Here's Another Post About Nothing

Like Seinfeld, Only Not Nearly As Clever

I’m trying to fill the space while Karyn’s absent, so here’s a new mixed-bag post.

First, A Mystery!

It has come to my attention that something is eating my fence.

I was outside with Hambone a couple of days ago and I saw a good 6” diagonal chunk chawed out of the bottom of one of the wooden pickets. My first thought was the neighbors’ dogs were trying to tunnel in so they and Hambone could finally properly murder each other.

However, their dogs are well-behaved and closely-monitored. Also, the chewed picket was in a place they couldn’t reach.

I walked the whole fence-line to see if it was rotting anywhere and the rest of it was fine. Then I scanned the yard to see if I could find telltale signs of wood shards in Hammy’s doody. In her younger days, it wouldn’t have even been a question if she ate it, as she chewed all the way through the drywall to the ducts in the last house, as well as almost entirely through a solid wood-core door, thanks to her separation anxiety. But after thirteen years of Prozac and kidney issues, she’s finally sort of chill.

I mean, yes, of course she’d fight the neighbors’ dogs Gladiator-style, but she has no particular beef with the fence.

How she sees herself:

How she is in real life:

Now yesterday, I noticed an entirely new chewed part, and it wasn’t in a spot where the neighbors’ dogs or Hambone could reach.

I talked to my neighbor and she said her dogs always make a beeline to that first spot, as does Hambone. So I’m going to set up a camera on the spot later today and see who’s doing it. It’s sad exactly how exciting the idea of going all Nature Nancy Drew is to me. We caught a fox on our front door camera and I looked at the footage every day until the system deleted it sixty days later and I was crushed.

I’m thinking it’s squirrels or rabbits, as I read that both have to gnaw on wood because their front teeth never stop growing.

In related news, we have to call an exterminator as there’s something alive in our basement. Last fall, I piled all my pumpkins against the side of the house for the wildlife to eat, and also in the hopes that this year’s ad hoc pumpkin patch won’t be the massive waste of $100 worth of seedlings I invested in last year. (How did I kill pumpkins? HOW??) A couple of days ago, I had a pile of old stuff in a bag in the basement. I had to transfer the stuff from said pile to a box for charity pickup. As I began to unload old pajamas and towels, HUNDREDS of pumpkin seeds fell out of the folded items, and I clearly did not put them there. (I feel like I’d recall if I had.) So something has set up shop down there, which is likely why our alarm went off when the motion sensor was tripped at 4:00am a few weeks ago. (Ha! No heart attack there!)

My hope is that it’s squirrels. Last fall, I told Fletch I thought we had squirrels in the attic over the garage and he didn’t believe me… until he opened the hood of his car and found acorns.

Point? Whatever I was feeding on the side of the house with the pumpkins seems to have found a hole in the side of the house and has moved in, avec seeds. The seeds seem too big for mice to carry, yet I don’t have an issue with mice being exterminated if it’s them. (Sorry, mice—get a better publicist.) But if it’s chipmunks or squirrels, I would want them saved and, in a perfect world, domesticated.

It’s like the action never stops around here. I’ll keep everyone posted.

Bad Touch

I almost had an incident at the gym yesterday.