Skip to main content

The Rotten Little Buggers!

No, I am not talking about the U. S. House of Representatives!  I am talking about pack rats!  (The difference is that I have a soft and forgiving place in my heart for pack rats:  they are working hard to make a living.)

 Two or three days ago, I bought two bags of bird seed to feed my feathered free loaders in the back yard, but the press of time and my own procrastination caused me to leave both bags in the bed of the pickup.  Today I proposed to put the bird seed into two or three five-gallon buckets in the back yard, from whence I fill the bird feeder.  But the buckets out back, for some odd reason, were tipped over and emptied of what little seed had been there.  I have not solved that mystery, unless it is a deer;  something, at least, capable of getting over the back yard fence.

 Then I looked into the bed of the pickup.  Pack rats had chewed holes in both bags, and shoveled out more than two gallons of seed into the pickup bed.  Rotten little buggers!  Not only that:  they defecated into their tailgating spread.  So that part of the evidence is tossed outside the backyard fence, as a reward to the perpetrators.

 The rest of the bird seed is stored in five gallon buckets in back, lashed to a tree branch to hold them upright.


Now we shall see!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Watching a Formerly Sane Man Descend into Abject Religion

If you read the previous post, you know the apparatus, pictured here, is a torture machine. There are ten of them in our house, purportedly to circulate air to dry out all the problems caused by a water leak. We live in Tucson:  it has not rained in Tucson since the Gadsden Purchase. A mudslide the size of the one in Washington State could course through our neighborhood and it would be bone-dry and stone-hard before it quit moving. I suspect it is the CIA, and probably the Border Patrol! We are, after all, only about a hundred miles from the border. I fully expect a large suburban assault vehicle to pull up to the house, and for lots of people with UPPER CASE LETTERS on their shirts to interrogate us, and I will have to explain that all the drugs I use come from Walgreens and Total Wine. But it won't work.  Our minds are going. We are getting short with each other and, if they promise to turn off the fans, I will confess to having invented the Arab...
Post a Comment
Read more