Category Archives: Just Stuff

Sounds better than miscellaneous.

Urban Wildlife, Part III

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Good news: There is nothing trapped alive under our house.

Bad news: There is something dead trapped under our house.

Although the severity of the skunk stench has pretty much dissipated, there has still been a lingering odor as you move from the hallway into our bedroom. (Being the pregnant one with dog-nose, I am the only one who continued to smell it.) After much pestering, Steve volunteered to do a quick round under the house to make sure all was well. Let’s just say that the mission turned ugly about the point that he found out what that unidentified lump was that we spotted last Sunday when we did that cursory look from the crawl-space with a flashlight.

Two heavy-duty contractor bags, a bottle of enzymatic formula and some other potion he unearthed from the garage later, and my husband just moved up about 15 notches on the best husband ever scale.

Urban Wildlife, Part II

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For the last 48 hours our house has reeked of roadkill. Sometime while we were out having a leisurely Sunday breakfast a skunk sprayed underneath our house. Olfactory investigations indicate that ground zero was somewhere roughly between our bedroom and the bathroom. This afternoon was actually the first time I was able to enter the house without a gush of eau-de-le-pew wafting up my nostrils. However, as you head closer to the back of the house, the scent becomes unmistakably stronger, and you are reminded of how effective a defense tool these suckers were dealt. Pregnancy doesn’t help either. Whether the rest of you are aware of this or not, you get a pretty gnarly case of dog-nose while you are pregnant, and can generally out-sniff one of those german sheperds they use to detect drugs at airports. Call it a gift.

You’d think that living in the city, we would be limited to your basic urban disturbances (which I have kindly elaborated on to you at length in these very pages) however, not wanting to deprive us of the “rural experience,” the local wildlife has made sure that we get to deal with their wrath as well. I can only assume that the possum must have said something bitchy to the skunk, thereby causing a nasty slap-fight, ending in the skunk saying “oh yeah? Well, take this you hoochie!” and promptly turned around and sprayed her in the face. Think of it as our own little wildlife version of Jerry Springer.

Thankfully, Steve has the entire week off and was able to quickly put to use his new air compresser and nail gun, and fashioned us a wire-mesh cocoon to encase the entire underbelly of our house. The trick was making the gamble as to what was actually still under the house at the time that he sealed off the crawl-space opening. He felt confident that whatever may have been under there over the weekend was not under there today. I prayed he was right. The last thing I want to be dealing with is a skunk and a possum trapped together under our house like a bad version of Survivor.

But tonight, as I was reading Stella her bed-time stories and convincing her that she did not need her water bottle (more on this later), I heard the unmistakable sounds of something trying to either get in or out of the crawl-space. And being that the crawl-space is directly under Stella’s bed, I not only could I hear it, but I could feel it. Naturally, I sent Steve out to investigate and he came back in reporting that he saw a gigantic possum hunkered in the bushes…on the outside. Score!

Now, as long as we don’t have the rest of its family under there or our good frend Smelly McStink, I think we can call this issue closed. Unless, of course the racoons and their opposable thumbs show up and dismantle the whole set-up.

You may be experiencing technical difficulties…

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Nobody panic. I am in the process of upgrading my blog software, and running into a few technical glitches. Mostly, you will find that the navigation from the categories and comments are broken and that a side effect of this is that you also cannot leave comments.

Bear with me.

UPDATE: Things seem to be working now.  Let me know if you encounter any problems…(aside from the fact that I haven’t posted any photos of The Chosen One in over a week).

Where everything old is new again.

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I usually don’t do this kind of thing, but…

I stumbled upon this site through my daily blog-travels and couldn’t keep myself from sharing. (If you are interested enough to look through, I suggest first reading the ‘About’ section to get a handle on things.)

The Daily Mumps

A photo, a title and some pithy commentary. Turning your family blog into a comic strip is pure genious. So much done with so little – from both a design and content perspective it makes me remember just how great this medium can be…

…and that all my procrastination on re-tooling this site is not doing any of us any good.

Urban Wildlife

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You’d think that by living in the middle of the city that we would be pretty much void of any real animal wildlife. The actuality is that, although from our vantage point there is asphalt as far as the eye can see, we have an active and varied mix of nocturnal mammalian activity within our neighborhood. [I think it is important to clarify at this point that I am NOT referring to the drug dealers, thieves and other misfits that cruise our neighborhood after dark.]

Nevermind that we are overrun with cats aplenty – on any given night of the week we are guaranteed that we will see either a skunk, possum or raccoon. We even have a humming bird that has continued to visit us this winter regardless of how ridiculously awful the weather gets.

So a few months back when all three of us watched a possum skirt the perimiter of our yard we didn’t think much of it. That is, until we watched it continue it’s way over to the house, then disappear underneath it. Now is the point in the story where I reveal just how little I think of possums and their oversized-rat-like selves. Raccoons and skunks are cute. They are both troublemakers – but they get away with it much better because of their ability to have sweet little pointy faces with large waddling bellies, or amazing dexterity that rivals that of a toddler. Possums on the other hand are not cute under any circumstance, and after getting to listen to their horrid screetch-like sound ALL NIGHT LONG I am no more inclined to cut them any slack. It is bad enough that I will occasionally be standing in the shower and hear and/or feel the oh-so-pleasant scratching at the underside of the tub. DO YOU KNOW HOW CREEPY THAT IS? But to be kept awake all night by the sounds of unhappy possum was another thing entirely – especially when the idea popped into my head that the sound I was hearing could quite well have been possum birthing ritual. Ick. Steve said he seems to think that he thought two possums “fighting” in our backyard a couple of nights ago, so I don’t quite know what to make of it all.

All I do know is that we need to hermedically seal the perimiter of our house so as to keep it from turning into an inner-city wildlife sanctuary. And, pronto.

As for my biased opinions on possums, I think the only thing that might – just might – make my cold heart soften a little would be a new installment from Janell Cannon. But I can’t make any promises.