5/9-11/06 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.
While I was up there I cleaned the debris from around the spring. Everything looks OK up there also.
At one point, I saw the little Pine Squirrel that lives around there chewing on something on the upper roadway. He didn't want to leave so I just stood there and watched him for quite a while. What he was doing was chewing on the paper from an old mortar bag. I had a sack of mortar mix left over one year and over the winter it had hardened in the bag. It had been lying on the upper roadway under the eaves for quite a while and I had noticed that something had been tearing the bag apart and even tearing away at the crumbly mortar inside. Now I could see who was doing it, but I couldn't figure out why. I thought it might be for some minerals that were in the mortar, but when I talked to Ellen about it in the evening, she suggested that the squirrel might be chewing up the paper for nesting material. The squirrel did look a little pregnant to me so it makes sense that that was what was going on.
Before I quit for the day, I swept out and vacuumed the first floor of the cabin.
©2006 Paul R. Martin, All rights reserved.