Thursday Thoughts With Coffee. #6

Good morning everyone! What a difference one week makes. Last week it was so bitterly cold and this week it feels more like spring. Yesterday was mainly sunny with a high of 39F (4C) and not much wind. The snow melted off my deck nicely. The birds were enjoying themselves, they looked positively skinny since they did not need to bundle up and puff out those feathers.

There were 4 Pine Grosbeaks that showed up twice yesterday and there were 5 out there this morning. But like the Evening Grosbeaks, they did not stay long each time. Very strange. I have never had a year like this since I started feeding birds. It is beautifully sunny today, but there is a strong north wind blowing which is going to put an end, briefly, to our milder weather. The temperature is going to drop throughout the day to 21F (-6C) and down to -4F (-20C) tonight.

This is Squirk, above, my first friendly squirrel where I presently live.

But it warms up to melting temps again by Saturday and continuing into next week. I will not argue with that. Very nice indeed. I have shared a few stories before about my snowshoeing days, something I do not participate in anymore. It was a very enjoyable time, however, a nice quiet and simple way to get out and enjoy the beauties of winter. There I go again, using beauty and winter in the same sentence. That is twice this winter. What a terrible thing.

Back to snowshoeing. I will share one story that I wrote about before, but I have a number of new readers now that have not heard that one and I hope the rest of you will enjoy reading it once more. It was a sunny day, no real wind to worry about. However, I will say this, with most any winter activity, it is best to have someone along, just in case you run into problems. And I usually did. Run into problems. And did not have someone with me.

This is a Raven, about double the size of a crow, and they have shown up at my feeder the odd time.

Nor did I let anyone know where I was going or how long I would be gone. This is something that should always be done, especially when going out alone. Anyway, off I went, by myself, the temp was -15F (-26C), but I was dressed appropriately warm. I was walking through the pines and the sun was shining wondering through those pines, casting long shadows and sparkling off the snow. A little squirrel was sitting at the base of a large pine tree using his sharp teeth to open one of those rock hard pine cones to get at the small seeds inside.

I passed him and came across some chickadees who were digging around behind the bark of the trees looking for any frozen insects they could find. I finally got to the place I wanted to be, along the edge of a small cliff. I actually wanted to go down the cliff to the valley below and then come back up further along to another snowshoe trail I had made a week before.

This is a male Downy Woodpecker, above.

The snow was quite deep and even with snowshoes I was getting rather tired by the time I reached the cliff. Should I stay along the top or go down? There was a nice easy slope going down so I decided that it would be okay. I started off, it was about 30 feet down to a ledge and I had gone about 10 feet down this slope when I started to hear some cracking. I stopped. That was an odd noise to hear. Then suddenly more cracking and WHUMP! I fell the last 20 feet! However, that was not the worst of it…

Hmm, guess I should stop there for now and I will finish this off tomorrow. Otherwise this post will get a bit long. It already is a bit longer than normal. Well, time for some more coffee and some housecleaning. I hope you all have a wonderful day and God bless!

Steve and Muffin.

©2023 Steve McLeod.

The Investigators, Inc. The Secret Estate Case. Chapter 2. Bad Place.

Sky and the cats looked around for a way to open that door. Meow.=Look like button thing on wall light. Sky looked. “You are right MC,” she said, “I do not know how I missed that. Storm, you have the longest legs, so come here.” She held him as high as she could, but it was not quite high enough. So she jumped, and Storm was able to push the button opening the door.

They all went inside, slightly against the rules, but Sky is rather curious at times, and so are the cats. It was not a large room, but through those mirrors on each side, she could see the whole of the bedrooms. “I wonder how many guests he had in here,” said Sky, “and if they were allowed to leave.” There was a loose board on the end wall and when Sky moved it a small door opened revealing a wall safe. “Okay MC,” she said, “let us see if you can open this one.”

Muffin secretly pressed her microphone. Soon we all appeared at this little room. “How did you find me?” she asked. “Just a wild guess,” I said, “you should have called for support anyway.” “Yes, I know, but sometimes I just kind of keep moving ahead when I find something,” she acknowledged, “but I did find another safe.” Meow.=Talk so much, not able to hear, you finished now? “Yes MC,” I said.

He did get it open after a couple of tries. But it was empty, like the larger safe downstairs. “That does not make sense,” I said. I started tapping the sides of the safe. Aha, the side wall under the shelf sounded hollow. It was a simple sliding door and inside was a small envelope. “Rats, that is not very exciting,” said Sky. However, it was exciting. Inside were papers with a picture of an estate, plus floor plans of the rather large house. “Now, if only we knew where this place is located,” said Sky.

“Austria,” said Astrid, “I went to this place over here to ski a couple of times.” “You recognize that from the picture?” I asked. “Certainly, this mountain is a well known place,” she said, “very easy to recognize.” “What are these red spots on the floor plan?” asked Sky. “Most likely locations of safes,” said Tracy. “Okay, Tracy and Kristina, I want you both to memorize as much as you can from these papers and that photo,” I said, “just in case we lose these papers somehow.

I have a feeling that perhaps more people than Marven might want to look for the jewels that M had stolen over the years. And whoever broke in here likely found some papers mentioning exactly where that estate is located. So he has a big head start, therefore we need to work a little faster.” And that is something we did. We immediately flew to the closest airport to where we wanted to go. Macey and Marlene met us there.

I had called and asked them to join us, we just might need some extra help, and Marlene is one of our nurses, so it might be a good thing to have her along. That still left enough behind to look after each other. Soon Rock, Sky, Astrid, Tracy, Kristina and myself were in a helicopter looking for that estate. It really did not take long to find it and there was a pad to land the helicopter. That was good since there was no road into that estate.

I just hope this place belonged to M, or we could be in trouble for trespassing. Rock dropped us off and went back for the others. We also had Muffin and MC with us, but Storm wanted to stay with Angel. The house, which was very large, was locked, not a problem for us, but we looked around outside until the others arrived. If anyone else is out here they must have been dropped off by helicopter. Our helicopter belongs to Mandar, so we can keep it here.

Although the place looks deserted, I had an uneasy feeling that we were not alone. I told everyone to stay alert, just in case. Sky, the cats, and I wandered off to look at some small buildings behind the main house. Meow,meow.=Me think danger somewhere near in house. Have strange feeling, not good, something very bad. Meow.=Yep, me too have danger feeling. It bad danger, not good place to be.

To Be Continued.

©2023 Steve McLeod.