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maybe wrap dead mice in plastic
Wednesday, September 27 2023
Gretchen had me take the dogs to Petsmart today to get their monthly nail trim, and it would've been easy had Neville been any good on a leash. But his response to be tugged gently in the direction we need to go in is to plant his legs firmly on the ground at an obtuse angle to the direction I am pulling. In some places I can drag him like this without much difficulty, but today he did that in the roadway out in front of Petsmart. By the time I'd gotten him inside, I'd given up on leading him by leash and picked him up so I could carry him. Ramona is much better on leash, so long as she isn't distracted.
On the way out of Petsmart after their nails were trimmed (technically they were ground down), Neville peed on two different things inside the store, including the anti-shoplifting coil at the front door.
I then went to Home Depot to see what sort of live-capture mouse traps they sold. It was pretty much the same depressing story as it had been at Lowes, though the one live-capture trap they sold didn't look like it was going to be effective, so I didn't buy anything. Judging from what the products promise to do, people want to kill the rats or mice in their houses, but they never want to see or handle the dead bodies. This had me thinking that if a mouse trap could be made that wrapped the corpses of dead mice in a layer of opaque plastic, Americans would be standing in line to buy them. That way people could add dead-mice-in-plastic to their already horrifyingly unrecyclable & uncompostable waste streams coming from disposable diapers (human shit wrapped in plastic), used Keurig cups (coffee grounds wrappped in plastic) and Juicero packs (crushed fruits wrapped in plastic). Hmm, it makes you wonder why the Juicero never caught on.
Back at the house, I finally got around to removing some large hunks of wood that had been sitting in front of the garage for months. Some of them were chunks of tree of heaven (which I am finding unsplittable) and others were of silver maple. We'd be having guests tomorrow, so I've been trying to tidy up the outside of our house. These chunks had been sitting there so long that they'd each accumulated numerous residents beneath them, mostly in the form of large night crawlers, salamanders, forest slugs, pillbugs, and centipedes. U felt bad destroying their homes and tried to mitigate things somewhat by sweeping up the denizens (along with ample worm castings) and throwing it in the unmowed grass just north of the raised beds of our garden.
This evening Gretchen came home and made an Asian peanut noodle dish for Ray and Nancy, who would be coming over prior to Gretchen and Nancy going off to see some movie. But ony Nancy came over, and we all ate our dinner in the living room in front of the fire (since the rest of the house was cold). Nancy remarked that Oscar was being surprisingly social (which he was) and I agreed, saying that he's become a totally different cat.
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