Author: Chris

More fun than watching a lawn grow?

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What’s more fun than watching a lawn grow?
How about watching a lawn removed and replaced:

   

This is work-in-progress to transform my front landscape from the usual lawn-centric, high-maintenance, manicured look to a more natural grass/meadow landscape — and save my oak trees in the process.  It’s been taking a while but the end result will be something of a meadow garden using more native plants, lots of ornamental grasses and requiring much less maintenance and even less water once established.

The local company doing the work is Terra Nova Ecological Landscaping.  Here’s their blog.

Here’s some meadow garden examples:

  

 

Rough Week for Pan

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Pan was pretty content when I woke last Sunday morning (below left) — but I noticed he had a lump under his jaw — and there was a dead bat on the bedroom floor when I came home late Saturday night.

  

Yeah, a bat.  I suppose they caught it on the roof — they have a pet door upstairs so they can access the balcony and roof.  At least both he and Hera are current on their rabies shots.

So, the result of taking him to the vet is that they anesthetized him, took care of some overdue teeth cleaning, gave him a rabies update and installed a drain in the abscess that had to remain in place for the week.

That first night was a long one.  He was drugged out for the evening but then he started getting restless and wouldn’t tolerate the elizabethan collar — he kept pulling himself out of it.  He also seemed to hallucinate things now and again.  I didn’t get much sleep that night baby-sitting him.

Sometime early the next morning I finally remembered the cat body harness I had and was able to attach the elizabethan collar to it so he couldn’t remove it any more.

Not a happy or comfortable cat for the rest of the week until the drain and collar could finally be removed.  But he’s good and happy again now and healing fine.

Santa Cruz Blur TRc demo ride

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I’ve been happily riding my old Santa Cruz Superlight since I got it way back in 2001.  I’ve never been too interested in keeping up with all the yearly new bike tech and I get pretty bored with all the bike talk at many ride meetups.  (nerp derp berp)  I just like to ride on da trails!  So I had yet to try tubeless or Propedal or dropper seats or any new geometries and shocks.  I didn’t even get around to disc brakes until like 2010 – and I had to get new hubs and wheels to do it.  However, somehow the most recent batch of talk about new bikes among friends and other riders finally got me to go try a demo of something a little more… modern.

With a little bit of research, the Santa Cruz Blur TR Carbon caught my interest and I even managed to find an XL available for demo — not the easiest size to find anywhere!  This is their recent “Trail” version of the Blur introduced last year as something between the Blur XC and Blur LT.  Here’s a great video explanation of why Santa Cruz made this bike.  So I took it out on some very familiar trails in Wilder Ranch yesterday….

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