Home, home on MY range…
July 17, 2009 by cynthia
Would everyone whose genomes do not contain exactly 46 chromosomes please vacate the premises immediately?
This means YOU, antmind. Feathered friends. Cute li’l gophers and raccoons. Eight-legged buddies. Numerous insectivorous pests munching in the garden, chewing on my books and masticating in my closet.
Mother Nature and I haven’t always seen eye to eye, but this is getting ridiculous.
A week ago I awoke to a large black blob on the ceiling, about 20 feet away but heading steadily in my direction. I’m blind as a bat without my glasses, so if I could see it, it was significantly bigger than a dustbunny.
Put my glasses on and, sure enough, a very large spider was galloping across the ceiling toward my canopy bed (not the spider at right, that was a pet spider I had in the garage, but I like the shot).
I got up, stripped (I have a philosophy about spiders falling into clothing that probably requires therapy), put on my shoes and picked up my dorsoventral flattening device, i.e., a stick. The spider paused, considering its options, and I whacked at it.
It dropped behind a wall mirror. Or maybe into the clothes basket that I subsequently placed on the bed.
After a strenuous effort to find him failed, I moved into the guest room.
A week later, I’m still in the guest room, retire for the night, set the burglar alarm and head in for a shower. There, on the master bedroom wall, is good ole’ Mr. Big. I grab a tissue, creep up behind him, pounce…and miss. Spider leaps off the wall, lands on my shirt (this is why we strip before killing spiders), and heads for my neck.
I shriek, set off the burglar alarm, whack at my clothing, grab a shoe and with an almighty WHOMP smash the spider into my chest. The spider’s now exploded across two rooms, the bruise on my chest promises to be an amazing one and I have to placate the burglar alarm people…but at least I get to move back into my room.
Then I think…what if this is a DIFFERENT spider…
It’s epidemic. This week I noticed an ant on a dish in the kitchen sink. I squished it and smelled my old antmind buddy, Tapinoma sessile. And where there’s one, there’s usually…I found a line of ants marching across the kitchen counter. (It’s black granite, so they’re harder to spot than you’d think.)
The antmind and I have had words in the past, so I knew immediate action was required. I scrubbed the counters down (removing scent trails) schpritzed antkilling potion around the perimeter of the house and the outside windows, and, er, got better about doing the dishes. It seemed to work; I haven’t seen an ant in the kitchen in three days.
I headed up to the bathroom to shower (and remove ant spray), and found three silverfish in the bathtub. The thing about silverfish is, you can spray and you can squish and you can tent the whole bloody house and bomb it with mustard gas or something…and the silverfish will survive. They live in cedar-shingled roofs and there’s not much you can do about them, I’m told, except learn to love them. Or get a new roof.
Got out of the shower, dressed, went outside for a few blueberries and was divebombed by angry birds, warning me off their berry bushes. It’s not much of a deterrent (Alfred Hitchcock notwithstanding, these are pretty mild-mannered birds and we usually get along just fine), but their level of hostility was unnerving.
Finished my blueberry breakfast and took a turn around the yard–there’s a broken pipe somewhere in the sprinkler system and I’ve been trying to track it down. I was cheered to see the lawn was no longer a sodden swamp. It had dried up so much, in fact, that a family of gophers (or maybe moles) has moved in and made nice, big mounds of dirt right in the middle of the grass.
At this point I’m getting pretty tired of Mother Nature.
I have an uneasy truce with the raccoon family that lives under the back deck: If I leave a couple bins of water on the deck for their bathing pleasure, they won’t trash the deck. We’re still negotiating the yard lights; they carefully unscrew them from their posts every time I put them back. The message is obviously “Don’t light our yard at night,” and so far there doesn’t seem to be a happy compromise.
The water had evaporated from one of the bins and I’d forgotten to replace it; in retaliation the raccoons overturned a box of plaster I’d left on the deck. They dipped their paws in the water in the remaining bin, mixed until it was a nice consistency and carefully plastered much of the back deck with little raccoon footprints. As abstract art it wasn’t bad, but it probably wasn’t doing the deck much good.
Sigh. I’m trying to live in harmony with Nature and all that, but isn’t there a clause somewhere that says Nature ought to live in harmony with me, too?
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Usually bad luck comes in threes. That might mean that Nature wins.
Sorry – Nature always wins. She has yet to throw down mice,locusts or cockroaches.