Skunks and Other Adventures

 

About a month ago (the day before Halloween) I went to town with Andrew.  I went to the quilt shop and library while he was in meetings.  When we got home that night we walked into our house…our house has a mud room on one end (which is where we entered in) and our bedroom is on the other side of the house.  Well anyway, we walked into mud room and this horrible stench came wafting at us.  As we walked to our bedroom the smell got worse and worse.  When we walked into our bathroom we were pretty much dry-heaving it was so revolting.  It smelled like skunk and dead rotting animal.

To back up a little bit…a few weeks before I was in our bedroom and I heard this scratching sound coming from the walls of our bathroom.  I told Andrew about it when he got home from work and he just told me it was a mouse.  I told him it sounded like huge claws!  There is no way it was a mouse.  So he went outside and took off the boards covering the access points to under our house. He got a flashlight and crawled in there a little ways and suddenly came out really fast.  He said there was a skunk staring at him.  So we set up a trap to kill the skunk, and a few days later we caught it!  We left a plate of tuna fish under there to see if anything else would it eat and then we could trap whatever else was under there. 

The tuna fish never got eaten so we figured there was nothing else under there.  Well, lets just say we were wrong…way wrong. 

Back to the horrible stench in our bathroom.  Andrew called the maintenance guy for the ranch and told him that something died in our wall and that he was going to rip out the dry wall to get it out.  The maintenance guy told us to try taking out the vanity mirror on the wall and see if we could it from there. 

After pulling out the vanity Andrew could see there was a skunk dead between our walls.  He pulled it out and put it in a trash bag.  Only one problem…it had been dead in there for awhile and didn’t smell anymore!  Which means there was still something else in our wall rotting!!  WHAT?!!  I don’t know how the people who lived here before us lived with that smell because that other skunk had to have died when they lived here. 

So Andrew pulls out the heater in the wall and starts looking around and sees another skunk…ANOTHER skunk in our wall!  He couldn’t stand the smell of it..so this is what we came up with to help block the smell away…

A hanger and gloves to grab the skunk with…a bucket for Andrew to throw up in (if need be) and a dish towel with essential oils on it to block the smell haha

Well after some time he finally got it out of the wall and buried it out in the horse pasture.  Our bedroom and bathroom smelled for over a week like a dead rotting skunk.  We haven’t heard any scratching sounds in our wall lately luckily haha.

There are also four great horned owls that live in the trees around our house.  It’s so neat being able to hear them from our window at night and in the morning.  Plus, I am sure they are helping keep the rodents down around our house too! 

Sorry the picture is blurry (the owl kept moving)

We also saw some Wild Horses up the Steen Mountain Loop Road!  We saw a little group near the bottom, then after driving a ways we saw another huge group further up.

New addition to the family

 

Over Thanksgiving we got a new addition to our family!  A kitty!  We have been looking for a kitten for a while now.  But we could never find one in Burns, and when we called the Save a Stray place they were asking us all these questions about why we wanted a cat.  I told them we want one to catch mice in our house and that we really wanted a kitten.  They would not sell me a kitten!  They kept telling us that we don’t want a kitten and that we should get an adult cat.  Well I don’t mean to sound rude, but what the heck?!  We are the customers, so I pretty sure it’s customary to let the buyers do the choosing.  I’m not like a kitten murderer or something.  We just wanted a kitten that would get used to our dog and us. 

We also looked in Bend, Oregon but didn’t find one we liked.  So I got on KSL and looked around Utah for kittens that we could get when we were home for Thanksgiving.  I found one the morning we were driving home to Utah.  They had only two left when I called and said they wouldn’t save one for me, unless I beat the other two people who were coming to look at them later.  So I called Andrew’s mom and asked if she wouldn’t mind going to look at them and picking one up that I liked online.  She called me a little while later and told me she had one!  I was so happy! 

She is quite feisty and gets really hyper, but she is adorable.  I think she will be a great mouser and hopefully frogger too haha. 

My mom bought her a scratching post (which she loves!) and told the Petsmart employee that she doesn’t get grandkids, but animals from her kids so she spoils the pets haha is was really funny. 

She’s slowly getting used to Gus.  We left them in the living room last night together and they didn’t kill each other, so we’re guessing that’s a good sign. 

1st Year Anniversary

 

I can’t believe one year has gone by already!  It has not seemed like a whole year since Andrew and I got married.  But it has been great and I feel so lucky to be married to my best friend.  For our anniversary Andrew took me to a place in Crane, Oregon called Crystal Crane Hot Springs.  I had never been to a hot springs before so I was really excited!  I was pretty impressed he found something that was within an hour of the ranch in the wintertime. 

We first stopped at the Pete French Round Barn by Diamond.  They have this really cool gift shop that I have been dying to go back to (hey, you have to keep yourself entertained out here in little ways!) After we spent some time looking around the gift shop and museum we headed to the hot springs and checked in.  We also went to Burns and had dinner at the little café they have there.  Andrew took me to the quilt shop and let me pick out some fabric to make some table runners too, boo yeah!   

When we went back to the hot springs it was rainy and cold!  So they have these private sauna tubs you can rent, so we rented one of them. 

I know it’s a cow trough, but it’s so cool!  They are each in these individual sauna rooms which are very warm and then they fill the troughs up with water from the hot springs so it’s really warm…and deep! 

Andrew rented a cabin for us to stay in that night.  All the cabins are different themed, and we got the cowboy themed one.  They even allow pets there so we brought Gus with us.  It was a great anniversary.  I can now say I have swam in a cattle trough too and it was quite luxurious!  ha ha

First Snow!

 

It snowed here last night!!  I couldn’t believe we already have snow here!  We got about 1/2 an inch on the ground, so not much, but it’s exciting! We even lit our wood-burning stove in our living room this morning (mainly just to make sure it worked, but it sure is making me excited for the Holidays!).

We also found a skunk living under our house last week!  Now we know why the skunk smell never went away (even with new carpet).  I heard something scratching in our bathroom wall that sounded big.  When Andrew got home from work he looked under the house and sure enough there was a skunk staring back at him.  So we trapped it!  It took a couple of nights to get him, but we finally did! Boo Yeah!  No more skunks under our house, Happy Day!

We made it!!

 

We made it to Oregon!!  We don’t have internet though except at the office on the Ranch Headquarters, so this is going to be a big post with lots of pictures from the last two weeks.  When we first got to our house we walked in and it smelled like a skunk and there was mouse poop everywhere!  Then my mom was cleaning out the kitchen sink and a frog jumped out of the sink and scared her to death, it was pretty funny.  But then we started to see frogs everywhere!!  We pulled out like nine the first night we were there (luckily I bought some drain plugs so I’ve only seen one frog in here in about a week and a half).  We cleaned like crazy to get that place livable.  I am so grateful that both our parents were there!  They helped us clean the whole house and move in our stuff!  I don’t know if I could have done it without them!!  Thank you so much!

We live on the headquarters of the ranch, so we’re not completely by ourselves in the middle of nowhere!!  I actually have neighbors, yay! Our house in the picture above is the one closest to the sign, but in the background….it’s called the rock house. My brother calls it Hagrid’s Hut haha.  It was built early 1900s. It has a screened in porch so we keep our dog Gus there during the day.  Which makes me feel better because he barks when people come to the house, so I know I have some protection while Andrew is at work all day haha.

This is the view from out front porch.  It is really pretty here!

We have deer that come into our yard everyday too!  Lots of them. There are two bucks that stick around as well.  One is a big 3 point!

They like to eat the apples that fall off the trees in our side yard.  We’ve got some to eat out of our hands too!  The secretary that used to live in this house trained them when they were young to eat from her hands, so I’m guessing they’re the same ones, just bigger now. 

Andrew hand feeding the big buck an apple.  It took a couple of tries, but he finally took it. 

I’m not brave enough to hand feed the buck…mainly because of his antlers…pretty sure he could kill me if he wanted to.  There is this one doe that isn’t scared of us at all.  She comes running up to us when we come out of the house.  The top part of her right ear is gone so we know which one she is easily.

 

Feeding deer in our side yard after church on Sunday.

The other day I heard a bunch of leaves rustling outside our bedroom window.  At first I thought it was a bird, but it was really loud, so I looked out the window and there was a coyote in our yard!!

After conference last Sunday Andrew and I went for a drive over the Steens Mountain Loop Road.  It took us about two and half hours to drive it and stop at certain spots, but it was totally worth the drive!  It is gorgeous up there!!  There were a couple of spots on the road I was nervous about, but luckily there weren’t any other cars on the road coming the other direction, so that helped.

I know it’s called the Big Empty out here, but it is really pretty in it’s own way.  Some really breath taking views!

Andrew was driving out in the alfalfa fields the other day while working and saw all these deer hanging out in there.  Crazy!  I love living here (minus the spiders in my house and frogs in my drain haha) but it is a really neat place to live!  It makes you appreciate the simple and little things in life that make you happy.  LOVE IT!! (and the house is MUCH better!  We got new carpet put in and fixed things up a bit that really needed it too.)

We’re Moving!!

 

In less than a week we’re moving to this beautiful place!!

Roaring Springs Ranch in Oregon!!

http://www.billyspostcards.com/Postcard/20500_Postcard_Roaring_Springs_Ranch_Burns_Oregon_OR.html

Andrew got a job to be the Wildlife Biologist on the Ranch there!  I have always wanted to live on a ranch so I am really excited, and nervous to move.  It will be hard to leave my family in Utah, but it’s a great opportunity for Andrew that we couldn’t pass up!  Plus I know it will be good for us too and that we’ll learn a lot of from this.  I am excited for this new chapter in our lives and I can’t wait to see where it leads.  It’s about 70 miles from the nearest town (which is Burns, Oregon), so I’m going to have to find a lot of things to keep me busy in order to keep my sanity haha but it’s such a beautiful place and the people there are so nice and friendly.

Crafty Crafty

 

While Andrew was hunting I went to get an eye exam (they’re always so awkward) in Kaysville.  My mom and I decided to make some cards with the washi tape I bought a little while ago.  If you’ve never heard of washi tape it is pretty much one of the coolest things ever.  It’s decorative tape that sticky, but it’s really easy to remove from things too.  Here is a picture of some of the cards we made. 

  Sorry the picture is blurry, my phone doesn’t take the best pictures. But they turned out really cute and they’re fun to make (and easy!).

 

Yesterday Andrew’s sister, CarolAnn, and I went to a boutique and saw these really cute Halloween shadow boxes.  We really wanted one, but CarolAnn suggested that we could make them.  So after leaving the boutique and grabbing some lunch with Andrew’s mom and Sammy’s (yum!) we ran to Hobby Lobby and made some shadow box Halloween decorations! 

We have these two older chairs that are really good sturdy chairs, but they didn’t match the chairs have now around my table.  So I decided to refinish the old ones to match the new ones!  I had no idea the work that goes into refinishing something.  It’s a lot of work, especially trying to sand down the chairs all the way.  But I was really happy with the results!!  It was a lot of fun too.  We went to Andrew’s parents house and worked on our projects (Andrew is making us a log bed! Yay!! I am so excited for it to be done, it looks so nice!)  So we both got to work sanding chairs and logs haha.

Sage 1 (sanding)

Stage 2 (Spray painting)

Stage 3 (staining)

Finished!!!

Billy

 

This is Billy…the billy goat.  Andrew’s been watching him all summer.  He’d wake up at 4 am to get to the right spot on the mountain just after sunrise to watch Billy and make sure he was in the same spot.  I have countless pictures and videos of this goat from all summer.  I’d come home after work everyday and he’d have some new pictures of video of Billy for me….I was starting to get attached haha.

On the morning of September 18th, Andrew and his hunting posse were up above Silver Lake Flat…and this is what happened to Billy.

Needless to say…..Billy is now dead and is hanging up in Andrew’s parents shed.  Andrew was so excited to get his goat though and he definitely deserved it after all the time he put into scouting for this particular goat.  They estimated him to weigh around 300 pounds and his horns are around 9 inches long!  It’s definitely a mature billy, around 8-9 years old!   His friend Vince said he got a Polar Bear not a goat. 

Thanks for the help from Andrew’s brother Nathan, his Dad, and his friends Eric, Justin, and Vince.  He really appreciated all your help!!

Bye Billy….