Necessity is a mother

We are planning to drive up to New England in a month to see the relatives and the foliage. This will be our first true retirement road trip. I will just be getting my arm out of the sling and being allowed to drive again.


I’m having trouble with the planning only because I’m used to working around constraints caused by work and how much vacation time we had. Now the animals in our lives cause our biggest constraints.


We are going to leave our cats, Brie and Sunshine with Christy. As you know if you’ve read my earlier blog, Brie is very skittish and when we leave her it takes a remarkably long time for her to settle back down when we get back. Obviously the longer we are gone the more of Brie is lost. She eventually settles but is never completely the same. So one factor in our planning is the “Brie Factor”.


Penny also feeds about a half dozen neighborhood cats each day. We can’t just leave a big feeder full of cat chow out because we get nightly visits from voracious opossum and they would quickly devour the food and/or destroy the container to get to it. The birds also eat a surprising amount – and one stray dog will eat till he explodes. We have found our neighbors unreliable in the feeding of cats. So I have my first engineering challenge for retirement – build a cat feeder to dispense food reliably for up to 3 weeks while protecting the stored food from weather and predators.

We did have a 3-day battery operated feeder. (Bought at 60% discount at Tuesday Morning 2 or 3 years ago) It is a bowl partitioned into 3 compartments that rotates to expose the food for 3 intervals (8-12-24 hrs). The challenge was to design a cover and large bin that would refill the compartments on a daily basis without jamming. I built a prototype yesterday, using some wood; duct tape and a coffee can to see if the feeder was powerful enough to rotate under the weight of the food in the bin. To my surprise, it worked! Tomorrow I design and add the bin to hold 3 weeks of food and then set it up for a 2-week trial run while we are here.


Now the trip planning gets interesting. The animals are settled. Now, how long will we be gone? Do we want to make hotel reservations in advance or just wing it? We called Nana today and we will be stopping there (NC) on the way back. We will stay with relatives in CT and Debbie’s cabin in VT. (Donna also offered us her place in VT) That’s where it stands. We stopped by AAA and the library and got a wheelbarrow full of maps and books. Now I’ve got something else I can do while I recover that won’t stress my arm.
I can feel a trip planning blog coming up.