World’s cleanest rat…
Check it out! My second score for the Havahart mousetrap (yes, yes…we have the mouse-crushing kind too, but I don’t much like spattering them all over the foodal areas). Man, it’s got to be that time of year. I’m bailing livestock out of this house right and left.
Charlotte had three confirmed kills yesterday. Uncle B swears when he went out to the greenhouse late last night, he caught her out on the path sucking a mouse dry like some kind of Countess Chocula. You may recall, she had dental issues and they pulled her chewing teeth last year, so there’s not much else she can do, poor girl.
I’m guessing he won’t be giving her smoochies for a while.
Oh, and did I tell you about the rat? Big ol’ woodrat kind of thing poked his head out of a hole in the kitchen wall weeks ago. We plugged the hole and didn’t see him again for a while, but there are plenty more holes. Something hollowed out a loaf of bread I left on the counter. And this morning, it looks like the little fucker has stolen a whole, brand new bar of hand soap that we kept next to the kitchen sink.
I wouldn’t mind so much, but it’s the second one this week.
October 14, 2009 — 7:48 pm
Comments: 15
New stove!
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. It looks exactly like the old stove. Ahhh, but the old stove was completely buggered. The doors didn’t fit, the vents didn’t work properly. It was basically an open fire in a metal box.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go watch Obama’s healthcare speech to Congress.
Hahahaha…psych!
September 9, 2009 — 7:50 pm
Comments: 17
Insert weasel (a) into IQ test (b)
We’ve only got one set of next-door neighbors. The neighbors on the other three sides are sheep. Our one set of people neighbors has asked us over several times, during the course of which we managed to drink all their premium booze and eat up all their delicious crispy salted snacks.
We have yet to reciprocate, on account of our Badger House is — to put it delicately — a shit-hole. Not entirely our fault; I was so determined not to waste a penny on a storage unit, I filled this house from floor to ceiling with packing boxes. We live among these majestic corrugated monoliths like a nomadic tribe, making warm temporary nests from throw pillows and blankets, trailing books and teacups and computer cables. Total shit-hole.
But then it hit us — garden furniture on sale! Our garden, at least, is lovely. We picked up a table and four chairs at a distinctly off-season price yesterday. While Uncle B enjoyed a doze today, I decided to assemble our new table.
So…whaddya fink?
Stupid Taiwanglish instruction sheet…
August 3, 2009 — 6:56 pm
Comments: 10
Run away, little girl!
Case in point: the leech (seen here struttin’ at yet another village fête).
We have a sort of moat-slash-drainage ditch out the back that may or may not have leeches in. Exciting leeches. Leeches that would guarantee a raftload of excitable government leechophiles descend on us like a ton of unwashed hippie.
You know what else the prospect of leeches in our ditch guarantees? That I personally never, ever, ever, ever, EVER set foot in that fucking ditch.
So help me, that one scene in African Queen. With the leeches.
July 30, 2009 — 6:10 pm
Comments: 9
I’m getting good at this!
I’m the best damn mouser in Badger House! w00t!
Charlotte keeps bringing them in lightly injured — mildly annoyed, really — giving us a good look and then letting them loose in the livingroom to skitter around under the furniture, leap alarmingly in the air and scramble repeatedly over my bare feet. I now have a special mouse-trapping cup (which doubles as the spider-trapping cup in Uncle B’s hands) into which I am developing a facility for snaring meece.
I don’t mind. It beats the HELL out of bludgeoning the tragically crippled ones I would find dragging themselves across the carpets at Weasel Towers. I can only assume she maimed them more horribly in those days in competition with Damien, who was an utter feline psycho jerk. God, I miss him.
However, there’s apparently one that didn’t get off so lightly. For several days, we’ve been struggling to cope with the most unbelievable stench in the stair and landing area. Something has obviously crawled into the walls and died. We can’t quite pinpoint where, so we’re reluctant to start prying up floorboards.
If it gets any stronger, I’m going to have to set it a place at the table.
June 23, 2009 — 8:19 pm
Comments: 22
Goodbye, little buddy
Feh. I shipped my lawnmower 3,500 miles, got two mows out of it, and — BANG! — hit a metal post sunk in the ground and totalled it. Bent the driveshaft. Complete goner.
It was old and nothing special, but it was one of those happy few, once-in-a-lifetime mowers that started on the first pull. Every time. Two months on a container ship across the frozen Atlantic in Winter, came out the box and started on the first pull.
It was mine and I liked it.
So I’ve spent a week disconsolately lookin’ at mowers. Everything we saw was very fancy and glossy and a minimum of £200 for an underpowered, no-big-deal, weasel-driven push mower.
I’ve taken the mowing on myself — it’s the one way I can harness my plant-murdering powers for good. I looked at those fancy sports-car-looking machines with all the complicated shit hanging off them and thought to myself miserably, “oh, how a weasel is going to fuck up that shiny yard candy.”
We hit one last place today — a man who repairs and sells mowers out of his home — and I spotted a rusty old job in the corner and fell in love. “Make me an offer,” he shrugged. Heh. Weasel’s got a new funky old mower.
Hey, dude had six cats. I know I can trust him.
Anyhow, I have to mark where that post is so I don’t hit it ruin another mower. So I came up with this thing. Uncle B says I’ll go to hell for this picture, so…ummm…I hope nobody’s had a recent bereavement or anything.
June 5, 2009 — 7:52 pm
Comments: 24
Hello? 1992 calling…
This is the most interesting thing I’ve found in the attic so far. Which is to say, there’s nothing interesting in the attic so far. Some new and empty wine bottles. A bunch of empty boxes. Picture frames.
Well, there’s the poop. Tiny mouse poops near the opening. Then some rat poops further in. And then some larger rat poops. Like, larger than rat poops.
Back home, I’d say possum or even coon. But th’ain’t no possums ner coons hyere. Nor anything of equivalent size. So that just leaves very fucking large rat, I guess.
Oh, joy.
Anyhow, Gromulin asked what was up there, and that guilted me into checking it out. I’m alllll about the minions. Have a good weekend, everyone!
May 29, 2009 — 6:41 pm
Comments: 15
You’ll never guess what I found in the attic!
Give up? I found WE HAVE AN ATTIC!! I had no idea. I assumed that little hatch led to the usual useless crawlspace.
And it’s thoughtfully pre-filled with shit! I assume those are empty boxes. That, or the previous owner was a receiver of stolen goods — it’s all quite modern stuff, like scanners and video cameras.
I didn’t actually heave myself up to explore it. Uncle B wasn’t around, and I like to have witnesses when I put my foot through the ceiling plaster. Just in case I nick an artery on the way.
I’m not sure I want to know what’s in that cooler…
May 26, 2009 — 8:06 pm
Comments: 17
Never send a pussycat to do a weasel’s job
Stoator, God of Weasels. Nobody ruin Weasel’s fun pointing out it’s probably an otter, ‘K?
Another Kinkadian run in the country today. We stopped in a little village for refreshments in a self-consciously quaint tea shop (this part of the country is lousy with such places: grossly overpriced and fatally twee, but the food is usually excellent. Even I pronounced the fruitcake edible). We found this lil’ feller in the antiques shop next door.
Later, while Uncle B enjoyed a well-deserved nap, the cat hooked a paw under my chair and pulled out a little mouse. Then he got away. Again and again and again. We chased that poor little bastard from the chair to the couch to the bookshelves and back again for an hour before I gave up and woke up The Badger. (I needed someone to lift the couch while I threw a tea-towel over the bugger).
After another half hour of this roundy-round, the cat got bored and wandered away, Uncle B declared himself not an expert on the catching of mice, and I finally managed to slip a flowerpot over the exhausted rodent. Hardly as big as my thumb, he was, and panting hard.
Somewhere in the hedge tonight, a sadder but a wiser mouse is telling a breathless tale about a cat, a badger and a weasel.
God, I’ve died and gone to Toontown.
May 14, 2009 — 7:59 pm
Comments: 17
Hopi farging carp on a popsicle!
Today we had a surveyor in to look at our deathwatch beetles. We got his name from a local real estate agent who deals in ancient buildings. It’s no good sending out a green surveyor; he would take one look at an old pile like Badger House and pee his pantses.
Our guy tapped and frowned and frowned and tapped and took a little dust sample in a 35mm film can (luckily we had one to spare). And then declared the house whole and sound and (almost certainly) in no danger at all, tappingdancing beetles or not. He offered us the use of a stethoscope for the Summer: if you can identify exactly where the little bastards are hanging out, he told us, it might be worth opening the wall to kill them. But otherwise, the damage you’d do tearing the place apart to find the infestation would be far more than the insects will do.
They don’t do much harm. They don’t do any harm fast. Their life cycle is (up to) twenty years. And they won’t spread in the absence of damp.
“After all, they came in with the wood and they haven’t knocked the place down yet,” he said, klonking his fist against a great oak beam.
And I said (proudly), “haha…oh, yes. We have documentation on the house going back four hundred years.”
And he said, “oh, no! These beams are MUCH older than that. Some are probably a thousand years old.”
And Uncle Badger said, “!” And I said, “!!!!!!!eleventythousandholyshit!!!!”
He explained. Nearly all the wood in the house would have been reclaimed from some earlier use: another house, a barn, a horse-cart. Wood was scarce around here and hard to come by and EVER-so-hard to work with. We’re talking hand tools and OAK. When we were looking to buy, we seriously considered one house built in the 15th or 16th C from beach flotsam (very common) and they even knew the name of the French shipwreck it came from.
It’s clear that some beams (top picture) weathered outside for…oh, hundreds of years, maybe. And I spent months poring over mysterious pegs and slots and cut marks, trying to figure out the original shape and purpose, when these artifacts probably had nothing whatever to do with Badger House.
Whoa.
No, seriously. Whoa.
It’s probably just as well I’m psychic as a potato.
April 21, 2009 — 8:24 pm
Comments: 21