UC Davis integrated pest management Web site debunks this.
But, you know what, there might be something more to the gum theory. Two years ago I actually did this, but with Big Red gum, and darn if the gopher didn’t go away.
The other reason to enjoy the garden right now is that in about two days it is going to be blistering hot, forewarning us about the terrible things our bodies and plants will go through this summer. In Chico heat it’s difficult to motivate oneself to be diligent about giving plants the water they need. That’s because it’s so difficult to pry oneself out of the wading pool.

Ooh, la la
Sunday is the League of Women Voters’ 34th annual wine tasting party and light buffet. Hooray! Tommy isn’t a big wine drinker, but it will be fun to get a little gussied up and snack on various cheeses and schmooze with big-wigs. The event is at the Lakeside Pavilion at California Park from 4-7. I won’t be wearing my hat, so big-time fans who want to circle around me like groupies likely won’t be able to recognize me. But if you do, stop by and say hello.
Tickets are $25 in advance and can be purchased at Vino 100 in the Safeway Shopping Center on Mangrove in Chico or from any League member. The price bumps up $5 if you wait to buy them at the door.

Cluck, cluck
My friend, whose name will not be disclosed, is thinking about getting some chickens in her backyard.
When I was a young girl, my Auntie Jeanne had a chicken coop and I used to pretend I was Laura Ingalls and go out and fetch the fresh eggs.
Alas, my friend had heard that because she lives in the city limits, chickens weren’t allowed.
I called the municipal code department and found out that chickens are allowed under certain circumstances.
First off, roosters are NOT allowed. We can understand that as they are the equivalent of the animal version of leaf blowers.
The nice guy from the city said my friend would need a permit from the city. Also, there are rules about how close the chicken cage can be to her main structure. The rules vary depending on the zoning.
Also, each animal needs 250 square feet of space, so if you have a big yard, you could have a nice little flock.

Shameless plug
I’ve posted a few pictures of my happy little garden on my blog. Note that the pile of junk in the background belongs to my neighbor Curious George, who is in construction and collects odd things.

Posted by Heather Hacking at 05:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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(Note, these are not my actual friends. I just found this image on the Internet. Any similarity in appearance to my actual friend Kevin is completely coincidental).

Friday (April 27) marks the deadline to apply for the May 5 spring parade. This year’s theme is celebration of diversity. Last year Tommy and I were invited to ride on a convertible fire truck driven by Robert Fickert.
For years we’ve been joking about entering the parade and riding in the Sow There! purple dirigible, but have not quite gotten it together.
One year while we were camping at Lake Almanor a bunch of my goofy friends were joking that we should enter the Chester Fourth of July parade. For some reason, a bunch of the guys in our group thought it was fun every once in a while to wear kilts. We also had a scotch tasting party but that’s a completely different story.
My friend Kevin said we should enter the parade, have all the men wear kilts and march as the Butte Jacobite Society. Instead of bagpipes, the men would carry stuffed cats under their arms.
We all thought it was hilarious to laugh about, especially in Chester where most of the floats in the parade include fire engines and the various chapters of Clampers.

One of my favorite memories of Chico Parades was when Leify was about 5 years old. He wanted to get a good view of the parade, so we climbed up into one of those gnarled trees that used to be on the west edge of city plaza. I think was a camelia, but that was a while ago. Naturally I climbed into the tree with him. We ended up missing most of the parade because it was such a hoot to climb a tree.

There should decidedly be more tree climbing in adulthood, or more 5-year-olds to pal around with.

Posted by Heather Hacking at 04:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We had a big triumph last week with Tiggy. The cat caught the mole. That same week, we liberated the backyard. The soil had been tortured in the past. Gravel had been spread over the years. My friend Shelley lived in this house before me. She’s a potter and we keep digging up bits of clay and pottery.
To reclaim the areas for gardening, Tommy dug down two feet and composted steer manure was placed in the holes. I’ve lived here 10 years and have composted the entire time, so there are some very sweet spots of rich, dark soil with a zillion wiggly worms.
In January, I planted tomatoes from seed in the window sill, and Tommy planted about 15 of them in this newly-enriched back part of the yard.
Then, of course, after all that work had been done to improve the icky, gravel soil, mounds started to appear. What the heck? Is there no peace?
Another mole.
We’ve also discovered another set of pushed up dirt in the main part of the yard near the newly-planted red salvia.
Apparently Tiggy took too long to find his prey, because the mole(s) had a chance to procreate.
What do I need? An army of Tiggies?

Thank the Goddess you’re here
This week we had a dinner guest. One of my new favorite shows is "Thank God You’re Here."
It’s modeled after the old show “What’s My Line” from Comedy Central.
The show has guest comedians who are dressed up in costumes. They’re thrown into a stage set with stock actors from the show.

The comedian doesn’t know what the story is until the actors start talking, and has to ad-lib their lines. They’re short, “Saturday Night Live” type skits.
(It’s on at 8 p.m. Wednesdays on NBC).
OK, we’re complete dorks. We were debating whether to play Yahtzee and my dinner guest suggested that we play our own version of the TV show in the living room.
This turned out to be completely hilarious and proof that you don’t need Parker Brothers to have a fun evening with friends.
We took turns and two of the group would conspire while the other person had to hide in the kitchen. The two would work out a scenario.
For example my friend Forest and I pretended we were newscasters and interviewing Tommy, who was supposed to be an Atlanta Braves player. We introduced ourselves in overly dramatic newscaster voices and my well-practiced dramatic hair flip.
Apparently the newscasters were “outing” Tommy’s Braves player character. The bit was that Tommy’s character had thrown a game to cash in on big-time gambling winnings. As Tommy stammered to defend himself, we kept peppering him with more “evidence” and pretend surveillance tapes of him meeting repeatedly with Pete Rose, who happened to be his business manager and his accountant.
“Is it true that you threw the game because your wife is suing you for alimony and your career is basically washed-out?” I asked, using my best Diane Sawyer voice inflection.
Each game went on for about five minutes, until everybody was cracking up and couldn’t continue.
In one of the rounds, my friend walked out of the kitchen and we greeted him as if he was the god Pan, and Tommy and I were medieval sheep herders. I presented our “Pan” with a bowl of dried lavender as an offering so he might help us to have a fruitful life.
It was all incredibly silly, but fun. Sort of a mini version of when people go to murder mystery parties.
I’ve written a couple of murder mysteries for a local charity, so it came rather naturally. But I was also really impressed that Tommy ran with it, especially since he’s such an Iowa guy.
The two guys crafted a skit where I was “Natasha,” a Russian spy posing as a housecleaner. I must admit, I was very impressed with myself for that sexy Russian accent.
Another skit, Tommy and I were psychologists in a counseling session with our dinner guest who had obsessive compulsive disorder. His props included a bottle of hand sanitizer, plastic sandwich bags and a dirty mitten.
We had so much fun, we want to invite more of our goofier friends over — you know who you are — to be able to have more characters.

Come smell the roses
If you’re free at noon Monday, Chico State University is celebrating the college’s 120th anniversary. Part of that will be a ceremony at the university rose garden. Some of the hundreds of roses were first donated by George Petersen, and the garden was named after him. George was owner of Lindo Nursery from 1909 to 1948 and was the son of John Bidwell’s groundskeeper.
April 27 the rose garden will again be the location for a birthday party at 1 p.m. with music, cake and special guests.

Posted by Heather Hacking at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A reader named Nancy wrote in recently in reaction to the article about Tiggy who conquered a mole in the yard. She brought up some interesting points:

NANCY WROTE: "I have two cats, acquired over the past three years. I also used to have mice in the house every fall and birds in the garden every spring. I'm thankful to say I no longer have mice. However, the bird population is sadly dwindled. Although I have seen the occasional scattering of small feathers on my door mat, I believe the biggest impact the cats have is just putting out the "unwelcome" mat.

"So, like most things in life, cats come with assets and liabilities."

Posted by Heather Hacking at 02:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For some reason I'm a little bit competitive about dying Easter eggs.

Not that I want my eggs to be more beautiful than other people's eggs. I just want my eggs to be as beautiful as I can make them.

Who knows, maybe it stems from finger painting in preschool. Perhaps those petroglyphs of childhood were overly praised by my parents.

We bought two packets of Easter egg dye and boiled the dozen eggs. A dozen eggs really isn't that many, so care needs to be taken to make sure each one rivals something created by Jackson Pollock.

We bought the standard dye kit and then a kit that was supposed to help create swirls and sparkles. The second kit was to eggs what the glossy women’s magazine ads say bronzer is to skin.

It made an ordinary egg shine with the "glistening nutrients you don't normally see in Easter eggs." Seriously, these eggs looked like they were polished with gold flakes. I was so proud.

We had Bonnie and the nine-year-old over to join in the "artwork."

I could go on about techniques used to make the masterpieces, but that would likely bore most of you. I was secretly proud when the nine-year-old sort of huffed off because he was upset that my Easter eggs were more beautiful than his.

Then the egg hunt arrived on Easter Sunday. We also had 25 plastic bags within which we hid money and Leify's leftover Halloween candy.

We started in the house hiding the eggs. Invariably one egg from each "hunt" gets lost and the hider can't remember where they were hidden. I remember as a child finding crushed and rotten Easter eggs between the cushions of the couch weeks after the Easter ham leftovers had been eaten.

After the first egg was not found I asked that we only hide the actual hardboiled eggs in plain view.

Plain view can be just as fun and cuts down on all that prattle about "warmer, colder."

But still, the egg gremlins apparently arrived and a few more eggs turned up missing. This meant the egg hunt needed to be moved outside.

I think we ended up with about 8 eggs at the end.

Posted by Heather Hacking at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

(Note how this mole is surrounded by demolished roots of plants. Not a pretty picture).

We've been battling moles and a gopher for about a year. About this time last
year it was heart-breaking because we had just planted a lush lawn. We
were actually so proud we took pictures of the lawn. Then the changes occurred.

Little mounds started occurring as if there were some West Virginia coal miners who
had shrunk themselves and were inviting themselves to our barbecues.

Disheartening is an understatement. Then plants started mysteriously
disappearing. Entire plants would be sucked into the ground. I called the UC Davis
Cooperative Extension and the omnipotent Joe Connell told me I likely
had a mole AND a gopher.

Varmints.

Great luck. This must be what little Dannielynn will feel like when
she's 18 and learns that Anna Nicole Smith is her birth mother and that she didn't
win the $450 million settlement.

We actually considered using poisons and gases but just chose to live with
the misfortune.

One time Bonnie, my best friend next door, said she saw the mole rearing its
head. I grabbed one of those ornamental metal stakes, you know, the ones with
the dragonfly at the top, and shoved it down the hole. But the then 8-year-old
freaked out and practically called me Satan for wanting to kill an animal.

The newest development in the saga is that my neighbor has decided to make her cat an outside cat.

The cat is named Tigger but we call him Tiggy. He's an apt orange kitty and
runs into our house every chance he gets because we made the mistake of giving
him wet food and tuna.

Who knew?

Recently the cat did a heroic thing ....

I was bringing over two boxes of Easter egg dy and standing at the front door and saw Tiggy
gnawing at something dappled in blood.

I suddenly got strangely excited and yelled to my friend through the doorway.

"I think Tiggy got a mole!"

Tommy and Bonnie and the 9-year-old next door all ran out of the house. There
was Tiggy looking like a Lion King chomping away at his prize.

It was, indeed, THE MOLE. Tiggy had gnawed through half of its face but the
teeth that destroyed my lawn were still prominent.

I hate to say it, but I was really proud of the cat. It made me feel bad that
I had squirted him with water and wished I had petted him more when he tried
to eat my grass. That cat was my hero and I wished that cloning was more
economical.

Ding-dong, the mole is dead.

Of course we pried the orange cat away from the offending mole. Tommy took
a shovel to unceremoniously dump it in the Dumpster, after taunting me
with it perched on the edge of the shovel. Yes, you can be a brat at age 36.
That's part of the reason I love him.

You could tell the cat was proud, sort of strutting around the yard.

Later we saw Tiggy rooting around the ivy near the hole where he had found
the mole.

The kitty was looking for more satisfaction, obviously to impress us with his
Olympic cat prowess.

Hmmm. All that work I did a year ago to give myself and others advice about
how to rid their yards of moles, and the answer was staring me right in the
face. This cat.

Posted by Heather Hacking at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A reader named Cris wrote in recently re: an article about knocking down weeds
and trying to avoid the dreaded R-word: Roundup.

Sally had said she uses several sheets of newspaper end rolls (available for dirt cheap
at the front entrance of the Enterprise Record).

Cris said she has long used Glad bags secured with rocks. She said its the only thing she
has found that works. I've heard of other people who use black plastic garbage bags or
tarps to knock down weeds. The key, I supposed is to do this early in the season before
you're getting itchy to plant things there.

We've pretty much knocked out the Velcro weed just through force of will and that fact that
when Tommy gets started on a task he is fairly persistent about getting it done. There are
still a few stragglers here and there, but at least there is an end in sight.

Any readers who have other suggestions, please share.

Posted by Heather Hacking at 04:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I really think Hallmark needs to meet the new millennium. Most of us have
shelled over $4 for a Hallmark card.

We feel guilty if we don't buy a card for a relative on Christmas,
Thanksgiving, Halloween, Secretary’s Day and the first day of spring. You're obviously
not a friend unless you send a card.

What's wrong with e-cards? Doesn't thinking about friends on the exact day
they were born constitute caring? Why are we supposed to think about them
three day before and try to account for postal delivery?

Plus, I’m a writer so the words I would choose to express my friendship,
admiration or congratulations would be my own, rather than something printed in
pink italics and written by a frustrated poet.

I also think there are gaps in the types of cards they offer us to buy for
the same amount of money we could purchase a tasty burrito at the taco wagon.

There should be some more modern greeting cards, be it paper or electronic.

• "So you're marrying a fireman. Get used to spending time alone" ... with a
picture of a woman out partying and dancing four nights a week."

• "Glad to hear you're out of prison."

• On a related note: "Congratulations on your new tattoo."

• "Too bad your divorce settlement didn't go the way you wanted. At least you can
bad-mouth the guy until your kid is 18."

• "Good job on the promotion. Now you can wield that evil side I've always
seen in you."

• Maybe there could be a section in Hallmark of "passive aggressive cards."

Cards that state "I know why you moved away. It's because you hate me."

Or the even more adorable: "I miss you. Why don't you call very often. Is it
because you think other people are more important?"

This card could have a cutout for you to insert a picture of your passive aggressive friend and a cartoon drawing of them doing something alone, like shopping or scarfing on Dove dark chocolates.

Dad wrote recently that he's looking forward to the times when technology can
transform e-cards to be more interactive.

For example, they will likely in the future actually have computer chip
capacity where you can send an e-card to an ex-boyfriend and a hologram will
reach out and slap him.

On a lighter side, you could send cards that holographically kissed your
loved one. That would be sweet.

Or a cordial "new neighbor" card where the neighbor electronically shakes
your hand.

Then there's always the "thinking of you" section of the greeting card aisle.

This could include cards such as: "I'm still thinking about that money you owe me," or
"It's been so long since I've seen you I forget what you look like."

Posted by Heather Hacking at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)