Chris & Joy’s Critterweb

Just a quick note that we might be a bit out of the loop over the next little while. The remnants of tropical storm Fay brought lots of much needed rain, but also some destruction here thanks to our crappy roof. We’ve got leaks in two rooms and a shelf fell down in the office because the drywall was waterlogged, destroying several statues and other knicknacks, damaging our printer, and smashing the glass of the rock box, among other things. The water is seeping under the wall to the living room so the rug is soaked and we had to disconnect the computer, stereo, and anything else electrical connected to that shared wall.

I’ve got the router ‘high and dry’ and plugged in but we’ve also been having issues with the FrankenDell (our ancient, built-from-junk-parts laptop) so we may be ’sans Internet’ for a few days. Right now I can still revive it by taking out the battery, ram, and other removables, holding down the power button a while, then putting it all back together, but obviously there is a short somewhere and it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a paperweight.

Our landlord is sending roofers out to assess the damage and get the leaks fixed, and we’ll see where it goes from there… I won’t deny that we are very worried about a mold issue (we already had problems with that here) from the waterlogged drywall, carpet, and subflooring, and thinking back to the house we had to evacuate in Hendersonville, from which my lungs never did recover. But we’ll take it one step at a time and see what happens.

In spite of the small scale disaster it caused inside our house, we’re still very grateful for the rainfall. The area needed it very, very, badly and we probably still need a lot more rain to catch up.

And I will warn you up front that it is hard to watch. It almost made me cry, and brought back some painful memories of Mojo as well. But I think it really brings home some hard facts, and in particular anyone who is thinking of getting a purebred puppy should consider these realities first.

BBC’s Pedigree Dogs Exposed

Someone posted the show in six parts to YouTube and the link above is to the first of the six parts. I am not sure if they had BBC’s permission so the video might not be there long. This is also on BBC’s site but currently you cannot view their online shows unless you live in the UK.

Yep, it’s been almost a year since our last move. I am assuming by now that most of our friends and relatives have taken to marking our address in their address books in pencil instead of pen — if they are even still bothering to keep track at all! In just under ten years, we have moved ten times, and this last time we pretty much had to settle at the last minute for the house we are now living in because we just couldn’t find anything closer in to Asheville that would take the pets. Right from the beginning it was off to a rocky start; with the nasty bathtub surprise, the rusty water, and the Canton paper mill smell. Add to that the weird paranormal stuff and the horrific expense of filling the propane tank and it will probably come as no surprise that right from the first month we got here, we were counting down ‘how many months left until we can move out.’

But as we got down to these last few months, we decided that maybe the best thing to do might be to tough it out; moving is so expensive, and we’re just flat out sick of doing it year after year after year. We had contacted our previous landlord a couple of months ago to see if she was going to have anything coming up, and figured that would be the only way we would consider another move, since we trusted her and knew that the animals would not be an issue. When we didn’t hear back from her, we went ahead and put in a couple of gardens, fenced in an area for the cats, and settled in.

So…. last week we got our lease renewal in the mail, with an envelope to send it back in after we signed it… and then the very next day, our old landlord called about a house she’d just purchased that would be in our price range.

Well. This certainly threw things back in an uproar, didn’t it? We went to see the house with her and it had a lot going for it; it was on nearly two acres, in a quiet rural area with no nearby neighbors, it had an area already fenced, an outbuilding, and even a chicken coop. There was more space than we have here and the landlord would be pulling out the carpet and refinishing the wood floors underneath. One of the really cool things was that it was a five minute walk to the bank of the French Broad river. The fact that the paper mill smell at our current house was so intense this past weekend that it set off an asthma episode for me sure added to the appeal. Over the following day or so, we carefully weighed all the pros and cons of whether to jump on this opportunity (which had just miraculously sprang up for us at the last minute!) and came to a decision…

Our signed lease renewal went into the mail this morning.

Yes, that’s right: we are actually staying in one place for more than a year. This must come as a terrible shock. When we signed the lease renewal Joy commented as she looked over the document, “we haven’t had one that looked like this, before.” and I replied, “I think that’s because we’ve never actually renewed a lease before!”

We’re finally starting to dig ourselves out of the hole that ten years of catastrophes, vet bills, and moving helped us create, and we just can’t justify setting everything back again. If we keep making progress, the next move may be into our own house, which is what we really want. And for all it’s annoyances, this house has it’s positive points as well, and it has been a very peaceful place for us to be. With the economy so uncertain, the ongoing drought, and the unknown future the upcoming election represents, we really aren’t sure what we will be doing long-term, but for at least another year, this is ‘home.’

In addition to our usual busy work schedule, there’s been some cool stuff (besides the gardening) we’ve been working on the past few weeks:

1) The Cat Yard

The Catio now has a fenced area off it where the cats can hang out and eat grass, explore under the porch, and chase bugs. This has made Simon and Winter very happy, and even Olive seems to enjoy it. Because of our cats’ track record of injuring themselves in bizarre ways, the yard is only open to them when we are out there to supervise.

2) The under $20 composter

Actually now it is an under $40 composter since we have expanded by adding a second can. This way, we can alternate them so we have one being filled, and one full that is ‘incubating’. The first one we made is really working out well; the compost is maturing fast and every day I just lock down the lid then roll the can around on it’s side a bit to redistribute the stuff.

3) Chris’ latest woodburning/pyrography project

This is the “Fairy Cat” plate I made for Joy. It’s a combination of woodburning, watercolor pencil, and oil pencil, done mostly freehand from my own design.

4) The Homemade sisal cat scratcher

This was Joy’s idea and she did most of the work, which involved wrapping 150′ of sisal on a board and stapling it. I cut the ramp rails and did the assembly. It has earned the Winter-Hermione seal of approval.

Our small garden has yielded it’s first harvest:

Do two small jalapeno peppers count as a ‘harvest’? They are small, and have a purplish tint to them, but are hot as fire! They went into the batch of fresh salsa we made this morning:

Joy has been going to the Waynesville tailgate market on Wednesday mornings and almost everything in the salsa came from either our garden, or the market. Yum!

We’ve got quite a few more peppers on the way, and the tomatoes (which are definitely NOT cherry tomatoes like we thought they were) are coming along nicely. But we’ve had no rain at all and have been hauling five gallon pails of water to the garden every evening to keep it all alive.

I’m a bit stumped here. What you see below is an (albeit blurry) picture of two brand new, formerly antless, ant bait stations, an hour after I placed them on the desk. This morning while I was doing paperwork for today’s service calls, I kept finding ant after ant on my mouse, hand, and keyboard, so after killing the fifteenth one (and getting sick of the resultant formic acid smell) I decided to put out the bait stations to see if I could determine where they were coming from.

The reason I say I am stumped is because there is no food in this room, never has been, and no one eats at the desk. WTF is the attraction (other than to annoy me, which I will have to say is working splendidly) of the desk?

I can now see where the trail leads: behind the scanner, down a Cat-5 cable, along the bookcase, under Cricket’s crate, and to a hole in the baseboard. I am not sure whether to let them be, and hope they take enough bait back to wipe out their nest, or to get out the diatomaceous earth and try to block their entrance. The latter is more appealing but will result in hundreds of ants trapped on this side of the barrier, and the others may just find another crack to get in through.

I think for now I will just abandon the desk to the ants until the temperature drops a bit lower than the current 89 degrees it is in our NON air-conditioned house.

…stupid ants are becoming the bane of my existence…

We found this female hercules beetle on our maple tree outside the front door. She is not quite as big as the palo verde beetles we had in Arizona, but very stocky and possibly heavier. We found out what she was later by doing a bit of research on the web, apparently the males have huge horns that they use to duel with and they are considered one of the strongest animals on the planet. Credit actually needs to go to Liam for pointing her out to us.