Critter Ridder and Tabasco

I spent part of Saturday morning in the attic and on the roof with $40 worth of squirrel repellent—specifically, a bottle of a something called “Critter Ridder,” and a container of a powder that does the same thing.

Turns out they’re mostly hot peppers. It seems that squirrels and lots of other wee beasties hate the smell and taste of the stuff. (Basically, I spent the day dosing the house with Tabasco sauce.)

‘Course, given my luck, I’ll have the one squirrel in creation that’s a spicy foods freak. He’s probably up in the ceiling right now, munching on a ghost pepper and mixing up some margaritas to go along with a Chimichanga or two.

Squirrels!

Phooey. Darn. And Pshaw.

We seem to have squirrels living in the attic. I’m not 100% sure but judging from the volley of scratches I heard early this morning, I’m guessing that we do, indeed, have guests. I’ll know more when I get up there later today.

One thing I hadn’t expected when I moved to Texas was the sheer aggressiveness of the wildlife. First it was the flies and mosquitoes. Then we jumped up to vertebrates, specifically deer. Even though this is a pretty settled suburb, the place is lousy with deer. Deprived of natural predators, and blessed with a high birthrate, they are everywhere now. And sometimes they can be a bit combative. The other day I saw one chasing a man down the street. No kidding. (I’ll tell the story later.)

Now it’s gawd dang homesteading squirrels.

At this rate I firmly expect that before the month is through, I’ll get mugged by a muskrat.

Sorry for the delay

Hey, All,

I know I promised that I'd be posting more here. And, frankly, I didn't. Sorry about that.

Things have just been really complicated here. Mostly good, but complicated.

I've already written about this, but I'll recap just to set the stage. Two months ago we moved from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to the Austin-area. (Not Austin itself. Can't afford those kind of prices. But a town just a few miles away.)

The reason for our move? The usual one for people my age. Our son and daughter-in-law, and their brand new baby girl, live in Austin. They are basically the only family we have, except for some cousins who are miles away. And, now that my parents are gone, there wasn't much to keep us in New Mexico.

So, toward Texas we headed...

We rather like the area. Lots to do. Lots to see.

There are few small drawbacks. The traffic from our house to Austin itself is horrific. And the drivers here can be a little...um...confrontational. And then there's the awful heat, and the bugs.

And, finally, there is the little fact that Austin is a very young city. Lot of folks in their 20s and 30s are moving here to take advantage of the booming economy.

In fact, truth be told, I can walk into any cafe in the city and...all by myself...raise the average age of the crowd.

Ouch.

Birds of the Air, Beasts of the Field, Bugs of the Backyard

So one thing that I did not expect was the degree of bugginess here in Texas. Of course, it varies according to the time and the season. Right now, it’s a hot, muggy summer and the little bastards are uniquely active. We have spiders everywhere in the yard (I’ve destroyed two Brown Recluse nests already) and insects of all descriptions -- paper wasps, mud dauber wasps, mosquitos (my feet and legs are apparently considered an all-night buffet), and flies. Particularly flies.

The mosquito bites are painful, but it is the flies that are the biggest problem. We have a lovely backyard here, and we’d like to eat outside. But, the flies have been so plentiful and so aggressive that they’ve been driving us inside. The first time we tried to have dinner in the yard, we found the flies massing like a phalanx on the other side of the table from us. At any moment we expected to get mugged. I had visions of them grabbing the plates and flying off with them. Sort of UFO meets Yogi Bear’s picnic basket.

I tried to at least reduce their numbers by purchasing two traps. These are basically just plastic bags full of water plus some really foul smelling scent attractant. The flies get in but they can’t get out again. They drop eventually from heat and exhaustion and drown in the water.

We had one in Albuquerque and it worked well. It kept our backyard pretty clear of the nasty little brutes. So, I figured if I could got two for our yard here in Texas, we’d be fine. I mean, how could it miss?

Answer: by a country mile. Apparently Texas isn’t like New Mexico. Its supply of black flies is, it seems, infinite. Its reservoirs of pests cannot be plumbed by modern man. Or woman, for that matter. One of the traps I’ve got in the backyard now contains a layer of dead flies, floating in the water in the bag, that is fully an inch thick.  And they just keep coming.

I guess the only thing to do is to wait out the fly season. Maybe by September, we’ll be able to dine, again, al fresco, as opposed to Al Insect. But that leaves me the question of what to do with a bag full of drowned flies.

Here’s a thought. Austin has bridge which is famous for its bat colony. Maybe I could drop the flies off there as a sort of gift. You know…

Kinda like an insectivore-ish version of Grubhub. Except without tipping. And no App required.

IKEA Revisited

So Martha and I played newlyweds and visited IKEA yesterday. I say play newlyweds because that’s what the store feels like to me, a place where people just starting out go to find furniture which is nice enough, but not too expensive, and which will fit comfortably into a limited area.

We did get a couple of items, but we didn’t visit the store’s famous cafe. That’s because of the meatballs. I really, really, really don’t like Swedish meatballs. In fact, truth be told, I figure that’s why Sweden has known peace for 200 years. All you’d need is a cranky boy scout with a slingshot and a pile of meatballs, and nobody would dare invade.

Grand-Parentization

So far we have been surprisingly comfortable in Georgetown and in the new house. Though, the move, and the house, have required us to confront some things, and that has not always been particularly pleasant. For example, we are finally forced to do the serious downsizing that is at the heart of...for lack of a better term...grandparent-ization.

You see, this house is quite a bit smaller than the ones we’ve had before. Don’t get me wrong. It is very nice, but it is cozy. Where, for instance, we had four bedrooms, a living room, a den, and a sunroom in Albuquerque, now we have three bedrooms and a living room, but no den and no sunroom. Zillow puts our square footage in the new house at 1570, where-as the ABQ house had 2379 square feet.

This has made us rethink what we own and what we really want to keep. We have already divested ourselves of a good many pieces of furniture. Now we have to figure out what to do with our paintings, pictures, prints, and, particularly, our books.

That’s been tough, and it will get tougher, but the really difficult thing is in reconsidering who we are and what we need. Today we were unpacking the rest of our kitchenware -- plates, dishes, coffee cups, etc. And that brought us face to face with the fact that, well, we are no longer in need of the twenty or so wine glasses that we’ve had for years. Four will do quite nicely, even if we have company. The same is true for coffee cups. I have a small collection of them dating from back when I was a journalist and was always getting mugs from trade shows. But, again, why do I need them? Four cups is more than enough, particularly since I merrily wash the dishes in our brand new (and incredibly quiet) GE dishwasher every night.

Of course, it is easy enough for me to take those extra coffee cups and glasses and what have you, rewrap them  in the same paper the movers used to ship them here, put them back in a box, and take them into the garage...where they will remain until (if) we have an occasion to actually use them again. But the point is that things have charged. We are no longer at a place in our lives when we are likely to have large gatherings for reasons ranging from the personal to the professional. We will have “grand-parently” gatherings of smaller groups, or, if they are large, then they will probably be someplace other than here.

This is not a sad thing. But it is a marker. We have left one stage of our lives and gone to another. And transition, no matter how benign, is unsettling…

Not a Dish Washer, but you get the point.

To South Padre Island, and farewell to my parents

We've back from a trip to South Padre Island and Brownsville, TX, where we visited my son and daughter-in-law. It was a wonderful trip, but also sad, in that we spread the ashes of my parents on a beach they loved.

hair cuts from the west

the linx

Texas parents, school tangle over boy's long locks — http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jHTRVxrCriQ0q9mjS5cP9NkcjONgD9CL6PO02

Texas parents battle school over son's long locks — http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-12-17-texas-school-hair_N.htm

Texas parents battle school over son's long locks — http://news.yahoo.com/video/us-15749625/texas-parents-battle-school-over-son-s-long-locks-17178226