|
|
|
mouse projects
Thursday, November 10 2011
I had trouble sleeping last night, but in our cavernous house it's always easy to change venues. First I tried going out to the teevee room to sleep on the couch there, but Eleanor was taking up too much room. So then I went down to the living room to sleep on that couch, but there was some rodent in the wall chewing so loudly that sleeping there proved impossible as well. I went to investigate to see what problem was being caused, and though I could localize the source of the sound to within an inch or two (at the bottom center of the stone heat shield on the wall behind the woodstove), I couldn't actually see anything. I pointed a bright flashlight into gap beneath the bottom stones but this did nothing to stop the chewing. So then I took to alternating my own scratching noises with the rodent's chewing. At first this seemed to flummox the little guy, and he'd stop for awhile to listen (picture a question mark hovering over his little buck-toothed head). But he became increasingly bold and began to ignore me. He decided he was living in the wall and trying to excavate an portal into the living room, something that would have been a lot easier if he attacked the drywall instead of a part of the wooden structure. (A couple weeks ago a new hole appeared in the drywall next to the toilet paper roll holder in the first floor half bathroom, and I had to seal it because foul smells were coming out of it; evidently the rodent who had crafted it had died before finishing his life's work.) I ended up sleeping in the Gunther Room in the basement.
This morning as I was getting ready to come upstairs, I could hear the sound of Andrea (our neighbor) visiting. This put me in something of a pickle, as I wasn't wearing any pants (indeed, I was totally naked from the waist down), and I didn't have any pants I could put on in the basement. So I was, essentially, a prisoner. When Andrea drops by, there's no telling how long she's going to stay, particularly when she hasn't been over in awhile. She'd come with a bag of cashews and a condolences card as a friendly gesture in response to the recent death of my father, which was all very sweet. But I needed to use the brownhouse in a bad way, and there was no way out without her seeing my naked puckered ass. This wasn't really a problem except for the unwritten rules under which I live, one of which dictates that I never use any of the household toilets for anything. In the end, though, I just couldn't hold out, and I had to drop a deuce in the so-called "Fish Bathroom" (so-named because of its aquatic decorative theme).
It was another warm, beautiful day, with the predicted rainy weather system slow in arriving. I went down to the greenhouse area with the chainsaw and began cutting up a large White Pine that had snapped off in a storm that had followed Tropical Storm Irene. The tree could have fallen any direction, including onto the greenhouse, the brownhouse or even my laboratory, but instead it fell into the utility pole without actually damaging it. I cut off the piney boughs and piled them upon the mound of soil just north of the greenhouse. Ideally, this mound would be bigger and more gently-sloped than it is, I'm always piling branches on it to keep its soil stabilized.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?111110 feedback
previous | next |
