0707/9th October 2021 .
Bang! Crash! Wallop! When a solid, 6’4 dude crashes to the floor, it makes quite a racket.
Scared the life out of me. I had gone downstairs to see something on Grant’s PC and as I exited the room, in front of him, Tinkerbell suddenly got underfoot.
Evading maneuvers ended with Grant on the floor.
Tinkerbell having fled, nowhere to be seen. Can you imagine how awful it would be, to actually land on top of a beloved pet?
This is Tinks with her favourite “Ur”. She regularly carries it upstairs, singing to it. (“Ur, Ur, Ur”.) At night she takes it back as a gift for Grant.
Which is better than half-eaten mice. He got another last night, though not in his bed this time.
Maybe you’re wondering “why don’t they just block the access holes so the mice can’t get in?”
The thought occurred to me but the way the house is built, there is no way to get at the gaps.
Mice aren’t the only creatures that find their way in, either. Grant came up and told me one day that he had a snake in the basement. He was worried the cats would kill it. “Just a garter snake”. (He rescued it)
Back in the dim distant past, when I visited my parents in Laos, just prior to being sent to the USA, I was lying semi-comatose on my bed one torpid afternoon and heard a noise nearby.
“Sounds like a snake coming down a curtain”, I mused to myself, apparently remembering some jungle-themed movie I had seen.
Looking up, I was not that pleased to discover I was right. In Asia, as far as I was concerned, all snakes were dangerous, or at least to be avoided.
“Daddy! There’s a snake in my room!”
“Well what are you telling me for?” was the grumpy response from my father whose siesta I had disturbed.
Men have always been such a disappointment to me.
The sweet Thai girl who helped my mother was summoned and removed the serpent with a broom.
How, I’m not sure, but it ended up dead. Lach looked at it and said wistfully “it’s just a baby”.
In those days I had not yet gone quite so soft, but I didn’t like the idea that we had killed a baby, even if it was 6 foot long.
There were quite a few things I didn’t like about that last summer before I emigrated, including a coup d’ Etat and having a cow noisily slaughtered under my bedroom window at the crack of dawn.
“Don’t lose your British accent,” was all my mother said, at the airport, when I was dispatched. I was 16. When I next I saw my parents , in Barbados I was 23.
This is how “triggers” sneak up on you.
Best to move far away from that sorry summer.
Grant, I should report, appears for the most part undamaged. Just a slight contusion on his elbow. The floor and furniture, as well as the cat, undamaged.
It appears we have a solution at least in the matter of the tall, wide bushes that overhang a steep slope. Even Grant’s long arms could not reach far enough with our new trimmer.
Never one to accept defeat, I went out yesterday with the long-handled clippers and played Tarzana for a while until Grant came and shouted at me.
This morning he looked a bit sheepish when he came in from the garage. “Come and see this!” he said
When he makes these announcements it could be anything, so I grabbed the camera, but I didn’t need a photograph of his find.
He’s been “sorting things out” and selling some of it. And after three years in residence, he discovered that not only did we already have a hedge trimmer, but one with a long handle.
Bad news – I read that if you can fit a pencil through a hole or gap then a mouse can get through!
Now that you mention it…I’ve heard that too, so no point in trying to stop them!