Referer Spam vs. Real Live People

For those of you who are real, living flesh-and-blood persons and not referer spam-bots, you deserve an apology for my lack of postings of late.  I discovered back in June that a blogger cannot really trust the stats to tell him or her how much traffic is coming to the blog because a lot of it is from "bots" which are computer programs acting like people.  My subsequent disgust at the idea made me not want to go to the trouble of writing anything for fear that there are no actual readers out there in cyberspace, just hackers and their machines.  In good faith, I have decided to keep blogging and trust Google to block these imbeciles as much as possible.  If you are a breathing human being, thanks for following.  If you are otherwise, stop playing massive multi-player games 14 hours a day and get out of your parents' garage and get a real job.  If you are a spam bot, may you catch the next nasty computer virus that comes along. . .

Pear Poachers

The first year we moved here (2010) we didn't have much fruit on our fruit trees.  They were very overgrown and in need of serious pruning.  The next year, we got lots of apples and figs, but the deer ate many of the plums.  This year, our third here, we had many figs and plums, but the deer got most of those.  The apples I picked yesterday.  But the pear tree was loaded before we left to go on vacation for a week.  Loaded!  But not quite ready, so I determined to wait and pick them when we returned.  Big mistake.  They are all gone.  Now, if it was only the pears within 6 to 7 feet of the ground, I'd blame the deer again, and Lord knows we are overpopulated with them on the island.  But the pear tree was absolutely CLEANED OUT!  All the way to the top branches, which you would need a tall ladder to reach.  Now, I'm not naming any names, but I find it hard to believe that someone would just drive by and then decide to go to all that trouble of pear poaching not knowing if we were home or not.

And we have some strange next-door neighbors.  They were obscured by 8 foot tall Japanese Knotweed when we first moved in.  But the county wanted permission to spray the noxious weed.  We granted it, as did the neighbors, and now we have no buffer between us.  What was it Robert Frost said about good fences making good neighbors?  I understand.  We see and hear everything from their property these days.  Everything from the fact that they live in an odd assortment of travel trailers and a garage with a upper level apartment to the fact that a mentally challenged person (or it could be an EXTREMELY eccentric person) lives over there who becomes agitated upon sighting a deer in the yard (which is an almost daily occurrence) and starts banging on the dead knotweed with a long stick and barking loud unintelligible protests.  And with the knotweed gone, they can well see our fruit trees now; that's all I'm saying for now. . . .

One of our friendly deer looking in the downstairs window.  He probably wants an apple.