As it happens, I have a couple of very good hunters, but the dogs' domain doesn't extend to that side of the house. Poppy, the blue heeler mix, perpetually knocked over things in the garage on her way round a thing that was supposed to keep her in the dog stall by the detached garage's side door - I'm sure she was stalking mice or rats. Once I have the garden weeded and mulched, we'll see what we can come up with. Perhaps some fencing around the area and letting the dogs in to patrol (hoping they stay out of most of the herbs?) I think a good distribution of hair (combed off of the dogs) throughout the garden might also help. I don't want to exclude that neighbor's cat, so I may have to work out some kind of little gate for her.

So you're going to do the kitchen renovation and house extension while you're in the house? That also sounds like a formula for upset cats. I bought my house in February and moved in in late March, so had a few weeks for the contractor to get started - we wanted to do the kitchen first but the village insisted that we simultaneously build the new garage (we converted the existing one in the house to rooms and office space) - they didn't want me to somehow never get around to having a real garage. It meant it took longer on the kitchen so the cats spent several weeks locked in one of the back bedrooms during the day. That time also gave me an opportunity to slow-motion get moved from the apartment to the house using my pickup truck. Many pieces of furniture can be disassembled to be moved (though it seems faster to leave them intact and have strong men heft them into a moving truck and back out again). My daughter was 13 at the time and a real trooper. We spent a weekend going back and forth with the heaviest stuff after I'd moved most everything else. I wanted the payment to be a surprise so I had a large denomination bill to give her at the end of the weekend, and the look in her eyes told me it was appreciated and a surprise. :) It was a lot of work, but she stuck with it and I think we had a good time. She's just finishing moving into a new house herself, and I suspect the lessons about dismantling large pieces to move them yourself were not lost on her.

Several friends recommended the "My Fitness Pal" app after I got the fitness tracker. I have finally decided to go ahead and add it in, because it allows me to easily keep track of sodium and calcium, most crucial when taking low-dose prednisone. I've added recipes of a number of the dishes I cook and figured out what sized portions to stick to to keep sodium in particular low. There is a navel-gazing aspect to it, but I am enough of a creature of habit that it won't take long to have my typical breakfast foods in there and most of my dinners. (Now that I'm not eating white flour the list has shrunk considerably.) Lunch is most variable because I occasionally go out with friends, but lots of restaurant foods have been entered into it. The hive mind at work - it notes when members add things and makes it available to the rest. Even a lot of the Middle Eastern foods I prefer (we have a great Halal market near campus - I buy EV olive oil, dates, rice, lebne, yogurt, spices, and lots of other things there) so clearly this is a global product (owned by UnderArmour - I quickly had to figure out how to turn off their copious email notifications).

Looking forward to stories of the move and the renovations and continuation of Dorothy's work at the new place (Beaver). Is the mill still in play, Dorothy?