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