I have hired Bella Scherneck to stop by the house 3x a week, just to take a look inside and out.
I told her I have friends who might stop by, mostly so she knows she might get checked up on.
I found her on NextDoor Neighborhood, she charges $5 a dog walk and initially told me she’d charge me $10 to stop by 3 times a week. She then told me her mother advised her to ask $15 which I think is fair, and makes me think she’s unlike to be a hardened criminal.
I’m getting my blog up and running and hopefully will get it open for business soon, although there won’t be much in there you won’t have seen, especially since a lot of what’s below will be there.
I have some bad news about my “creek,” in actuality it’s a long pond. According to the previous owner, it used to run merrily along until 5-6 years ago somewhere down stream, there was an avalanche, some of the bank must have subsided, and it no longer flows.
I called the Greater Oregon City Watershed Council and they are very interested because that means the water is sitting and warming up and, they say, still seeps into the watershed. I also pointed out to them that the widening water was killing the trees shading the water and they have funding to address that. They are having a meeting today and may want to come out to investigate. Apparently, there is a lot of hostility toward the work they do (boy is that way different from sportsman’s Maine) and unless a landowner agrees, they are helpless to address it. I also pointed out that if the water is indeed stagnant, it was also a mosquito breeding ground. She said that isn’t really her bailiwick but that I can contact Clackamas County Vector Control (now that sounds like a government agency I wouldn’t want to tangle with!!)
So I called Vector Control and they will come out and evaluate the situation in April or early May when the mosquito season begins. They are only interested in establishing that there is a problem before they consider what to do, so they aren’t interested in looking at it if there are no mosquitos around. I assured them that the previous owner said there were lots of them down there. He did say they weren’t bad up by the house. We’ll see what that means in a month or so.
Apparently, Vector Control takes mosquito-born diseases very seriously. They spray for mosquitoes and they give out “mosquito fish.” I don’t remember the proper name for the fish, but they are only for bodies of water that are separate from natural bodies of water, like fountains or water features, because they are non-native fish. Not for my pond, alas, disconnencted as it is to the rest of the watershed.
Anyway, I’m working on things at this end and finding things I’m afraid I’ll miss, like fiddleheads in the supermarkets and for sale by the side of country roads which I will be looking for soon.
I have a video doorbell that notices movement outside my door even if the bell isn’t rung. It calls me if someone walks past or rings it so I can talk with them. Because the front door faces the driveway, not the street, I can see from the gate to the garage. Today I got a call that someone was walking around and when I got to the video I saw a woman carrying a shopping bag, walking along the driveway from right to left, coming from the shed or the back yard. She closed and latched the gate and I didn’t hear a car drive off, so she may have been a neighbor. I alerted Bella who will look around and check the shed. Although I was able to watch the video, I couldn’t save it, so for another $30/year, I will have the videos captured from the first alert, and recorded and kept for 60 days. I can see that people who live across the street from these things might feel spied on if they have this motion detector, she was walking along the drive and was picked up at least 30 feet away from the camera. I looked at past alarms and the last one was open I set off when I set it up. Seems like it’s pretty quiet there, happily.
I told Bella that if she did find something amiss, she should just ring the doorbell and we can have a video chat.