4 posts tagged “house”
Okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but I woke up early this morning and the bed was shaking. I thought that maybe Pepper was taking a very vigorous bath (hee), but she wasn't even on the bed. And Mr. G was laying there like a log. I figured I must still be dreaming, so I went back to sleep. And then 20 minutes later we woke up to the news that we'd had a moderate (5.2-magnitude) earthquake!
When I was living in Peru, I remember waking up in the middle of the night and going out to the dining room, where all the plates were shaking and the room was tilting side to side. I have no idea what the magnitude was, but it was pretty scary for a little kid. I know that there were other earthquakes during the years we lived there, but that's the one I remember.
You'd think that, having experienced a terremoto before, I would have recognized what the bed-shaking meant. But we just don't get earthquakes around here! And I thought animals were supposed to warn you about this kind of thing ... Pepper, you failed!
So today one of the things on my to-do list was to wash Pepper's food bowls. As usual, I put the dirty ones in the dishwasher and retrieved a clean replacement from the pantry floor (which is where we keep all of Pepper's fine dinnerware). Glancing down as I picked up the clean bowl, I noticed that, curiously, it had sawdust in the bottom of it. And then I saw the sawdust MOVING.
I urgently called Mr. G over to inspect my creepy-crawly find, and upon further exploration he discovered that, in fact, these little bugs were all over the pantry. The bugs were so small that the only thing we could tell for sure was that they were light in color (like sawdust) and very tiny (again, like sawdust); they looked more like fleas than ants or worms (but they weren't fleas). We found many carcasses and some live critters on the outside of several containers; more alarmingly, we even found a few bugs on the inside of a couple of containers. Needless to say, we threw out multiple garbage bags full of tainted (and potentially tainted) pantry staples today. I don't even want to guess at how much it's going to cost to replace everything.
Does anyone have any idea what these bugs are or where they could have come from? Mr. G is convinced that they are recent invaders, but I am inclined to think they have been around for a while and we just didn't notice them because they are so tiny. I mean, is this a job for an exterminator, or will the purge (accompanied by a scrub-down and thorough vacuuming) do the trick?
We have a rabbit's nest in our backyard. When Mr. Guycita found it earlier this summer, I was inordinately excited at the prospect of spying baby bunnies through the kitchen window. So I wasn't too surprised yesterday when Mr. Guycita (who had been mowing the yard) burst into the house and declared, "The nest has babies in it." My initial joy, however, turned to horror as he continued, "I just saw a cat kill them." Apparently, Mr. Guycita was entering the backyard when he witnessed a neighborhood cat give chase to (and easily catch) two tiny bunnies. He told me not to look out the kitchen window, but—although I was sad about the bunnies—I was very curious to see what was going on in the backyard. The scene before me was straight out of National Geographic, only on a much smaller scale and with a decidedly greener background than the Sahara: The big cat was hunched over its prey, tearing apart the flesh and devouring it. Mr. Guycita went out later to get rid of any leftover scraps, but he could find nothing. He says that the cat did not leave even one bone uneaten! It must have had one of those moms that won't let you leave the table until you've cleaned your plate.
The back of our house was egged this week. Mr. Guycita discovered the mess while mowing the yard yesterday. He is sure that someone is out to get us, but I think it was a random act. Kids like to hang out on the walking trail that's behind our house at night, especially now that the weather is getting warmer.
I suppose it could possibly have been the children of the neighbors who we had to confront a few months after moving in (their dog kept pooping in our yard, and their kids kept trampling our new flowerbeds). But that was several years ago; the kids are older now, and the dog belonged to the stepdad who is now the ex. So I still think it must have been someone else.
What's funny is that, although the culprit threw three eggs, only one hit the house. Mr. Guycita found the other two intact in the grass. What a wimpy vandal!
