|
|
|
Snoop and the rodents
Friday, August 14 2009
My computer was inaccessible for most of the morning as I waited for EASEUS (rhymes with Jesus) to finish resizing my hard drive partitions. I have four, the maximum possible with one Windows XP drive: Cuckoo, Duck, Egret, and Shrike. This provides a view into what has become my personal technological naming convention. Computers are named after mammals, with Windows machines being rodents or weasels, Macintoshes being marsupials, portable devices being flying or gliding mammals, and Linux machines generally being monotremes. Hard drives are named after birds, and WiFi access points are named after insects. Virtual computers (which I started experimenting with today) will be named after amphibians (my first is a virtual KUBUNTU installation named "Toad"). Beyond artifacts with enough self-awareness to know their own names, I rarely give names, though I have named my two favorite cordless drills Chris and Snoop (after the hardware-store-loving assassins from The Wire).
Late in the afternoon I prepared my tools and supplies, lathered up with mosquito repellant, lay down some tarps, and then clambered into the tiny crawl space under the house's front entrance, a ten foot horizontal spider hole with a coffin-like cross section. To say it's unpleasant in there is to state the obvious. Fortunately, it could have been worse. There were spiders, but all of them were of the small cobweb-spinning variety, some with swarms of freshly-hatched young. There were no huge hand-sized wolf spiders, no Black Widows, and no snakes. There was a Leopard Frog at the entrance who I'd almost scared into the hole, but I'd managed to get him to hop off in a better direction.
Once I was in the crawl space, it was hard to get out, so I stayed in radio contact with Gretchen using a DECT 6.0 handset in intercom mode. I'd tell her something I needed, like a utility knife, and she'd fetch it, and I'd grab it with my toes and pull it up to my hands. My task down there was to use spray foam to fill a corner of the decking where the particleboard had rotted away, cover it with a pressure-treated plank, and then cover one end of it with a section of steel lath mesh (the kind used to support plaster walls) to prevent rodents from gnawing open any tiny gaps. The goal of this procedure was to cut off access for rodents, whose Special Olympics between the joists I've been hearing with increasing frequency.
Before I went to spray the foam, I suddenly realized that the solvents and propellant might displace my oxygen supply, which wouldn't be good considering how much time and effort would go into getting myself back out to the surface. So I called Gretchen and had her set up a fan to blow more air in my direction. The sound of the fan wasn't enough to drown out the podcast entertainment I was piping in. (I was re-listening to episodes in the back catalogue of the KunstlerCast, comprised mostly of banter about the "tragic comedy of suburban sprawl.")
Because of a full bladder and a need to replace the depleted battery in Snoop (the cordless impact driver I use for almost every project), I actually had to come to the surface and then go back in again. Batteries never run out until the least comnvenient moment.
Eventually I finished up and declared the project completed. Just putting all my support supplies away was a job unto itself.
With that long-procrastinated task out of the way, I could disconnect the ultrasonic rodent-repelling devices I'd been running for months in the basement ceiling. Then I could hook up the exhaust fan in the bathroom where I like to take my baths, allowing me to properly vent the humidity once more.
Before I took a well-earned bath, I had to cut some locks from my greying mane; they'd somehow found their way into puddles of spray foam and would be easier to regrow (in perhaps a somewhat greyer incarnation) than clean.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?090814 feedback
previous | next |
