Bear, and Screen Door Solution

First... remember this pic from June 10th?  Look at the log.

This is what it looks like now.  I noticed it yesterday.  Pam was putting bird seed on it for the birds and chipmunk.  Apparently, for the bear too.

Remember the bear?

We haven't seen him again, but he's obviously been here at night.  We still put out the bird feeders, but take them in around 7 PM or so and lock them in the woodshed.  

So getting to the screen door.  Many of you know that the Gibson family lived on a trawler for three years.  Pam and I, sometimes daughter Megan and son Sean, sometimes as many as three cats.  And three dogs.  Three good sized dogs, two of which are pit bulls.  Very nice dogs, but not necessarily the brightest.

Living aboard in Georgia, we had to do something about the insects.  They're ferocious in the south.  Gnats, no-seeums, mosquitoes, green flies, you name it.  We didn't want to always run the air conditioning, so I hung screens over the doorways.  They were connected at the top and hung loose over the bottom so the dogs could go in and out.  

Well, when we rented this place in Bleecker, I bought a screen door for it so we could get fresh mountain air.  After all, isn't that one reason for living in the mountains?  The dogs had no concept of swinging doors.  The only doors they knew of slid from side to side, and if there was a screen, just go through it.  Which they did.  Our screen door was trashed within no time.

I tried putting small branches all across the bottom, but they just brushed those aside too.  So this is my solution, which is working.

The screen is attached all the way around except for the bottom right.  I cut that with a razor, and the dogs go in and our on that side.  The small branches on the left serve two purposes.  First, they let the dogs know to use the other side.  Second, because the dogs have also stepped on the door frame while coming and going, the door "racked".  It was sagging and dragging, hitting those patio blocks.  That diagonal stick is under tension and supporting the door, pushing it up just like a sailboat's 'boom kicker".  The smaller sticks add pressure.

Looks sort of Adirondacky, doesn't it?  Time for a victory beer.  And time to figure out what we're going to do if we ever visit someone with our dogs, and they have a screen door.