On Thursday morning I woke up at Sunset, came downstairs, looked out the back door and immediately turned on my phone to catch this picture. Orville used to pass directly through this area on his way to look for green apples falling from the tree, but he quickly discovered that he didn’t especially like what we’ve put in his way. He hasn’t tried it again since; I don’t think he liked coming down the ramp. And once the roof and walls are in place, he won’t be able to get in anyway. Besides, not many apples fall directly onto the deck (though I had an Isaac Newton experience on Sunday). But while the apples aren’t yet ripe, the plums definitely are; I made a cobbler Sunday evening, and I think I’m going to make jam this coming weekend. It looks as though we’ll be finished most of the second cottage by Friday, and I don’t need to return to Seattle until Monday, and we aren’t yet ready to start on the roof just yet. And it’ll be nice to have homemade jam again for the first time since I left Oklahoma.
Diary #530
August 25, 2020 by Maggie McNeill
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Nice picture. Overall, looks like a very nice place you are building there.
Cool pic, great progress and excellent construction.
You’ve probably noticed various critters’ reluctance about descending ramps before.
Cattle, and pigs, can be enticed to walk up ramps fairly easily. But descending is another story. Cattle can even be enticed to walk up stairs. But not to descend stairs.
In a fairly infamous hack decades ago, students at an institution which I will not name, enticed a cow to walk up stairs to the top of a very large architectural dome. But it required a crane and a huge sling to get the poor bovine safely back to terra firma.
Cattle guards rely on a similar instinctive behavior, to prevent cattle from walking through an unfenced portion (unfenced to allow passage of people and vehicles) of an otherwise fenced field. No doubt you’ve seen many of them.
Cattle will not even attempt to walk across an open grid of parallel rails.
These constructions are also used to prevent cattle from straying onto railroads through unfenced open roadway crossings. Cattle straying onto a railroad is bad news for the railroad and the cattle.
If one chose to surround a cattle pasture with a ditch covered with parallel rails, one could dispose of the fence. But that’s more expensive than building a fence.