Has anyone noticed what’s been missing from the house?

Spring is the time of year that war is waged against spiders, as they move up from their down low winter hideouts and build webs in the corners of the ceiling. Most of my friends’ houses are usually lively with spiders, but not this year.

At first I thought this might mean no spring, but no, the grass is turning green, night temps are above freezing, the toads are horny, there’s above average roadkill. Spring is here.

Yesterday I de-cobwebbed my own house for the first time since moving here in the fall. Being such a country abode, the house would normally be overrun if I ignored the arachnids all winter.
Not only were there no new webs, but the ones hanging from the rafters were very old and dusty, obviously having been abandoned some time ago.

Not one spider egg to be found in anywhere.

I’ve heard about the disappearance of bees and the decrease in bird populations, but where have all the spiders gone? Methinks of that line from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “goodbye and thanks for all the fish.” Are the smarter creatures migrating to a new planet? And how will future generations explain about the birds and bees if there aren’t any?

I've been too busy to blog 'cause I've been lining up my crack lawyer team to sue every shoe manufacturer on the planet.

Shoes don't come with warnings that walking with laces untied can lead to tripping.

It's not my fault I didn't know that. No one told me. How was I supposed to know?

Giving the squirrels a break

Actually, in the house I’m moving into in a couple of months, it’s thousands of chipmunks. They run inside the walls, chirping, fighting, making chipmunk babies, making my dog crazy. I like it when they scamper up the outside of the window screens. As long as they don’t come into my space, I don’t mind.

This new place is huge; I’ve been staining/varnishing/painting inside for almost two weeks now. I still have several days to go before all the naval colors are covered, so that I’ll no longer have the urge to salute and say, “yes, sir,” every time I enter the house. I can’t wait to get finished and get back to work so I can get some rest. At the end of a ten hour day, I just want to fall down. How anyone blogs everyday is beyond me. I’m way too tired to be creative when my brain is completely stoned.

So saying, it’s time to go get another latex high. I’m starting to suffer withdrawal symptoms.

Home Sweet Home, Part -1

My mother came to visit me right after I had moved into this lovely cottage. Her last night here, we had our first cold snap, so I laid my first fire in the wood stove and lit it.

The house filled with smoke, the alarm went off, the dogs hit the cathedral ceiling yelping. I doused the fire and figured screw it, it’s not that cold; I’ll call the landlord in the morning to check it out.

After returning from dropping my mother at the train station the next day, I pulled into the drive and let the dogs out of the van. Then I noticed that both house doors were wide open, and it was cold out. Hmm…

The dogs frolicked in the yard as I stepped into the house. The place was a shambles, with broken crockery everywhere, off the shelves and smashed on the floor. The beautiful piece of hand-blown glass in the round window in my bathroom was shattered in the tub. I backed out of the house, my mind in a whirl. I already suspected that the landlord must be insane to accept a tenant with not just one, but two terrible terriers, as well as to let her plant a 12,000 pound boat smack in the front yard. What had set him off? Did he not like the new throw rugs and the floor lamp I had added? The lamp was lying on its side and the rugs were crumpled. Was it just one of those days to pitch a fit, breaking his own belongings as well as mine? I looked at the boat I just gone to great trouble to have trucked to the yard. If I had to flee, would I be able to arrange to get it out fast enough before he trashed it too?

Just then I saw him exit his house next door, headed my way. I edged towards my van. The dogs ran towards him excitedly. I tried to call them back, knowing it was futile, because Jack Russells are disobedient little brats. I tried trickery. ‘Come on, guys, lets go for a ride, let’s go to the beach, let’s have a cookie, let’s go for a walk, quick, get in the van, c’mon lets go lets go.’ They kept running towards the psycho as I watched in horror, feeling helpless. He could whack them both with whatever that was he was carrying before I could get anywhere near the scene. The dogs reached him and didn’t get slaughtered. He got closer, dogs at his heels, and I could see he was sort of smiling. Did he have a more diabolical plan? Where in the hell was my cell phone? Should I just abandon those damn dogs to their fate and run for it? Serve them right for not listening. I could now see that he was carrying a shop vac. Was he showing remorse for his actions; was he now calmed enough to not be homicidal? Or was he going to try to lure us all into the house and finish us off with the vacuum, which he had cleverly modified to super suck and compress large items to fit in the canister, sort of like a trash compactor and vac combined?

I hovered near the van’s open door, keys in hand, as he drew near and said one word:

“Squirrel.”

I sighed in relief. He said that when he had opened the woodstove door, a squirrel leapt out at him, crashing off walls, furniture, shelves, and every breakable item in the house. Apparently a veteran of this, he had opened the doors and tried to shoo it out, but it disappeared somewhere. At that point he decided to leave the house open in the hopes it would find its way out. Together we cleaned up the mess and then searched everywhere for the creature. He told me that when he and his family had lived here, he had once come home to find the place in such a mess that he thought they had been burglarized. He was about to call the police when the culprit attacked. He dodged just in time, narrowly avoiding being smacked in the head by an angry squirrel as it leapt from a shelf and fled through the open door. He assessed the damage to be about $20,000 worth of valuable artwork. They didn’t have insurance.

As soon as we were finished cleaning up, he went off to the hardware store for a squirrel baffle for the chimney top. I couldn’t help but think, why in holy heck didn’t you do that when you were attacked five years ago?

That evening, as I was enjoying a nice fire without barbequing any rodent bodies, I heard a rustling noise. I glanced at the dogs zonked beside me on the couch. Not a twitch from them. I put down my book, quietly got up, and followed the sound to the bookshelf. Scritch Scritch. SH*T. ‘Dogs, out.’ I called next door, hoping that I wasn’t waking anyone at that late hour. My landlord answered. “HELP, it’s still in here!” He dashed over with a have a heart trap, and together we managed to shoo it into the trap from under the enclosed bottom bookshelf, where it had been hiding for the last twelve hours. As my landlord left with his new pet, I let the dogs back in. “You’re both fired for never noticing that a SQUIRREL, for heavens sake, which you’ve made your life’s mission to eradicate, was in YOUR house all dang day!” And I thought, wow, wouldn’t that have been exciting if that bit of wildlife had decided to come out in the middle of the night. My dogs would have had a blast, I would have had a heart attack, and my landlord would have suffered greater losses.

Home Sweet Home

My house is heated by a wood stove and nothing else. Contemplate that, push button people. No electricity? So what? Next time you’re sitting there shivering in a power outage, wishing you had a nice hot toddy or ten, think of me cozy and warm, reading in a candle lit room. Heck, with an eight hour battery life on my laptop, I can even watch movies while eating popcorn popped on the gas stove.

A plus side to a house heated with wood is that if the party is lame, you can use the ‘gotta get home before the fire goes out’ excuse. Down side? If the party is awesome, gotta get home before the fire goes out. Or gotta sit up for an hour wasted off your head to get it reestablished. Still, there’s something about wood heat that you don’t get from any other modern heating source, other than the tropics. Maybe it’s something primordial, that “I have FIRE!” feeling.

When I first saw this place three years ago, I was hunting for a winter rental, having learned my lesson regarding living on a sailboat in New England in winter. The moment I saw the cottage, I knew I was home. Despite being well into the academic year, the house hadn’t been rented because your average garden variety college student can’t manage to put down the beer long enough to start a fire or keep it going. Also, the landlords lived next door, which made those nightly wild parties difficult.

Upon discovering that I couldn’t afford both house rent and winter boat storage, I got an idea and went to the rental agent. “Say again?” she asked. “Can I bring my 36 foot sailboat as well as my two Jack Russell Terriers?” As she wrote that down and said “I’ll ask,” I realized that NO one in their right mind was going to rent to me. While calculating just how much alcohol I’d have to buy to stay oblivious through another heinous winter frozen aboard the boat, the agent called. “Yeah that’s fine, when do you want to come sign the lease?” Really? What’s wrong with these people? Turns out that the kids were pestering for a dog. Having me next door meant having all the fun playing with mine and none of the poop to pick up. And they claimed that seeing the boat in the yard cheered them because they could pretend it was theirs without actually having any boat maintenance woes.

It was a bizarre twist of fate that I ended up back in this same cottage this winter, and hence plopped on quite a different course than I had picked out. Last summer, my former landlord and I ended up on the same ferry, not having seen each other since I had moved out of the cottage, back onto the boat, and had sailed off into the sunset. He said they’d had terrible tenants, and that it was even harder to rent the place now because of all the construction on the new addition. I told him I was fleeing to Florida the second it got cold. Next thing I knew, the rental agent was calling to make me a tremendous deal that was cheaper than living in a car. And I was still welcome despite no longer having dogs or a sailboat.

When I was driving back from my incarceration, uh, vacation in FL last month, so deathly ill I could barely drive, facing coming back to a freezing cold house was not curative. I called my landlords and said, I’m sorry to bug you, but I’m dying. Would it be too much to ask you to light a fire for me so I can just come in the door and fall down?

When I arrived home, not only was my house toasty warm, but they had taken advantage of the time I was away to fix a few things around the place, sweep the chimney clean, AND, she left me a pot of chicken soup, a basket of fruit, healing tea bags, and a box of tissues so I’d get better faster! And he continued to come over and plow me out after each of the 437 snowstorms we’ve had so far this winter.

How many people can say their landlords are awesome?