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some sort of comapssionate gesture
Thursday, October 9 2008
We weren't happy with the results from the flea bombing of two days ago (I was still finding fleas on Sally), so we bombed the house again, this time with five separate bombs. I put three of those into rooms in the basement, one in the living room, and one in the teevee room. Before I activated them, I swept up any cobwebs I could reach with the broom and put any spiders lucky enough to cling to it outdoors. This was a fairly empty gesture considering that the spiders were indoor spiders and the season is entering mid-October, but it struck me as unfair to gas them without making some sort of comapssionate gesture. (My mother used to do the same thing back when she fleabombed my childhood home, though I think she actually put the spiders in egg cartons and then brought them back in once the house was aired out.)
To make sure no fleas would ride out the bombing on our critters, we gave both Sally and Eleanor flea baths before their morning walk. I also combed Clarence thoroughly with the flea comb; he's the only cat who hadn't received an effective dose of FrontlineTM. (We'd hit all the critters with FrontlineTM some weeks ago, but it had proved to be a dud batch. We'd subsequently bought four more feline doses of Frontline, so the only truly-Frontlined critters are the cats, with the exception of Clarence.)
While the house was stewing in its flea-bomb atomosphere, the weather outside was gorgeous: both sunny and warm. Gretchen sat on a blanket and read and played her guitar while I continued work on the footings for the greenhouse walls. By the end of the day I'd used four eighty pound bags of concrete and come close to finishing the last stretch of footing, the most tricky stretch of all: the one beneath the south wall. Like the north wall footing, this footing ranges in height from zero inches to about fourteen inches, though I stepped it by the height of a concrete block about midway so as to limit my concrete consumption.
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