I used to count the feet.

At sundown all the chickens march into the chicken coop and hop onto the roost to put themselves to bed. I go out a little bit later with a flashlight to close the door of the chicken coop so that nothing would get at them at night. Every night I open the door and look in and count the feet to make sure that all the chickens were in there. Twenty feet; ten chickens.

And then one night I counted eighteen feet. I turned from the coop into the chicken yard with my flashlight: no chicken sleeping on top of the coop. No chicken hiding in the bushes next to the coop. No chicken wandering about in the dark looking confused, having forgotten to actually go to bed.

The light caught a bit of movement toward the back of my chicken yard. I turned the flashlight on the back fence and two glowing neon eyes stared back at me out of the darkness. Chickens do not have eyes facing forward. I took a step back, and then a step forward.

And the bobcat stopped chewing on my chicken, climbed right up the fence, jumped into the bushes and ran away.

This was only the start.

I live just outside a town called Los Gatos (the cats), originally named for the large number of bobcats in the area. We have an especially large population of bobcats that make our property home because most of our land is uncleared and we don’t own dogs. We see bobcats on the lawn, on the driveway, in the fields, and in the bushes. Bobcats are fun to watch because they behave just like very large house cats; they sleep in the sun, they wrestle like kittens, they bat pine cones around for fun. They have big tufty ears and spotty bellies. Given how cute they are it’s hard to remember that bobcats are not house cats; they are wild, and they hunt to eat.

By keeping chickens, I was putting bobcat food on a buffet and ringing the “free food” bell.

I thought that the chickens were safe. Although I had lost the occasional chicken to predators in the past, I had beefed up my chicken yard security, and it had been two years since I had lost a chicken. When the bobcat took the first bird I was momentarily struck stupid. But…I have a seven foot fence. I have a secure coop. How could this have happened? The rule I neglected to fully grasp is that a chicken yard is safe right up until the moment it isn’t, the predators have all the time in the world to look for a way in, and they will wait until the one night you forget to shut the door or the one time you have your back turned. And a fence now matter how tall is ineffective against a smart cat who can climb.

While I was wasting time dumbly trying to understand what had gone wrong two more chickens vanished, one after the other, and there was just a pile of feathers on the ground where they had been. One pile of black feathers. One pile of grey feathers. Like ashes left behind after a fire.

I put up a hot wire, a strand of electrical fencing, just short of the top of the fence. I covered the back corner of the fence with netting, where I thought the bobcat was coming in. I put the chickens to bed well before dark and let them out when the sun was well up. But all of this seemed ineffective; every few days I lost more chickens.

One afternoon in the middle of the day three chickens vanished, including my favourite, an enormous white orpington I had hatched from an egg. The white orpington had been my guard chicken, the mean one who would confront bobcats and coyotes standing just outside the fence and raise a ruckus that had all the other chickens running for the safety of the coop. My guard chicken was not mean enough. I found a big pile of white feathers and nothing else.

I seemed like I was fighting a losing battle; my yard was just not safe, and it was only a matter of time before the bobcats got all the chickens. I needed to do something and fast if I wanted to keep any chickens at all.

But I was too slow. Only a few days later I went out to the coop at dusk and there were no feet to count. I found more piles of feathers and two dead chickens. So that’s it, I thought, as I trudged back into the house, depressed. I’ve lost. It’s over. The bobcats had taken all of my chickens, wiped me out, in less than a week.

The next morning as I was looking out the kitchen window I saw movement in the chicken yard. Curiously, I went out into the garden, and froze in the middle of the path. There were three bobcats in the chicken yard — one large parent and two smaller half-grown bobcat kittens. They had come back for the last of the dead chickens.

“Eric!” I rushed back into the house. “Bobcats! In the yard!” Eric came out of the house with a pellet gun; I turned on the garden hose. We had talked on and off about what to do if we ever actually caught the bobcats in the act. We didn’t want to shoot the bobcats and had joked that maybe turning the hose on them would scare them away. This was our last chance.

Eric cornered the larger parent bobcat in the back of the yard, but it went up and over the fence before he could get it. The two smaller cats were not as smart, and both of them got stuck in the narrow space behind the new coop and the fence. I turned the hose on “jet” and unleashed a stream of water. Wet, and frightened, one cat managed to climb the fence and escape, but I cornered the remaining one with the hose. It climbed the fence but then stayed perched on the top, growling at me as I dosed it in the face over and over again, hoping it wouldn’t decide to lunge at me over the fence in a panic.

The cat seemed to be stuck there on top of the fence, miserable, angry, soaked. I turned off the hose. Why hadn’t it hopped over? Why was it just sitting there?

“Turn off the hot wire,” I called to Eric, who had been chasing bobcats on the outside of the fence. Once the power was cut the cat finally dropped off the top of the fence into the bushes. The fence had been zapping the terrified animal at the same time I was hosing it down.

I haven’t seen any bobcats by the chicken yard for a long time now, but I suspect that is more because there are no chickens left to eat rather than because of our ninja bobcat-frightening skills.

The plan now is to rebuild the chicken yard with a stronger fence and with a roof on it. The yard will become an impenetrable chicken fortress against any known predator in the area. Given my current rate of progress on the new chicken coop this should only take four or five years, tops!

(Part One, Part Two, Part Three)

So you’re probably thinking, “Hey Laura, it’s been a really super long time since you wrote about that shed/chicken coop of yours. Surely you’ve made some progress that you could write about. Surely the shed isn’t just sitting there in your yard, incomplete, in the rain, taunting you with your short attention span and inability to actually completely follow through with a project.”

Yes, well, um.

I will point out that there is a roof on that shed now, and it took me a long time to put a roof on that shed, and that roof is what I want to talk about in this post mostly. But the real reason the whole shed to chicken coop project has dragged on this long is for a particular reason: I no longer have any chickens. I had a family of bobcats come through and wipe me out in August, and I want to write about that, too, because it’s been an important albeit not very amusing part of the story. But for now let’s talk about the roof. And about math.

Rafter Math

When last we left our stubborn intrepid narrator (me) in June in Part Three she had finished the foundation and framing for the walls of the shed, reusing as much of the old wood as possible and widening the shed by about 3 inches. There was a great sense of accomplishment and no small amount of back strain felt by all involved (me).

The next step was to set rafters to hold the roof. The original slanted roof of the old shed (as shown in Part Two) had rafters, thick redwood sheathing, and then about four layers of asphalt shingles. My plan was to replace all that with a simple corrugated (wavy) metal roof. But I would still need rafters.

The existing rafters were 10 foot 2x4s with notches cut into them so that they would sit at the correct angle on top of the vertical walls. The notches are called birds-mouths, and there is some fancy complicated construction math (otherwise known as “trigonometry”) that you can do to figure out where to cut the notches and at what angle. (You know when people say that you’ll never, ever use eighth-grade math ever again? This is where they’re wrong. If you ever want to cut birds-mouth notches in rafters, it will help to remember your eighth grade math.)

About three of the six of my old rafters were in fine shape. The other three were too rotted to use. I figured — no big! Lay the old rafters on top of new 2x4s and use them as templates for the notches. No fancy complicated construction math needed!

But here is where I will bring your attention to that thing back in Part Three where I widened the shed by three inches. The notches in the old rafters no longer line up with the top of the shed. I needed new notches in new places with new angles. I had to do the math after all. Darn it.

I am told that a common framing square has markings on it that are supposed to help you with rafter math. But I don’t actually have a framing square, and, honestly, every time I looked up a description of how to figure this out I felt like despite my actual college degree from a technical school no less I was sitting there in front of the computer slightly drooling and muttering “wut?”

I spent perhaps a month standing around sighing over this, and then I stumbled on a tip in the magazine Home Family Handyman (which, by the way, is total DIY homeowner porn, and if you’re still bothering to read all of my crap here you should be reading that). The tip said you could use hurricane ties — bent metal plates you can buy anywhere — to hold the rafters right on top of the framing, and not have to measure or cut notches at all.

Huzzah!

12 hurricane ties: $11.76.
3 10 foot 2x4s: $9.48

After the rafters come purlins, which are just boards that go perpendicular to the rafters to support the roofing panels. I’ll skip this part because it was boring; I used lengths of 1x redwood I had left over from various other bits of the old shed and nailed them in mostly random places to the rafters.

Idiot on The Roof

Which brings us to the roof itself. Wavy metal roof panels come in several different lengths and are 26 1/4″ inches wide. For the length of the roof, front to back, I needed 12 feet of panel. I actually had some eight foot roof panels left over from roofing the barn a few years back, so I ended up buying a few more eight footers and a bunch of six footers. The 8s and 6s overlap by 2 feet to give me 12 feet. Easy peasy.

Width was somewhat more complicated. Math was required (darn it). I had a 10 foot wide roof span. The panels are 26 1/4″ wide, and overlap in the waves in increments of roughly 2 3/4″. I wanted to overhang the roof on either side by 6 inches. How many panels across would I need?

This actually seemed a lot harder when I was trying to figure it out a few months ago, and seems obvious now; five panels to cover the roof itself (width – overlap = ~2 feet; 10 / 2 = 5), plus one extra for the overhang.

Wavy metal roofing panels:
2 8-foot panels $28.50
6 6-foot panels $64.08

To attach the panels to the roof you also need wavy styrofoam filler strips that go between the panels and the purlins, and special sheet metal screws with rubber washers on them.

Filler Strips: $20.74
Screws (3 boxes): $13.29

And now, we roof. I roofed by flinging the panels up from the low side of the shed onto the rafters, and then by standing on a step ladder from the inside of the shed, arranging the panels into the right configuration and then screwing them into place onto the purlins. The last thing I wanted to do was actually climb on top of the roof, for two very important reasons:

• Metal roof panels are slippery, and that roof is frickin high off the ground. Also, I have neglected to mention that the shed is built on top of the side of a hill, so if I slide off the roof I am not only going to fall eight feet off the shed itself, but down another ten feet into a thicket of poison oak and blackberries. Also, there are spiders there.
• Framing without siding is NOT STABLE. It wiggles. You may remember from Part Two that I had trouble removing the roof from this shed because it listed queasily around from side to side. It did this a lot putting the roof back on, too, only this time I was up there with an electric drill, standing at the top of an unstable ladder, leaning out over the roof and trying not to be sick. Short of confronting a pack of angry bobcats on the top of a seven foot electric fence with a garden hose and I’ll get to that part in a bit, this was the most terrifying thing I have done all year.

I also occasionally had trouble lining up the screws with the purlins. Whoops.

Do-Over

When the roof was two-thirds done I was arranging the next set of panels on top of the rafters when I noticed something funny. I was going to be about eight inches short. I thought, well, I think I must have done the math wrong. And then I stared at the panels I had already put on for a while and realized that I had overlapped them all by three waves instead of two like I was supposed to.

Oh, crap.

So. I had one of two solutions:

• Buy another row of roof panels to cover the eight-inch deficit.
• Remove three rows of roof panels and overlap them correctly.

I went with Plan B, because emotional trauma is always better than spending more money, especially for a shed/chicken coop that was originally supposed to be free. The good news is that putting the panels down for the second time took much less effort, because at that point I was getting used to being terrified on top of a ladder. The bad news is that it took twice as many screws, because I had to cover all the holes I had drilled for the previous overlaps. This roof is very firmly attached to the shed. Very. Firmly. Attached.

The final roof: it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty darn good. Mostly I’m happy that its over.

(continued…)

(Part One, Part Two)

A number of years back the roller on a drawer broke in our old refrigerator. This wasn’t that big a deal; the fridge still worked, but it was kind of a pain that the drawer didn’t open easily. But since the fridge was old, and cranky, and used a lot of electricity, we decided to just go ahead and buy a new one. There was this one small problem: the space around our kitchen cabinets for the refrigerator was designed to fit the original fridge. Newer refrigerators were all going to be too tall.

Our next plan was to take out the cabinet above the refrigerator and replace it with a smaller cabinet, thus making the height of the space for the fridge bigger. This would be a huge pain in the ass but workable. I found the manufacturer of the cabinets, found a dealer, and discovered that manufacturer not only did not make cabinets in the same style as the ones we had, but they didn’t even come in the same color. So then the thought was well, we could remodel the kitchen and replace ALL the cabinets, and get new appliances and a new floor and hey! maybe we could bump out the wall a few feet and make the whole thing bigger!

And thus a $10 refrigerator drawer part dangerously came very close to spiraling into an unbelievably expensive construction project. This story is not unique. I often wonder how often large remodeling projects start from very minor fixes to existing problems. (For the record, we bought the smaller non-matching cabinet and a new fridge and put off the kitchen remodel to another time.)

I bring up this story because this is where my free shed turned not so free. Now that I had the shed in various parts on the ground I knew the extent of the rot and what I could use and what I had to throw out, and it was worse than I had originally thought. There was a lot of rot. There was a lot of building to be done. I had to keep reminding myself that this was a chicken coop, not a cottage, and the chickens really were not going to complain about my construction skills.

Foundation and Empire

The original base of the shed was made from 2×6 dimensional redwood (actually 2 inches by six inches planks, as opposed to the 1 1/2″ x 5 1/2″ trim we use today). The joists were held together by short chunks of wood on the long side toenailed in, like this:

This made the base less than sturdy. A number of the shorter chunks of wood had gone missing, and one joist had broken off on the end of the foundation altogether. So my first plan was to replace all those shorter boards with long end-boards, nailed straight to the ends of the joists in the way all foundations are made today, like this:

Cost of 2×6 x 10 foot pressure-treated end boards: $21.94

Cost of framing nails: $2.54

But before I built the foundation I had to come up with a plan for how to put the shed onto the ground. There are a variety of ways of doing this, from a full concrete pad to skids (6×6 or larger posts, laid on the ground), to just putting it down flat on the dirt (which I didn’t want to do). I settled on a compromise with these concrete blocks, called bond beam blocks. They have slots in them to fit (conveniently) 2-by lumber.

I dug small foundation holes, filled and tamped them with gravel, and set the blocks on top of that, levelling the blocks across the high and low points in the spot where I was going to put the coop (fortunately, it was already mostly level). The chickens helped by making sure that every hole I dug was rapidly filled in again, often before I could put a block into it, and by eating the gravel.

Cost of 8 blocks, and 6 bags of gravel: $28.36

Cost to replace stupid chickens that died from eating rocks: $0 (luckily, so far)

Then I built the foundation right on top of the blocks. A few of the joists were rotted on the ends, so I had to cut them a little short and nail on incredibly ugly but stable extensions I cut from the discarded long ends of the shed. “It’s a chicken coop,” I kept reminding myself.

I was rewarded for all my hard work with a torrential rainstorm that lasted more than a week. But despite the rain and the mud, it all remained level. I was pleased.

You may note from this picture my apparent inability to evenly space the joists across the width of the shed. There’s a reason for that; I was planning on reusing the original redwood planks for the shed floor, which were in good condition (and I had been careful when I pulled them up). The planks were all of specific lengths, so I spaced the joists to fit the planks. Setting the floor went quickly, and the foundation was done.

The Frame-Up

Next up was framing. I was planning on using most of the original frame, which was lying in chunks in my driveway, although I did have to replace some parts that were rotten, and I wanted to make the front door wider. I reused as much as I could, but I did buy more 2x4s to make the repairs.

Cost of many 2x4s: $22.36

Cost of more framing nails: $2.65

The astute reader will have already noted a problem I ran into at this point because of lack of foresight. The original shed was 10 feet by 7 ft 3 inches. That was with the shed foundation built with the short lengths of wood inside the joists. By replacing those short lengths with long boards on the ends of the joists I had widened the short side of the shed to 7 ft 6 inches. The frames of two sides of my shed were three inches too short.

The solution? I replaced the sole plates (bottom board) of all the framing with new 2x4s at the right length. For the tops, I added more unbelievably ugly nailed-in frame extensions.

I win no awards for construction talent, but I get a gold medal for kludgy hacks.

Engineering Technique, circa 3000BC

I put together all the framing in the driveway, on level pavement, on the other side of the house and the other side of the property from the chicken coop. My next problem was getting the completed framing sections up the driveway, past the house and the garage, around the corner, through a four-foot gate into the garden, and into the chicken pen.

Here’s where if I were smart I would have asked for help. Even the long sections of the shed would not have been that heavy to carry with two or three people, maneuvering them through the more complicated narrow parts of the path would have been much easier with help, and setting them upright and plumb would have been a piece of cake with someone to hold the walls in place.

But I got a notion into my head that this was going to be my chicken coop project, and I was going to do the entire thing myself, with my own two hands, and absolutely no one was going to help me. So why bother asking for help from one’s husband, or one’s neighbors, when I could pick up a wall and physically drag it the long way around the house over the lawn (once you get it moving it’s not too bad…) I could set it upright, carefully balanced on edge, and then painstakingly wiggle it through the narrow gate, a few inches at a time. And then through the garden I could just rotate it end to end to corner to corner over the raised beds and paths until it was in place on top of the foundation. Then I could tip it up and brace it mostly plumb with random bits of wood and bungie cords tied to the fence, and if I was really lucky I could manage to get it nailed securely down before it fell over on top of me.

I only really hurt myself twice doing this. But bull-headedness is its own reward.

(Continued in Part Four)

(read Part One here)

After Greg delivered the old shed onto my driveway it sat there for close to nine months. I was too busy to clear the road to the chicken yard, and Greg apparently didn’t need his trailer back, because he never called me to demand that we finish moving it.

Even braced and tied to a tree, the shed was not stable on top of the trailer. When Greg and Jesus had been cleaning up after delivering the shed I had gone to look inside to get a closer look. I put my hands on the door sill, and the shed leaned over toward me with a loud creak. I started backward like I had been burned and darted well away from the crush zone. The shed rocked back to level. “Whatever you do,” Greg warned me, ” do not get into the shed!”

I was too frightened to get into the shed. But once in a while I would go out onto the driveway and look into the shed. Greg had emptied the shelves of everything but the dirt, of which there was a lot, and the kerosene smell inside was quite strong. But I had been right in my initial assessment; the shed was sturdily built, entirely of redwood, whitewashed on the inside, and huge. The door was a pretty light blue and although it didn’t open very well it did open. The shed was sound. It would make an awesome chicken coop when it was done. If I ever managed to get it down off of the trailer.

I started thinking. Even if I cleared the road to the chicken yard it was going to be tough to get the shed up into the right spot; the road was narrow, and uneven, and to even get to the road would require maneuvering the shed past the garage and through a carport that was, unfortunately, shorter than the shed. The magic 8 ball in my head was blinking FAIL. I was going to have to dismantle the shed, and take it up to the chicken yard in pieces.

In December I got up on a ladder with a crowbar and a hammer. On top of the roof I found four layers of rotting asphalt shingles and redwood 1x6s as underlayment. Slowly I started building a messy pile of asphalt and roofing nails and lumber on the ground next to the shed. Once I had a few rows of roofing materials off, I moved the ladder inside the shed itself.

“Do not get into the shed!” Greg had warned me nine months before. It’s usually good advice that if some activity scares Greg then that activity is probably way, way too dangerous for anyone other than Greg to attempt. But I was confident at this point that the shed was not going to tip over. I had been testing the shed by going out and wiggling it once in a while (and then running away). Like a Weeble, it wobbled, but it didn’t fall down. I could tip it several degrees off center on the trailer, but it seemed to want to come back to vertical every time. Leaning the ladder against it had proved stable. I was feeling more confident.

Lack of imminent death didn’t mean it was at all easy to stand on a ladder inside of it, or that I had any fun at all standing on that ladder. The shed still listed from side to side as I worked, like a small boat in a very big storm. If I didn’t move very slowly as I worked, or have the ladder oriented in the right direction, the shed could lurch, leaving me hanging on a rafter with my feet dangling in the air. There were a number of times I finished working on the shed for the day and staggered queasily inside to take a dramamine and lie down for a while.

It took me a week of afternoons and a weekend to get the roof fully off.

I could stand on the ground to pull off most of the siding. As it fell around me a lot of it splintered from rot. The light blue panel door came right off its hinges, and then came apart. Underneath the siding I found more rot, rot in the framing, and rot in the foundation. My free shed was looking like less of a good deal. Every time I stuck my crowbar deep into a chunk of wood that peeled away in shreds I became slightly more uneasy. What, exactly, had I signed up for?

Taking down the rafters took me another two weeks, because they had no rot whatsoever and were nailed down with giant eight-inch spikes. Whoever had built my shed years before had planned for those rafters to stay put, maybe forever. I got most of them off with persistent prying and cursing, and a few by cutting through the spikes with the Sawz-All that Eric got me for my birthday a few years back. Some girls get jewelry. I get power tools.

The next step was to take apart the frame of the shed, and I wasn’t altogether sure how to do that, given that each wall was nailed tightly to the floor and to each other, and I didn’t want to destroy them to take them down. I was still puzzling over the problem when Greg came back up to the house to do some tree trimming.

“Wow!” He said when he saw the skeleton of the shed up on his trailer. “You’ve done so much work!”

I explained what I was up to, and my plans for the rest of the shed demolition. I told him that when I finished taking it apart that he could have his trailer back, but I wasn’t sure how long it would take me. Greg looked at the shed. He looked at me. He got that look on his face that usually makes me back away in alarm. “Let’s just take it down now!” he exclaimed.

“Now?” I asked, backing away in alarm. “Right now?”

“Yeah! It’ll take like fifteen minutes!”

I watched as Greg snatched a hammer out of the back of his truck, jumped up into the shed, muttered “whoa!” once as it heaved underneath him like a bull, and then fearlessly began to pry at the corners of the framing. Within minutes all four corners were loose, and then with the help of a rope and some further prying we had lowered all four walls outward down to the ground. The shed looked like it had been exploded outward.

With some heaving and 2x4s as levers we managed to push the shed foundation off to one side of the shed, and flip it upside down on the ground. Greg hooked up his truck to the trailer and moved it out of the way, and then we picked up the foundation and turned it back right side up onto the ground.

He was right. In less than half an hour the shed was in parts on the ground. We had made more progress together than I had in weeks. Greg trimmed his trees and left with his trailer, leaving me with a stack of wood on the ground. Shed demo was done. Now it was time to rebuild.

(Continued…in Part Three)

About a year ago we went down the hill one afternoon to visit with our neighbor Greg. While we were there, Greg pointed out the improvements he had made to his house, taught us how to douse for water with two bits of coat hanger held in the hands, showed us the decrepit 5000-gallon redwood water tank he had been restoring, took us out in the woods to see the really awesome skeleton of a deer he had found, and noted offhandedly as we walked back that just the week before he had accidentally rolled his Jeep over the sharp edge of the trail and it had taken him a couple hours to get it hauled back up again.

We can never visit with Greg for less than half a day. Greg always has so many interesting stories to tell and so many things to show us, although a large portion of them scare the living daylights out of me. In past lives, I imagine Greg has been a pirate, a gunslinger, a flying ace, or a lion tamer. Greg operates at a very high RPM. Everything Greg says is emphatic. Greg is the number one living example of the power of positive thinking. “Did you get hurt rolling the Jeep?” I asked. “Oh no!” said Greg, cheerfully. “A little shook up, but it was fine! I just crawled out and went to get the winch!”

“Did the Jeep get badly damaged?”

“No more than any other time I’ve rolled it!”

Toward the end of the visit Greg pointed out a huge old shed he had down on the side of his driveway below the house. The shed was ugly and crammed full of boxes and paint cans and bits of metal. It smelled like kerosene. It looked like it was rotting away one side and not entirely water tight. The door was crooked and it didn’t shut all the way. “That shed has been here since I moved in!” Greg exclaimed as we passed by. “Someday I need to get rid of it! I could use the space!”

I looked back at the shed. Although the siding was rotting it was still standing upright. Behind all the junk, it looked like redwood. “You know,” I said. “If you could find a way to get the shed up to our house, I’d take it.”

“Really!” Greg exclaimed.

“Yeah,” I replied. “I need a bigger chicken coop.”

“Really!” Greg repeated. “That would be awesome! I’ll clean it out and see if I can get it up on a trailer!”

“Oh, no rush,” I said. “The chickens aren’t going anywhere.”

There’s kind of a a rule amongst chicken people that says once you get a couple of chickens you’re always going to want more chickens. If you’re not careful you end up collecting them, like seashells or interesting rocks or t-shirts with embarrassingly nerdy slogans on them (“Roses are red, violets are blue, all my base are belong to you“). I started five years ago with three chickens, which grew to five, and then suddenly like that I had ten hens that laid eight eggs a day and ate all the weeds in the vegetable garden (as well as many of the vegetables). By the time I found Greg’s shed I had built a second chicken pen in the barn, in which there were 45 fat and happy meat chickens I was raising to eat.

I had long ago crossed the line from just keeping chickens into being an actual chicken farmer. (It could be argued that I had not only crossed it, I had charged it with my vast army of undead warrior bears and scattered the enemy in terror before me.) But because I was insane, I really needed more space so that I could get more chickens. I figured it would take Greg a few months to get the shed together, which would give me time to get ready.

And then the very next morning I got a call from Neighbor Greg. “Hi!” said Greg. “I cleaned out the shed and put it on a trailer! I thought maybe I could bring it up to your place sometime this morning!”

Uhhhhh I thought. That was way faster than I expected. “Uhhh, well, you can bring the shed up,” I replied, “But I’m not really ready — ”

“OK! Open the gate and I’ll be there in an hour!”

I anxiously walked down the hill some time later and there was Greg, slowly climbing the driveway in his big truck and with the shed swaying way, way, up on top of a narrow trailer. Jesus, Greg’s Mexican friend who helps him out with odd jobs, was down on the ground on the windward side, holding onto the shed with a rope tied to the roof to keep it from tipping right off the trailer and crashing onto the ground. When they turned a corner the other way, Jesus ran over to the other side of the shed and picked up another rope.

Oh my God, I thought, backing away back up the hill, this is so totally not OSHA compliant.

The shed on top of the unstable trailer was ten feet off the ground, which was taller than a number of the low-hanging branches on my driveway, so progress up the road was slow and Greg had to climb on top of the roof shed to do some guerilla tree trimming. Sure! Climb up ten feet in the air on an unstable platform with a chainsaw in one hand! What could go wrong!

But Greg’s astonishing and apparently bottomless pool of good luck served him just fine, and no one lost a limb or was crushed into pulp on the shed’s trip up to my house, most of which I spent standing well off to one side peeking through my fingers and making worried squeaking noises. “So!” Greg proclaimed triumphantly. “Where do you want us to put it!”

“I’m not ready,” I insisted. “The road to the chicken yard isn’t clear, and I have to take down the fence to make a space large enough to get the shed into the yard. You’ll have to leave it here and come back.”

Greg was crestfallen, but he agreed to tuck the shed into a corner of the driveway, still on top of the trailer, and come back later when I was better prepared. With Jesus’s help, he tied the shed to a tree and braced it with random bits of wood he had in his truck. Braced and tied the shed looked stable, but if you were brave you could still put one hand out and rock it on the trailer tires. In a strong wind you could see it shivering in place, as if the holes in its decaying siding weren’t keeping it warm enough.

And there the shed would sit for more than nine months.

(Continued…in Part Two)

(warning, long)

The war has gone on for so long that we almost cannot remember a time in which we were at peace. We start awake at night at the slightest noise, ready to charge outside shouting with guns drawn, only to find we are hurling our fury at shadows, and there is nothing there. Sometimes we awaken in the morning to find they have silently raided us in the night and left nothing but rubble and torn ground in their wake.

We have greater resources, but they have more numbers, and they are relentless. They have worn us down over the years, our rampaging enemy with the floppy ears and the big, round, soft eyes.

* * *

At first I thought the mule deer in the yard were harmless, charming, even. For the first winter after we moved in I watched them from the window as they grazed, pastorally, at the edge of the lawn. With big eyes and ears and huge soft black noses they looked adorable, and when startled they leaped gracefully away into the brush, tails raised in the air like flags. I had a Disney cartoon running 24 hours a day in my backyard, and I couldn’t be happier.

One of the group of deer that lingered around the house was smaller than the others, probably a fawn from that year, and I named him Edward. Edward was frequently in a group with a larger doe, and she became Eleanor. In truth, since it was winter, none of the deer had antlers so I couldn’t tell whether Eleanor was Edward or vice versa, and since all deer look essentially alike eventually all big deer became Eleanor and all small deer became Edward. Eric thought this was very funny. “Look!” he’d say, calling me over to laugh at me. “There’s another Edward on the lawn!”

Eric didn’t think much of my ungulate fan club. He had studied wildlife biology in college, and had been a hunter for a few years before becoming a vegetarian. Deer, he explained to me, were stupider than dirt, and they were completely infested with fleas and ticks. The ticks carry lyme disease, and the fleas carry plague. Deer are prone to “mad deer disease.” (“You’re making that up,” I said. “I AM NOT,” he insisted. “Google it.” I did, and he’s right. Deer get a wasting disease caused by the same sort of prions that cause Mad Cow.) Even having the deer in the yard probably meant that we were all going to die a horrible death of some kind of painful hemorrhagic fever. On the other hand, Eric admitted, if all of modern civilization were to collapse in the Y2K armageddon and zombie masses roamed the earth, we would be OK at least for a little while because we could shoot and eat the deer.

Eric’s cheery optimism did not change my mind; I still thought the deer were awesome. All that first winter I watched them stroll pastorally through the yard. And then that spring I planted some roses in the garden beds next to the house and Edward or Eleanor strolled pastorally up to the house and ate them. Gobbled them right down to the hard bare branches. And suddenly I wasn’t quite so in love with the deer.

For years when I lived in apartments I had been cutting out pictures from magazines of sprawling cottage gardens, of big lush messy beds of old-fashioned flowers in white and pink and lavender and blue. Cottage gardens reminded me of my grandmother’s house on Cape Cod, of lazy summer afternoons, of watching honeybees wander lazily over the flowers, of brushing sand off of my feet after a day on the beach. I had been daydreaming of a cottage garden for years, and now that I had my big country house I wanted my garden. I wanted roses and lilacs and lavender; I wanted bees and hummingbirds and summer. But Edward and Eleanor were thwarting all my plans. It seemed like no matter what I planted Edward and Eleanor swept in, usually at night, and ate the new plants right down to the ground. If they didn’t eat the whole plant they just nibbled it really well to make sure it wasn’t good to eat, or they pulled it up and left it to die on the dirt. If I wanted my cottage garden, I needed solutions, and I needed them fast.

* * *

“I have deer eating my garden,” I said to the thin, bespectacled man with the ponytail who worked at the garden center. He reached out and touched my arm. “I’m so sorry,” he said, as if I had just told him I had cervical cancer. He led me to the section of the store labelled “Pests.” They did not sell pests in Pests. Along the wall were stacked an enormously impressive variety of commercial deer repellants with descriptive and similar names (“Deer-Out,” “Deer-Go,” “Deer-X,” “Deer-Rid,” “Deer-Be-Gone,”). My garden guy, however, suggested a small bottle of coyote pee, which cost $15. “Works like a charm,” he said.

“How do they get the coyote to pee in the bottle?” I asked.

My garden guy gave me a tired look. “Everyone makes that joke,” he said.

I applied the coyote pee as directed, and I could hear Edward and Eleanor laughing at me, just before they ate my plants. Coyotes, on the other hand, started coming by and wondering what the hell was going on. Was there a party, and they hadn’t been invited?

I went back to the garden center and asked for something stronger. My garden guy offered me a $25 deer repellant that was absolutely a sure thing. “Works like a charm,” my garden guy said. “Make sure you dilute it.” Confident, I mixed up the brown smelly goo per the instructions and sprayed an entire garden bed with it. Every leaf on every plant in the bed shrivelled up and died within two days. I suppose killing all the plants could be considered a form of deer repellant, but that wasn’t precisely the result I was looking for.

It took some time for my beds to recover from that experience, but after the garden and the deer came back this time I decided to resort to less commercial and less expensive solutions. A Google search for “deer repellant” gave me a variety of things to try to keep the deer away from my plants, many of them disgusting, but none of them cost me more than a buck or two (pun not intended). I tried Irish Spring soap, human hair, garlic, mustard, lemons, blood meal, dried milk, and hot pepper. I put dishes of used kitty litter all over the garden. I had Eric pee on my plants (“What? You want me to do what?”). Nothing. I considered growing rocks in the garden instead of plants.

And then I discovered rotten eggs. Based on an suggestion in an internet forum I put two eggs in a blender with a little dish soap and some water, filled up a spray bottle and left it out in the sun for a few days. This was a terrifically effective repellant, not just for deer, but also for everything else. I made the mistake of spraying it on the garden on a windy day, and Eric made me sleep on the couch for two days until the smell wore off. But it worked. It absolutely worked. With rotten egg all over the plants the deer left them alone. For almost a whole season the garden was perfect.

Rotten eggs are a perfect solution for overcoming deer hunger and curiosity, but they suffer from one major flaw: they do not cure laziness in the gardener. The egg repellant would work for a week or so, and then the effect would wear off, randomly. After a few days I couldn’t tell whether it was still working — I couldn’t smell it, even though the deer still could. It would also wash off if there was the slightest bit of rain or fog, and once it was gone, the marauding deer would take all my plants again. To keep the repellant effect going I had to mix up a new batch and have it ready to go every week.

I would like to claim that my gardening habits allow for that kind of strict attention to detail, but they don’t. As much as I like having a garden, and as much as I like puttering around in the garden, there are whole weeks where I forget that plants need things like water. A deer solution that requires constant maintenance is too complicated for me.

* * *

The most obvious solution to the deer problem was to shoot the deer. But despite the damage they were doing to my flowers I still did actually like the deer. I liked having the deer around, and I liked watching them graze in groups at the edges of the yard. I didn’t want the deer to die, or even to suffer serious injury. I just wanted to keep them out of the garden.

Our neighbor Roberta next door told us that she kept the deer out of her fruit trees by paying her son to shoot rocks at them with a slingshot. This mostly taught the deer to be afraid of her son, which only worked when he was actually around, and became entirely ineffective when her son went away to college. But the slingshot gave Eric the idea to buy a paintball gun. Paintballs, the theory went, wouldn’t hurt the deer like a real gun or even an air rifle would, but they would sting a lot. And we could shoot the deer from a far enough distance away that they might not associate the sting with us.

Paintball guns, it turns out, are really expensive, if you care about things like accuracy, firing speed and muzzle velocity. The best paintball guns operate with C02 cartridges, can shoot a paint ball at 200 miles per hour and are fully automatic — pull the trigger and get a continuous stream of paintpball pellets, as many as 60 balls a second. Since we were not interested in re-enacting Saving Private Ryan in the backyard with deer and paint, we aimed for something that was simpler and cheaper. One simple gun that would fire one simple paintball.

“Let’s get this one,” Eric said, showing me his computer. On the screen was an online store selling the SplatMatic ThunderSplat paintball shotgun. I was momentarily speechless.

“Is that real?” I asked. “Is it really called that?”

The SplatMatic ThunderSplat paintball shotgun was a simple spring-loaded paint ball gun. You cocked it like a pump action shotgun, and it fired one paintball at a time. It was just what we wanted. We ordered one and a big jar of multicolored paintballs.

When Eric got the Splatmatic ThunderSplat paintball shotgun he went out on the porch to try it out. I went out to watch. There were no deer in sight. Boof, he shot a paintball at a tree, which sailed at very slow speed some feet off to the right of the tree. “Hmmm,” said Eric.

It took some practice to get the Splatmatic ThunderSplat paintball shotgun to shoot where it was aimed. The paintballs had a habit of wandering off slowly in all directions, anywhere except where they had actually been aimed. After a few more experiments shooting at trees Eric got good enough to where the margin of error was only a few feet to either side. “Well, maybe I can hit a deer if they’re the size of a barn,” he commented, grumbling.

A few days later we had opportunity to try. “There’s a deer on the lawn,” I announced one weekend afternoon, and Eric leapt up from the couch and grabbed the Splatmatic ThunderSplat paintball shotgun from its spot behind the kitchen table. I watched from the window as he carefully crept outside onto the porch, crouched down on his haunches, and cocked the gun. Boof, a blue paintball sailed out from the shotgun, arced slowly through the air, and fell in the grass about two feet short of the deer. The deer watched it coming, looked curiously at the spot where it had landed, and then moved over and sniffed it.

Eric moved over a bit, cocked the gun again, and aimed more carefully. Boof, the paintball smacked the deer right on the butt, and bounced off into the grass right near the previous paintball. The deer twitched one ear and looked mildly startled. Perhaps it was coming down with mad deer disease.

Eric stood up and brandished the shotgun and stuck his arms in the air with a yell that sounded like “BLEAAGH!” That worked — the deer turned and darted off down the hill. Eric came back inside. “Maybe we should get a slingshot,” I said. “Maybe,” Eric replied.

* * *

The second most obvious solution to the deer in the garden problem is to put up a fence. Fence out the deer, and the problem immediately goes away. And, in fact, this is the solution I used for my vegetable garden, which is enclosed in a high fence at one side of the yard. Deer have never touched that garden. But the big yard around the house with my flowers in it is open to the lawn and to the woods and to the fields.

Fencing the entire yard and the flower garden would require not only a lot of fence, but it would also block out all the rest of the wildlife I liked to watch from the kitchen windows. Part of living in the mountains was letting the mountains in. I liked having the deer around; I just didn’t want them in the garden beds. A big fence was out.

I did try putting lightweight netting over the entire garden bed, which is a fine solution if you want your garden to look like it is into light bondage. The netting made the garden difficult to work in, but it did keep Edward and Eleanor out, at least until they figured out that they could grab the netting in their teeth and drag it right off the plants, leaving a vomit-like pile of black shaggy plastic on the lawn, tangled up with twigs and leaves and bits of plant. “I thought you said deer were stupid.” I asked Eric. “Maybe our deer went to college,” Eric replied.

* * *

Utimately, I resorted to the solution of “deer-proof gardening.” Rather than stubbornly planting all the beautiful old fashioned cottage garden plants from my books and articles, plants which the deer all seemed to love to eat, I would plant things the deer didn’t want to eat at all. Poisonous plants, stinky plants, hairy plants, and plants that simply didn’t taste good. I felt some despair at this solution because it meant having to give in to the deer, to admit that I couldn’t grow exactly what I wanted to grow in my own garden. It felt like admitting defeat. But if I couldn’t have my cottage garden, at least I could have some garden, and that was better than no garden at all.

I found a list of “deer-resistant plants” on the internet and worked from that. Gone were the roses and hollyhocks, hostas, tulips and daylilies. In were lavender, iris, lots of sages, foxglove, herbs of all kinds. Sometimes plants on the list didn’t work at all. I planted a penstemon on the list and the deer ate it the first night. “Maybe the deer didn’t read the list,” Eric said. I planted shasta diasies — my neighbor Roberta had a whole bed of them in her front yard — and the deer ate them. I planted a hydrangea which grew for four years and gave me glorious huge blue puffy flowers every year. And then in the fifth year the deer ate it right down to the ground. (I reconsidered my “no shooting” rule after that incident.)

But slowly, over time, and with experimentation, my garden started to become bigger and less appealing to the deer. Slowly, over time, I learned the plants the deer would and would not eat. Slowly, over time, I built a garden that wasn’t a cottage garden, not like the ones I had always dreamed of, but it was my garden, and it worked with my house and my yard and my schedule and my wildlife.

* * *

Even after I figured out deer-proof gardening, and we had convinced the deer that the paintball gun was at least a marginal threat, the deer still came around, as if to taunt us. One summer they took to sleeping under the porch. In the front yard, due to a quirk of landscaping, we have a small bridge that extends from the porch onto a hill with trees on it. Under the bridge it is dark and cool and on hot afternoons especially the deer took to creeping underneath it and going to sleep. Having deer nesting under the house was a continual surprise to everyone involved. We would unsuspectingly open the front door and step onto the bridge and suddenly with a huge banging and clattering deer would shoot out in all directions. Go outside, and have an instant heart attack, each and every time.

Eric was especially affronted by the deer sleeping under the porch. “Deer are WILD ANIMALS,” he said. “They are not supposed to be this tame.” For him, the deer sleeping under the porch not only represented the utter failure of the paintballs in frightening the deer away from the house, but also an escalation in the war. Now the deer were not only hanging out nearby. Now they were setting up camp. It was like fighting an infestation of very large adorable cockroaches. If we didn’t put a stop to it right away, soon we might be finding deer under the couch or peering back at us from inside the refrigerator. We would turn on the lights in the middle of the night and surprise huge herds of deer, which would scurry away and hide under the bed. Something had to be done.

One day we came home from town and Eric suddenly stopped midway up the road, short of the house, and got out of the truck. “What?” I asked.

“There’s a deer sleeping under the bridge,” he said. “I’m going to teach it a lesson so it doesn’t come back.”

I watched from inside the truck as Eric crept up the driveway, crouched down so the deer wouldn’t see him. He slunk as quietly as he could around the rock wall at the side of the hill, over to within yards of the bridge, and then jumped up, stuck his arms in the air with a yell that sounded like “BLEAAGH!” There was a BANG as the deer came to its feet and knocked up against the low ceiling, and then squirted out from under the bridge and took off up the hill toward the garage. Eric leapt up onto the wall to chase after it, and then stopped. Then he walked up through the trees in the direction the deer had run. Then he stopped walking and put his hands over his mouth.

Something bad had just happened. I turned off the truck, pulled the keys out of the ignition and got out and ran up the driveway toward Eric. He put out his arm to keep me away. “What?” I asked. “What happened?”

“I think I killed it,” he said. “It ran up the bank and fell back down again. I think it broke its neck.”

I walked further up to where I could see the deer, lying there in the road just short of the steep bank next to the garage. It was still twitching a little, its eyes rolled up, its neck twisted. I got kind of a sick feeling. This wasn’t supposed to happen. We were just supposed to scare the deer away, not kill it.

If we were better country people we would have taken this as a blessing: free food, dropped right into our lap, and we didn’t even have to waste any ammunition to get it. We would have hung up the deer and skinned it and cleaned it and popped it into the freezer and eaten well for months. But Eric is a vegetarian and I wouldn’t know how to clean a deer if it had instructions painted on it (“cut at dotted lines”). As angry as I was about my hydrangeas, and as much as Eric had joked about his Y2K food source, this wasn’t supposed to be a war with actual casualties.

“What do you want to do?” I asked Eric.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll call fish and game and try to explain to them that I scared a deer to death.”

But then the deer on the ground beside us thrashed, once, and its whole body shuddered. Alive! It’s alive! I thought. The deer untwisted itself, raised its head and looked around. Eric and I backed away to give it space, and as we watched from some distance the deer eventually got up, looked around for a while, and then trotted off into the woods. Other than a slightly unsteady list, it seemed to be just fine. After some conferring we decided that after falling on the bank it must have just been stunned. We didn’t kill it after all. We just harassed it badly.

That particular deer never darkened the space under the bridge again, and he apparently told all his friends, because no other deer ever showed up under the porch, either. All the deer kept their distance from the house and from the porch for at least a week, before returning to the usual habit of grazing through the yard and nibbling on all my plants that were not hairy, stinky, or poisonous. Eric reloaded his paintball gun, and the war resumed as usual.

In recent years, however, we have found a new weapon in our war against the deer, although it would be more accurate to say that the weapon has found us. Our new weapon is a newly resident mountain lion. We haven’t seen the mountain lion, but we’ve see paw prints on the driveway, six inches wide. Since the mountain lion moseyed into town there are many fewer Edwards and Eleanors in the yard, and those that remain are much more skittish. There are no deer sleeping under the porch. There are no deer nibbling on my garden. The paintball gun is gathering dust. The weapon is so effective that recently I’ve even been considering planting roses again. I’ve been thinking that maybe I can have my cottage garden after all. The tide of the war has been turned. Now we have to cross our fingers and hope that the cure isn’t worse than the disease, and that we don’t come out of the house some day to find a mountain lion under the porch waiting for us.

(I am writing, a lot. I hope some of you are still around to read.)

When I was seven my friend Carolyn lived at the end of the road in a big old white house shaded under huge maple trees. Her house was more interesting to play in after school when our parents were at work than my house was, because her house was older and larger than my house, and it had more corners and places to explore, but mostly because it wasn’t my house. And so we rode our bikes up and down the street, and we climbed the maple trees in her yard, and we explored the basement and attic and other back corners of her house, and then one day while we we exploring we found the old jars of pickles at the back of the pantry closet behind the kitchen stairs.

There were two jars of dill pickles, big half-gallon mason jars we could barely lift out of the closet and onto the kitchen counter. We didn’t know how old the jars were, and there was no one else around in the house to tell us. The tops of the jars were furry with dust and although there were labels on the jars the writing had faded so we couldn’t see the dates. Inside the jars there were whole pickles, packed tightly, and if we tipped the jars on their sides we could see garlic and peppercorns and whole spiky brown heads of dill seed through the cloudy brine.

I loved pickles. Pickles were my favorite snack. I ate jars and jars of canned cucumber pickles from the store, picking out the last pickles with a fork and then drinking the brine as well. At delis we sometimes found big glass jars of pickles on top of the counter, the sours and half-sours, the pickles suspended in brine like mad scientist torture experiments in vegetables. I always stepped up and asked for a sour dill pickle, and the counter man would look at my mother and ask, “are you sure?” When my mother agreed the counter man would reach deep into the jar with a big pair of long-handled grippers and then lean way over the counter to hand it to me, still dripping with pickle juice, wrapped up in a little piece of wax paper. Full sour dill pickles were so green they looked like they would glow in the dark, so large they took two hands to hold, and so sour they made me squish up my face with every bite. It would take me all afternoon to eat a sour pickle, and my teeth would ache for for another day after that. It would be many years later before I grew to appreciate the spicy, salty, crunchy half-sours, but I always loved a full sour pickle. Eating sour pickles was always an adventure.

The pickles Carolyn and I found in the closet behind the stairs didn’t look much like deli pickles. They had faded to a pale greenish grey, and they were smaller and curved to fit into the jars. Still, they were obviously pickles, and the prospect of a whole jar of homemade pickles all to myself was thrilling to me. “Let’s open a jar,” I proposed, and Carolyn eagerly agreed.

The lids of the jars were rusty with age. Carolyn held a jar and I turned the lid, but even with our combined seven-year-old strength we couldn’t budge it. We tried with a towel, and we tried with a rubber jar-opener that Carolyn found in a drawer. I had read in a book that if you whack the edge of the jar lid with the handle of a knife, you can get a jar open. We tried that and only managed to dent the lids and the knife handle, too, which would get us in big trouble later on when her mom found out. We carried the jars outside and banged the lids against the edge of the old brick wall that separated the driveway from the yard. We knocked the jars upside-down on the driveway itself (“Don’t break it,” Carolyn warned. “I’m not,” I replied). We took the jars back into the kitchen and pried at the lids with the knife, at the bottom edge along the neck of the jar and also along the top of the lid where it looked like there was a seam. Finally we got one of the lid to slowly turn with a grinding noise. It looked like the rim of the lid was turning, but the top of the lid wasn’t, which was curious. But something was moving, which gave us confidence in our jar-opening skills, so we kept working at it, and eventually the lid came off.

Or, half of it did. The lid was in two pieces: a flat disk on top of the jar itself, and a band around the edge that screwed onto the jar and held the disk in place. This explained the seam on the top of the jar — the seam was where the two parts of the jar came together. It took still more prying with the knife to break the seal on the flat part of the lid, but finally it came loose with a pop. Out from the jar emerged a faint ghost of dill and vinegar.

Inside the mouth of the jar the olive green heads of the pickles peeked out of the brine and there was a big head of dill stuffed into the top. Carolyn got me a fork and a plate and I speared a pickle. It was softer than I expected, so soft it took some work to unbind the pickle from the jar without breaking it in pieces. I put the pickle on the plate and cut it open with the knife. Other than the funny color it looked like a pickle, with a bumpy cucumber skin on the outside and seeds on the inside. There was nothing moldy or gross about it or anything.

“Do you think its bad?” Carolyn asked.

“It doesn’t smell bad,” I said. “How old do you think it is?”

“I don’t know,” Carolyn said. “Really really old.”

I put my finger into the pickle juice on the plate, and then put it into my mouth. It tasted like vinegar, and maybe a little metallic. I cut off the end of the pickle and put it into my mouth. Carolyn watched me like she expected me to fall over dead any second. “What’s it like?” she asked me.

“It’s really good,” I said, and I cut myself another piece.

It was a dill pickle, but not sharp and sour like the glow-in-the-dark pickles I was used to, and not plain and salty like the deli half-sours. It was both sour and salty and tasted of dill and garlic and spices and something else, something deeper and delicious, something I had never tasted before. There was also that slight taste of metal, like an old can, but if I tried I could put that taste aside. I reached for more.

Emboldened by my tasting, Carolyn had some of the pickle, and agreed with me that it tasted really good. Both of us had more of the pickle on the plate. Then we had another one. Before we knew it, we had eaten the entire jar.

Carolyn’s mother was completely aghast that we had eaten the jar of pickles at all, let alone the whole thing. In amongst the scolding she said something about “grandmother’s pickles,” although I never found out if it was Carolyn’s grandmother or Carolyn’s mother’s grandmother. She was even angrier when she saw the state of the knives. She called my mother, and then between the two of them we both got a very stern lecture on Absolutely Positively NOT eating strange food we found in back closets. Although today I think we would have had a fast trip to the emergency room for a date with Mr Stomach Pump, at the time I think we were just watched overnight to see if we got sick. Neither of us did. Carolyn’s grandmother, or great-grandmother, knew how to can, and even though the pickles were old they were fine. Although the second jar of pickles, the one we couldn’t open, never did reappear after that. I never got a second taste of those pickles after the one afternoon. Carolyn’s mother probably spirited that jar off to the trash before we found a way to get it open.

* * *

Some people spend their whole lives trying to recreate some fundamental memorable experience in their past. They are always searching, reaching, grasping, tasting, but no peach tastes like that one perfect juicy summer vacation peach. No kiss is ever like that first one with the girl who broke your heart. No roller coaster is ever as exhilarating as the one on the beach that was torn down in 1956.

For me one of those core experiences is that jar of pickles. Thirty-five years later I can still taste those pickles. Thirty-five years later I am still trying to understand what it was about those pickles that made them so good. I’ve learned how to make and can pickles, and I’ve learned about vinegar pickles, and, and fermented salt pickles, and kosher pickles. I’ve made batches and batches of my own pickles, and I know how to use canning jars with the two-piece lids to keep pickles almost indefinitely. Thirty years later I am still searching for hundred-year-old pickle recipes, still gathering recipes from grandmothers and great-grandmothers all over the internet, still collecting heirloom cucumber seeds, and locating lost spices and ingredients with strange names that barely sound edible.

I’m still searching. I don’t know if I will ever find the pickle of my childhood, or if the memory of the perfect pickle is too idealized in my head. But I do believe that someday I will find a pickle that will be good enough that when I step up to the deli counter for an old fashioned sour dill, that pickle-eating adventure won’t be nearly as good as the pickle-finding adventure I’ve already had.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, where we honor women in technology. Research has shown that women need mentors and role models, more than men do, to succeed. But because there are so few women in tech to start with, it can be exceptionally hard for women to find the role models that they need. Suw Charman-Anderson created Ada Lovelace Day as an international day of blogging where we talk about our role models, the women in science and technology who have inspired us. (you don’t have to be female to contribute)

I hadn’t been planning to contribute to ALD, just because my blogging has been totally moribund over the last year (twitter: addicting). But I woke up today and read a few posts was so inspired that I suddenly felt compelled to write anyhow. I’m not precisely following the theme, but I hope that can be forgiven.

My first job right out of college in the late 80′s was at Sun Microsystems. It’s hard to imagine it now, but at the time Sun was one of the top companies in Silicon Valley, one of the best places to work, and where there was huge amounts of innovation in both hardware and software. When I mentioned to my friends that I worked at Sun, they all said “oh, that’s so cool.” I felt very lucky to have ended up there.

After drifting through a few projects and after a few reorgs at Sun, I settled into a small division called SunPICS, which stood for Printing and Imaging and two other things that I’ve forgotten. We wrote the software for Sun’s printer, which was actually harder than it sounds, because with Sun’s printers the PostScript rendering engine was on the computer and not in the printer (there were advantages to this at the time). We also did fonts, color management, printer device drivers, multi-user and multi-system printer queue management — all kinds of things are are boring now because they’re built into any computer or printer in the world and completely hidden from view, but at the time they were all new.

SunPICS was not a sexy group at Sun. We were not developing SPARC processors, creating high-end UNIX workstations, working on the guts of UNIX itself or writing an X11 windows server. We didn’t get much attention in the news, or make zillions of dollars for the company. We did printers. But we were kind of unique within the company because we had lots of women engineers. Even within Sun, which was known for being a good place for women to work, we were special. We were a magnet for women. In the group I worked directly with there were five women and just one guy. In the larger division we were more than half women. We were an extremely close group; we were smart and technical and we got stuff done. We shipped product. We did good work. Even ten years after the group disbanded we were still getting together for reunion lunches.

Because I was young, and so inexperienced, I didn’t realize how special this was at the time. I thought it was totally normal to be working right in the epicenter of the high tech universe, and to be surrounded by outstanding women of all ages, nationalities, and backgrounds.

I’ve often wondered if the experience of working in this group was one of the reasons I had the confidence, after I left Sun, to strike out on my own, to write books, to do consulting, to teach web tech to others. Because of Sun, because of the SunPICS group, being a woman in technology, being a smart geek woman just wasn’t all that unusual. For a long time I simply couldn’t comprehend questions people asked me about how I overcame the barriers or discrimination of being a woman in tech. Barriers? There are barriers?

It was only later, after I moved onto other companies, that I realized how unique this situation was. Most of the time today I am the *only* woman in the engineering groups I work with. I see the barriers for women in tech now, and I think there are more barriers — if only the barrier of being so much more alone. There are fewer women in tech now to begin with, and fewer big tech company environments where a group of women can comfortably organically build the way it did for me at Sun. I feel tremendously honored to have had that opportunity.

So for Ada Lovelace Day, I salute my SunPICS co-workers, for helping make me into the woman I am today. To Liane, Frances, Lorraine, Penny, Leila, Pan, Margaret, Brenda, Deborah, and any of you I may have forgotten. Thank you.

Note: the following procedure refers only to the consumption of Smarties(tm) brand citric-acid based candies available in the continental United States. For information about the consumption of Smarties(tm) brand chocolate-based candies available in the UK and Canada, refer to subsection 4.3.2(a), Proper Consumption of M&Ms.

1. Shuck the Smarties.

Regardless of the total number of Smarty rolls to be consumed, all individual Smarties must be removed from their respective wrappers and piled up on a flat surface. Shucking and collecting Smarties ensures even distribution of flavors across rolls.

2. Spread out the Smarties.

After piling up the Smarties, spread them out into a single layer so that all flavors and colors are visible. A single layer enables the smarties to be properly sorted.

3. Pick out and eat the pink ones.

Ideally, each individual Smarty should be nibbled around the edges until both sides of the Smartie are flat (rather than concave). Then the Smarty itself can be squared off, octagonned, rounded again, and eventually reduced to zero. If you’re pressed for time, this step can be skipped.

4. Pick out and eat the orange ones.

5. Pick out and eat the yellow ones.

6. Pick out and eat the green ones.

7. Pick out and eat the purple ones.

8. Eat the white ones.

One could make the eating process more efficient by sorting the Smarties into piles by color after shucking them from the wrapper. But that would be obsessive.

Today while I was waiting in the starbucks line a very large man came in the door behind me YELLING into his cell phone.

“I know that’s what he told you,” he said, “but I’m sick of that shit. You tell him that he needs to get that work done. You tell him that he’s had three months now and that work isn’t done and he needs to get OFF HIS ASS AND GET THAT SHIT DONE. NO. NO. You’re NOT LISTENING.” The man was poking the air next to my head. I edged away nervously. The people in line behind him edged away nervously. “You need to get on the GODDAMN PHONE AND tell him what I’m telling you. Tell him I WANT THAT WORK DONE AND I WANT IT DONE THIS WEEK OR HE’S GOING TO GET A VISIT DIRECTLY FROM ME AND NO ONE WANTS THAT DO THEY. OK? OK? OK? GOOD.”

The man slapped his phone shut and moved up to the counter. “Hi,” he said to the barista, who edged away nervously. “I’d like a decaf pumpkin latte.”

You may have heard we had some rain last week out here in California. At our house, it was ten inches of rain and 50MPH sustained winds. On hummingbird mountain nearby they had wind gusts at 127MPH before the meter apparently blew down. Big storm. Big one.

When Eric and I got up on Friday morning last week the rain wasn’t so bad but our internet connection was out. So we made the incredibly stupid decision to leave the house and go to work. Because, you know, having access to your email is so much more important than knowing that your house and your pets are safe and dry or having a familiar place to sleep that night.

The day turned out to be full of incredibly stupid decisions. My second stupidest decision was choosing to wear a long wool coat to work, rather than a nylon waterproof rain jacket. My logic at the time went thusly: the wool coat is just so much more attractive than the nylon rain jacket; I only have to go from my car to get coffee and back, and then from my car into my building at work; and I have an umbrella. How wet could I possibly get?

I contemplated that question for a good long while as I sat in my car in the parking lot outside the coffee shop near work, as my car rocked back and forth on its suspension while the wind tried to blow it right over. I was parked four cars away from the door but the rain was coming down so hard I couldn’t actually tell if the coffeeshop was still there. I bravely picked up my umbrella, pushed the car door open and the wind forced it closed again, nearly taking off my fingers. I put down my umbrella, which was now quailing in fear, and had another long contemplative moment. While I contemplated the wind pushed my car another parking space away from the coffeeshop, leaving grooves in the pavement like the rocks in Death Valley. Did I really need coffee that bad? I took a deep breath and kicked my way out into the storm.

So the answer to how wet can one possibly get in a wool coat in a rainstorm is quite wet indeed, and the third stupidest thing I did on friday was wear tennis shoes. When you are dashing across the parking lot in a storm with your wool coat up over your head it is hard to tell that the wide puddle you are about to splash across is actually eight inches deep. And cold. Very cold. Did I mention the cold?

No, actually, I did not need coffee that bad. That was definitely the line right there.

But I got my coffee. And I got to work. Later on, my group went out to lunch. The wool coat was well and thoroughly soaked through after still more trips running to and from the car, and here’s something I never realized: a soaking wet wool coat smells kind of like a big wet dog.

It was such a peachy day.

It’s been a really good fruit tree year. We had a warm spring and for once it stayed warm rather than the usual pattern of being 80 degrees in February and then snowing the hell all over us in March. For California in particular this has meant abundant, delicious, and cheap stone fruit. The cherries especially have been spectacular.

I have a big Moorpark apricot tree in my garden; it was years old when we moved in and has only grown bigger ten years since. This area is actually unsuitable for apricots; with the cold springs we get the tree only gives me fruit about every fourth year, like the apricot olympics. When I get apricots, though, I get a LOT of soft, creamy, intensely flavored ‘cots. Cots up to my eyeballs. I adore apricots so every year I anxiously watch the weather hoping for a good fruit tree year.

Over the last few years I’ve been terribly neglectful in pruning the tree and this year I was regretting it. The tree hadn’t grown up so much as out with the branches stretching longer and longer on all sides. I would cut the lowest branches so that I could walk under the tree and the branches higher up would sag lower down to replace them. The tree had grown so wide and dense it was shading the vegetable beds I had in the garden next to it.

This was the year I was planning to aggressively prune the tree. Definitely this year. But I forgot to do it in the spring when it was dormant, and then we had a really good fruit tree year. The tree set hundreds and hundreds of tiny green apricots.

OK, I said. After the apricots turn ripe and come off the tree I’ll prune it.

Over the last month or two the apricots have been getting larger and larger, and the branches of the tree have been sagging lower and lower in my garden. I’ve been propping them up with sticks, worried that a branch might break off from the weight. With the branches hanging so low in the garden it was hard to walk around; I was always getting stuck in the arm and the back by wandering twigs. The shade from the branches was also causing problems with the vegetables in the neighboring beds. It may have been a good fruit tree year but it was going to be a terrible tomato year.

But every day the apricots got larger, and this last week they started to turn beautiful blushed pinky orange that my apricots have. Soon, I thought, coveting my apricots, squeezing the fruit every time I went by, testing them for goodness, and tasting future apricots in my mouth. Soon I would be able to start picking. Soon.

This morning I went out to the garden around lunch, and all was well.

This afternoon I looked out the kitchen window at the garden, and the apricot tree was gone. I could see all the way through the garden to the woods behind it. What? Hey! How…?

I had thought maybe worst case I might lose a branch. I didn’t expect the whole tree to split five ways right down the middle.

I didn’t want those dirty sour old apricots anyway, said the fox.

Part of the reason I haven’t been posting here much is that we had a bit of a laundry room breakdown a few weeks back. I discovered that our washing machine had sprung a leak. Actually, it appeared to have sprung a leak a while ago, but it took us a while to find out because the previous owners of our house had carpeted the laundry room (note to budding interior decorators: don’t do that). Good appliance parts juju wouldn’t work in this case; the washing machine would have to be replaced.

Fortunately, we had a spare washing machine, due to bringing a washer and dryer with us when we moved and discovering that the previous homeowners had left their washer and dryer behind. We had intended to sell the extras and never got around to it. So I dragged the extra washing machine out of the barn where it had been sitting under a tarp for nine years, scrubbed the brown slime and rat poop off of it, ran a cycle through it out on the driveway, and it seemed to work just fine. Huzzah.

And then I ripped up the rotted laundry room carpet and put in vinyl. I had read in my home porn magazines that they were making nice looking vinyl these days but apparently not at my local home depot. All I could find was pinky-grey stick-on squares with floral patterns, or sheet vinyl with greenish-grey marbling and floral patterns. Barf. Finally I did stumble across boxes of vinyl planks, which are made to look like wood, in different colors and with a slight texture and everything. They stick to each other rather than to the floor, they’re easy to cut, and are waterproof once they’re down. This sounded like a terrific idea for a laundry room to me.

The planks went down fast and the result looked great (for fake wood the plank vinyl actually looks better than a lot of the pergo-style laminate out there). On friday we put the new washer and the old dryer back in the laundry room. With new baseboard and a quick coat of paint the laundry room was turning out to be the nicest room in the house. “Maybe we should have bought a new washer and dryer to match the new room,” commented Eric. Maybe in a few years. For now this was OK.

On saturday we ran four loads of laundry to catch up.

On sunday afternoon the washing machine I thought was OK seized in the middle of a load and flooded the laundry room, the hall, and a good portion of the bedroom.

Today I go shopping for that new washer and dryer after all.

In the previous installment of this elaborate justification, a VW bus had followed us home.

This is not the protoypical 60′s hippie microbus. For example, it was made in this century, and has things like airbags and a decent engine. Volkswagen continued to make this vehicle — in different configurations, and renaming it to the Vanagon, and then the Eurovan — all the way up through 2003, and in fact they are still making them in Europe. (They call them “multivan” there. Please resist making nerdy Fifth Element joke). But they stopped importing them to the United States a few years back for of lack of interest. Eurovans don’t really fit well into the typical American car lineup: they don’t compete well with normal minivans because they’re big, boxy and they don’t handle all that well, and they don’t compete well with commercial vans because they’re too nice inside. It didn’t help that when they were new they were also way too expensive.

Given all the changes over the years there really isn’t much hippie left in the Eurovan anymore, although there are still plenty of them around in hippie towns like Santa Cruz, which is where we found this one (through craigslist. of course). Ours is a 2002 Eurovan, and is the “Weekender” model, which means it is set up for casual camping. Permit me to show you around (some of this is duplication of what I wrote on flickr already):

Yes, it is very very blue. We have a thing for blue cars. Note the blue truck right behind it.

There are hippie stickers on the windows which will have to come off. I’ve been debating painting skulls on the back to counteract the hippie effect.

The van seats seven. Two in front, two rear-facing seats, and a big bench seat in the back. I suppose you could stack a few more people up on the floor if you had to. All the seats are way comfortable. The folded up rear passenger seat comes out easily. All the others will come out with a little more work. With the seats out it’ll fit a motorcycle with no problem.

This is a huge gaping maw of a back hatch. The shelf will hold about ten bags of groceries, and there is tons of storage underneath. The shelf itself lifts right out; Eric is going to fabricate some bike racks so that we can put bicycles sideways in back here. He thinks he can fit two bikes in, minus the front wheels.

The rear seat folds forward should we feel suddenly compelled to buy 4×8 sheets of plywood. (you never know. the space station might need a patch).

There are cupholders and accessory power plugs all over this van. One would not want to have to reach very far to get to your beer or plug in your computer, after all.

Speaking of beer, there is a little fridge under this seat. The fridge and all the accessory plugs are driven by a separate battery, so you don’t drain the car running your stuff. (tidbit: the manual for the refrigerator is in german, and they call it Die Kuhlbox. From now on all refrigerators shall be Die Kuhlboxes.)

There’s also a little table, and lights, a separate heating system for the back, and curtains. Basically: its a small studio apartment on wheels.

This is the best part of the Weekender model Eurovan: the poptop roof. There’s a real bed up here, a mattress and everything. You can also prop the roof of the van into the poptop when its up, which lets you stand upright inside the van.

The bench seat in the van itself also pulls forward and completely flat — you can sleep two up in the poptop and two down below. In fact come to think of it I once had a studio apartment that was smaller than this van.

How does it drive? Well, a sports car it ain’t. It is a big, boxy, heavy van. The engine is a 2.8 liter VR6 with 200HP. It is tuned for torque, which means it can get out of its own way but it won’t really beat much of anything in a quarter mile run. On our twisty bumpy road it grips just fine but its not all that happy. It rattles a lot. On town roads or on the freeway it smoothes out and has no issues; it feels like just a large, slow, car. Maneuvering it around in parking lots is somewhat challenging; ironically it is much easier to see the back thanks to enormous mirrors and the square back end than it is to see the front which is pretty much invisible below the windshield.

Now we just have to decide where to go. Somehow the trip ten miles into town for breakfast once a week now seems somewhat…limiting.

A few years back we thought, maybe we should buy an RV.

Contrary to what you are thinking we have neither taken leave of our senses nor have we suddenly aged 40 years. We have no intentions of retiring early, selling the house, and spending the rest of our lives driving between the Koa Kampgrounds.

But we are the sort of people for whom there is no better vacation than to just point the car in some random direction and go out and explore for a couple weeks. A big stack of AAA maps and a full tank of gas: all we really need for big fun. An RV would mean we could go farther out without having to think, OK, time to go look for a motel room. We would be carrying our motel room with us.

We’re also the sort of people who occasionally load up the truck with bicycles or motorcycles and drive out to events or gatherings where typically there is camping. We can camp, sort of, in our current car, if you fold the seats down and don’t mind getting jabbed in the back by a tie-down. But its kind of tight. Not in the good kind of way. More in the ow you’re on my arm kind of way. There’s not a lot of room for both people and stuff in the car, and definitely not people and stuff and bicycles, or people and stuff and motorcycles and friends.

So we thought, hey, an RV.

But there are problems with RVs and other travel-type vehicles. Trailers of all sorts are difficult to maneuver and you have to go tediously slow on the highway when you drive them. Campers are top-heavy and hard to get on and off the truck. Full RVs are usable and comfortable but they’re expensive and…well, full RVs are just ugly. Insanely ugly. Good lord, are they ugly.

RV designers seem to be trapped in this strange sort of time warp, a sort of eisenhower-meets-nixon design sensibility. Not the midcentury design that is cool and retro these days; its more the decor and panelling and textures you find in the suburban homes of old people who die alone and who are eaten by their cat. RV design gives me the willies.

And then there are the exteriors. In addition to a general barge-like shape, RVs all seem to be decorated on the outside with some kind of inexplicable ocean theme, with blues and aquas and waves and names with “wind” and “foam” and “surf” in them. I’m not quite sure of the point of this is. When I think of driving an RV I imagine other marine themes, for example, “I am driving a humpback whale,” or “the tide comes in faster than this vehicle climbs this hill.”

They do make a sort of RV called a Fun Mover which is not so bad, and happens to be an appropriate RV for our chosen lifestyle. With the Fun Mover instead of the normal RV back full of bathroom or bed or widescreen TV they have an empty space and a big panel door that folds down into a ramp. They make them that way so that you can load up your ATVs or your motorcycles and go out with your RV into the unspoiled wilderness and, um, spoil it. And the RV manufactures are, indeed, much better at designing the interiors of Fun Movers for people not on social security, or at least designing them for people like us — solvent and spoiled GenXers who seem to believe we have fun we need to move. They are less mobile suburban ranch homes than they are mobile garages. “Look,” said Eric, thrusting an RV magazine at me. In the magazine there was a picture of a Fun Mover, open in the back. “They’ve covered the ENTIRE INTERIOR WITH DIAMOND PLATE.” Now that was one cool RV. Alas, Fun Mover exteriors still bear a strong resemblance to large oceangoing mammals.

At this point you will brightly point out the Airstream. Airstreams do have the significant advantage of being wholly not ugly. I actually know a few people who own Airstreams enough that it almost qualifies as an Airstream community. My sister Sharon has an airstream she actually lives in and drives black and forth to school. It is fabulous. She bought it for like $150, it is totally original, and for that we hate her. Jacob has an airstream he is restoring. Dori and Kathy have Airstreams they use as offices. I will point out however that airstreams are trailers and thus crossed off the list, and it would be tough to stuff a motorcycle through the door of an airstream.

After dithering about it for a while we were eventually dissuaded from the RV idea by a few significant issues besides the ugly part. First of all, we own way too many vehicles already. We have kind of a vehicle problem. There’s this thing? Where you have a big garage and a barn? Suddenly you find this really great deal on, well, anything, on craigslist? Cars, trucks, motorcycles, farm equipment, former soviet weaponry, submarines, space stations, its just too cool and its cheap so you have to have it? We have this problem. Junk fills up the available space. It just happens. I can’t explain it.

Second of all, although we drive a whole lot, we don’t actually camp very much at all. Not often. Maybe once or sometimes twice a year. Most of the time we just find a motel at the end of the day. For a while we had this theory that if we bought a camper, we would go camping more often. This is the same sort of magical thinking that leads one to believe that if you sign up for a gym membership, you will go to the gym. Or, really, that if you own a space station, you will of course instantly become an astronaut.

Then there is the RV gallons-per-mile problem which needs no further explanation.

But then in the last year so things changed. Eric has been doing more bicycle racing, and we’ve been travelling a lot more to farther away places. And we’ve been thinking in general of downsizing our vehicle collection, trading down the big vehicles from the cheap-gas-large-car-dotcom-exuberance era and getting smaller cars and fewer of them. So the thought of some kind of vehicle we could travel and camp in was becoming more appealing. Maybe not an RV. Maybe something smaller, maybe a camper or a trailer or…or…

A bus. A VW bus.

(see Part 2)