More Backyard Wildlife: Ipswich Foxes

J. sent me this link to a web page with video clips from someone's back garden in Ipswich in the UK.

Includes some footage of a crow attempting to make off with a fox kit that's much too large for it!

Eagle Nest Live Webcam!

The latest news is that the eggs are going to hatch very soon, maybe today!

This is a live webcam of an eagle's nest on Hornby Island. Right now the eagle is sitting on the eggs. I can see her (him?) moving her head to look around every few seconds.

More info about the eagles, when the eggs were laid, some static photos, etc., here.

Kilimanjaro Photos

If you've been reading this blog you already know that my sister recently climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.

She successfully summited on April 4th. Here are two of her photos.

Unwanted Renovation Help

The Big Guy keeps finding more and more places on the house where the original cedar siding needs to be replaced. Some areas are so dried out that they crumble into bits when you just pound on them with a hammer. It seems like it’s just the paint that’s holding the wood together.

And some of the birds have figured this out too.

About 10 days ago a Nuthatch started pecking away at a spot very high up just below roof edge on the west side of the house. It's a great location just about 25 feet away from the bird feeder. No doubt the Nuthatch was also inspired by all the hammering The Big Guy was doing on the east side where we discovered the water damage.

Stubborn little bird. Even getting sprayed several times with water from the garden hose didn’t deter it. Three or four days later, after removing two knothole plugs and lots of paint chips, the Nuthatch gave up. I guess it finally realized after it had excavated the second knothole that it wasn’t going to get much further on the very solid 2-inch thick board it had selected for its nest site.

But the cedar siding is much thinner.

And Northern Flickers have much larger, stronger beaks than Nuthatches.

A couple of days ago we started hearing knocking sounds on the south side of the house near the chimney.

A pair of Flickers have decided that we have the perfect location for their brood. In two days, they removed substantial hunks of wood from two siding boards, created an opening about 10 by 6 inches in size, ripped up the tar paper underneath and started in on the 2 by 4’s that the siding is nailed onto.

They’re driving The Big Guy nuts.

Yesterday afternoon he moved the medium-sized ladder around to where they are making the hole, got two fresh pieces of cedar siding left over from his work on the east side and temporarily nailed them over top of the hole.

This morning at 6:30 am they were at it again. Knock, knock, knock. Knock, knock, knock. They woke us up. I got up, went downstairs and peeked around the corner of the house. Flicker No. 1 was perched on the edge of the roof watching Flicker No. 2 pound away at a new location next to the boards The Big Guy nailed up yesterday.


The Big Guy is starting to mumble about guns and shooting and other kinds of violence.

And today’s his birthday too. I’ll go buy him some ice cream. That generally calms him down.

Asset Allocation Revisited

No rat casualties the last two nights, I have to write about something else. Aren't you glad!

So, the topic today is Investing.

This latest run-up in the stock market is making me nervous.

It’s the wrong time of year for these types of advances, plus it’s throwing my asset allocation further out of whack.

I’m a moderately aggressive investor who likes to buy-and-hold and can tolerate short term market downturns in return for higher long term gains. My target asset allocation model is 30% Canadian equities, 5% Canadian income trusts, 15% US equities, 25% international equities and 25% fixed income. However, my portfolio is actually more conservative than this model suggests since a large proportion of my equity investments, including the mutual funds, are in large profitable dividend-paying companies (e.g., banks and insurance companies) that are a lot less likely to crash and burn than your average small-cap technology or junior mining growth-oriented stock. (Been there, done that...)

I have become less and less of an actively managed mutual fund fan as the years go by so I look for opportunities to move money out of mutual funds and into ETFs and directly purchased stocks. Rejigging my asset allocation is one such opportunity.

Right now I am overweight in Canadian equities (big gains in resource/commodities sectors) and cash (I had a bond mature recently) and underweight in US equities (partially due to Cdn/US currency movements) and fixed income.

The cash from the matured bond is easy. I’ll just reinvest it in fixed income, probably an ETF such as the iUnits Canadian Short Bond Index (TSX:XSB).

As for the rest, I could realize some profits in my Canadian equities and shift the money into the USA. Blue Chips look attractive. They seem to have been out of favour for a few years so it might well be a good time to buy into big, solid, dividend-paying companies that market products all over the world. If we assume a significant market correction or economic softening will probably happen in the US this year then Consumer Products also look good. Even when times are bad, people continue to buy groceries, beer and cigarettes.

With this in mind I am considering the iShares Dow Jones Select Dividend Index ETF (NYSE:DVY) and companies like Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT), Anheuser-Busch (NYSE:BUD) and Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ). I already own some Johnson & Johnson and adding to that holding wouldn’t bother me in the least.

But what should I sell?

At first glance, my Canadian National Railway (TSX:CNR) and Brookfield Asset Management (TSX:BAM.LV.A) holdings look like prime candidates. The CNR investment has almost tripled in value and several analysts have recently published opinions saying the stock is now fully valued and highly unlikely to advance further over the next year. In fact, it may be due for a significant correction. But the thing is that when I calculate my current dividend yield based on what I originally invested it’s getting close to 4% and I would hate to give that up. It’s such easy money!

Similarly, BAM is yielding almost 5% for me and I’m even less willing to give that up.

I could sell CNR now and buy it back at a lower price when/if the correction happens. But that doesn’t support my objective of moving money from Canada to the US.

So I’m looking at my Canadian equity mutual funds. One of them surely needs trimming…

Another One Bites The Dust

Last night, Big Ben's bigger brother, Bart, was the third casualty of this little war. The Big Guy's traps are having an unusually high success rate, 3 rats in 4 nights!

But I'm sure the rest will smarten up pretty soon. In the past, the casualty rate has tended to fall off steeply after the first couple of rats. I have a few ideas about why this may be so.

• The stupidest ones are all caught in the traps early on and the rest are too smart to get fooled no matter how much fresh peanut butter you smear on the trap triggers.


• Someone else's backyard becomes more attractive for some reason (Higher quality bird seed? Better smelling garbage? Fewer dogs?) and they move.


• After a few deaths, the word gets passed along to everybody that the wire and wood contraptions are dangerous and should be avoided even if they do smell like yummy, yummy food.

I'm sure there's some obscure municipal bylaw forbidding disposal of dead bodies in garbage. So far The Big Guy has three bodies double-wrapped in plastic and hidden deep in the depths of our garbage bags ready for pick up next week. At this rate, we may even accumulate a few more.

Here's a web site with some funny rat cartoons!

And www.ratkill.com has lots of rat eradication stories (some quite messy and gruesome) for those of you who don't have any fun rats to eradicate in your own backyard.

Bertha R.I.P.

Rat Update: Big Ben's cousin, Bertha, expired on April 20th with the tantalizing scent of peanut butter in her nostrils.

Score: Humans - 2, Rats - 0

The Rats Are Back

Once or twice a year we get rats in our backyard.

Luckily they stay outside and never come into the house – unlike those pesky mice against which we fought a protracted 2-year campaign some years ago that started with securing our food supply in sealed containers (the mice retaliated by changing their diet to cables and coated wires), sealing up several hundred large and small openings in the foundation and outside walls of our house, escalated to booby traps and trained dogs (it became quickly obvious that our dogs do not have mice-catching genes), and eventually ended with chemical weapons.

The mice lost.

Lessons learned:

• Don’t put dishes in the same cupboards as you store food.
  
• When you make a hole in the house to run a cable or wire, seal it up afterward!
  
• Cats are better than dogs at catching mice. In fact, dogs probably won’t even notice that you have mice.
  
• Don’t buy bird seed with millet in it.

The mice never came back.

But the rats do.

Two nights ago, The Big Guy spotted Ben’s great grandson, Big Ben, outside making friends with Andy. For some reason that we can’t fathom, neither Big Ben nor Andy recognized each other as mortal enemies. So they’re just checking each other out in the back yard under the bird feeder when The Big Guy opens the back door and tries to give Andy some explicit instructions about what dogs are supposed to do with rats.

With all the yelling going on, Big Ben figures it’s probably a good time to leave and, as The Big Guy explained it to me, he just waddled his fat self all the way across the back yard and climbed a tree. Andy exercised his keen hunting dog instincts by strolling after him sniffing out the rat trail the entire way to the tree.

Is this the same Andy who spends much of his mornings keeping watch out the front window just so that he can bark ferociously at the mail carrier, the UPS and FEDEX delivery guys and kids walking by on their way to school? What happened to the Andy who once actually caught and chomped on a squirrel. Where’s the Andy who will pursue any and all crows who enter our airspace?

I guess Big Ben somehow managed to reach his fully adult extra-large size without learning about traps. Last night, he came to a squished end.

Traps are set again tonight.

We’ll see if Big Ben has any relatives as stupid as he was.

Havana Bay

I’ve started another book in Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko series, Havana Bay. As is usual whenever I start one of this author’s books, I wonder why I waited so long to read it!

Marvelous writing. It’s gritty and depressing and yet it keeps you reading far into the night with complex characters, vivid descriptions and surprising plot developments.

While looking up this book on the web, I discover that there’s another in the Arkady Renko series that I haven’t read, Red Square, as well as a more recent addition, Wolves Eat Dogs.

So many books, so little time…

Chris Bliss Juggling

Turn on your speakers and enjoy this Chris Bliss 3-ball juggling routine choreographed to the Beatles’ Abbey Road medley.

Here is a 5-ball routine done to sound taken from the Chris Bliss video. I suppose the juggling in the 5-ball routine is technically superior (not that I actually know anything about juggling) but I like the Chris Bliss one better because it feels like better performance to me.

By the way, the washing machine's fixed and The Big Guy paid the bill. I'm almost afraid to go out in case he gets into some other sort of trouble while I'm not watching...

Miscellaneous Ramblings

I haven’t written much in the last several weeks because I’ve had two colds, been out of town for nearly three weeks, been busy catching up on my eBay shop-keeping, not been in the mood to write anything, blah, blah, blah.

Then, this week we had The Incident of the Nail in the Washing Machine. Now, that’s a tale I’m itching to exercise my keyboard on. But, we still don’t know the ending of this story so we’re waiting to see what happens before we write about it. For now, suffice to say, no laundry is getting done.

Africa
My sister summited Mount Kilimanjaro (I checked my Websters, to summit can be a verb but the context seems to be confined to mountaineering and summit conference attendance) on Tuesday and she also made it back down (nadired, I suppose you could say.) Today she starts the Safari portion of her African Adventure with a visit to Tarangire National Park.

Netherlands and Germany
I’ve started planning this summer’s trip to Europe, actually, just the Germany portion. The Dutch segment has already been taken care of, mainly by my sister. For that piece I just have to buy airline tickets and figure out which trains to catch to get from Schiphol to where we're staying. In Germany, more extensive planning is still required. I am thinking along the lines of castles, rivers and mountains. The itinerary will likely include a Rhine cruise, Rhine valley castle viewing, and two or three of King Ludwig’s castles in the Bavarian Alps near Füssen. It got too difficult to figure out just by searching on the web so after getting sore feet by standing more than 45 minutes in front of the travel books section in Chapters, I ended up buying one of those over-priced guide books, The Rough Guide To Germany. Well at least it was on sale. There are some things that are still easier to do with a book in the hand vs. online.

Lewiscraft
My local craft store is closing and selling off their entire inventory. All the best wool was already gone but I did manage to pick up several balls of an interesting boucle yarn that I’m thinking of crocheting a few scarves from. I googled Lewiscraft and found out the company’s gone bankrupt and is closing all its stores. I thought there has been resurgence in crafting lately? Maybe Michaels, that big box craft store from the States is pushing out all the smaller competitors? Maybe crafty types are buying all their craft stuff on eBay? I know I’ve been turning to eBay for hard-to-find items like lilac-coloured Aida, unusual cross stitch patterns, etc.

Dominion Homes
Yep, that’s that troubled home builder stock I bought a few months ago. They’re still mired in muck, suffering from declining revenues and generally looking pretty pathetic. The U.S. housing market is bad and getting worse. Despite all of this DHOM’s stock price is holding amazingly steady. Well, OK it has slid downhill a bit. I guess they took their really big hit last year and investors are treating them like they are already as low as they deserve to be. We’ll see… Q1 financials are due out May 8th.

Taxes
Mine’s done. Hurrah! It’s raining today and The Big Guy can’t hammer away at the outside of the house in the pouring rain. He also can’t do any more work on the washing machine since he can’t put back together what he’s already taken apart. So he started working on his taxes. He’s making disgusted noises about a T5008 slip. Claims it must be in error. Unlikely since this particular T5008 is a replacement for an earlier one that did have an error. I asked him if he calculated the adjusted cost base. I also offered to have a look at it for him. He got all huffy and stomped off.

Wedding Planning
J. and T. have sent out a formal email announcing their wedding date so that makes it really official. Now J. and I are trying to schedule some time to go look at wedding dresses. It seems to be difficult to coordinate the somewhat sparse free time on our schedules. How can two people, neither of them working, both be so busy?

Costa Rica
In fact, we’ve been so busy that we haven’t seen each other face to face for a couple of months and so J. didn’t give me the big news until this week that she and T. are moving to Costa Rica. I can’t figure out if I’m sad or happy about this yet. On the one hand, my best friend is moving far, far away. On the other hand, I’ll be able to add Costa Rica to my most favoured travel destinations list and I’ll have somewhere cheap to stay when I go there.

Oblivion
It’s finally out! The next chapter in the Elder Scrolls saga!


I’ve played all the major releases in the series so far: Arena (I was still working at Digital in 1994 when I first played Arena), Daggerfall in 1996, Morrowind in 2002, as well as the Morrowind expansion sets, Tribunal and Bloodmoon. I spent some time this week reading Oblivion reviews, looking at screen shots, and watching the first sales on eBay before finally reading the System Requirements and realizing my graphics card is not going to be good enough. I just hate it when my otherwise perfectly-good computer can’t run the game I absolutely positively must have! And, yes, this has happened to me before. And yes, I did end up buying a new computer configured especially for running graphics-intensive games.

Unfortunately, my income is no longer what it used to be.

OK, here’s the plan. Take care of the trip to Europe first. Make a bunch of money on the Dominion Homes stock. Buy a hot new game-playing computer. Play Oblivion.

Of course, I could just upgrade the graphics card.

Hey! It would also cost less if I bought an Xbox and got the version of the game that runs on it...