My Blog

We lost our “kitten”, Velvet, on Wednesday, September 19th. She passed in her sleep after a long and spoiled life.

We will miss her company, her purring, and the way she always knew when we were blue or not feeling well.

Avast! Another year be under the keel and it be Talk Like a Pirate Day once more!

In me voyages I stumbled across a troupe of performers that I be enjoying, Alestorm! They be calling themselves a Scottish Metal Pirate Band and they be a sight to behold and while the sounds they make could shiver me timbers they speak me language!

Me mates do think me a bit odd for switchin’ between traditional shanties and the likes of Alestorm thoughout the day on me magic box, but they be daft!

So, ye scurvy dogs, may the the winds be fair at ever at yer back!

— Cap’n Rich

This year was the first time I flew back to school after the summer (leaving the family in Florida this time, too), and also my first year not to live on the third floor where I always have (I already walked up by mistake once and almost said I lived there still!) I am now in one of the upperclassmen dorm in the third wing of the building I used to live in (and on the 2nd floor). I have my own room for the only time since I was very little!

I have moved things into my room, but am still working on motivating myself to unpack. Part of the delay is due to the fact that I spent part of Sunday and most of Monday on a trip up to the UP (Upper Peninsula) so I could walk across the Mackinac (pronounced MACK-in-aw, like the city even though it isn’t spelled that way) Bridge between the two parts of Michigan on Labor Day.

Apparently this is an annual thing in Michigan (55th annual according to some people’s T-shirts), where the governor makes a speech and half the bridge is closed to cars to allow normally forbidden foot-traffic. It was really neat to get to walk across the bridge we drove over last year since I remember thinking how neat such a thing would be back then while riding in the car. I tried to get some pictures of the bridge structure, but since it was so crowded there are people in most of the pictures.

Oh well, then you get a sense of how it felt to walk across with the thousands of other people who crossed the bridge that day. I especially liked walking across the grates so I could look down at the water so far below without being at all worried about falling or dropping anything.

Today, after the 5+ miles (not including to and from the actual bridge part) of a hike, I can definitely feel it. At least it was downhill after the halfway point, and there was usually a nice breeze. Now I’m sitting in my dorm room with two fans on high to keep me from sweating. I’ve only had one class so far, the rest start tomorrow, but I have been having fun visiting with people! I’ve got some more guests due back soon, so this will have to be all for now. Until the next interesting event at college!

-Ashley

It started a few years ago, when we got our education in pesky non-pest removal. Florida is full of ants, insects and various things that you must hire pest control for, unless you like having those things crawling around on the inside of your house. But once you get to the mammal type pests over a certain size, you have to deal with a different type of company. So that is why I called them non-pests, otherwise the pest control companies should take care of them, right?

The first time we actually needed help was when some raccoons had figured out how to push on the aluminum soffit under the roof edge to make a hole large enough to get into our attic and we heard them roaming around up there. We looked online and found out that the longer you took to get rid of them the bigger the mess you would have to deal with, and the larger the overall cost. We wanted to be nice to the animals and hired someone to make sure that they were no longer in the attic, to seal things up, and to remove the animals that had figured out that we had an attic. (Apparently wire and the correct type of foam is both a raccoon deterrent as well as it being considered rat and squirrel proofing.) This company was good, but unfortunately too good. Since they placed multiple traps, to catch the animals that might be exiting the attic as well as entering our fenced yard, they ended up catching quite a few raccoons, as well as an opossum. They were kind to the animals and would relocate the animals elsewhere, but every time something was caught there was a fee for relocation as well as resetting the traps that the raccoons had removed the bait (marshmallows) from. It is really nice having a conservation area behind our backyard, but there is a potential for an endless supply of wildlife to be removed. Once we became fairly certain there was no way there were any raccoons in the attic we put an end to our paying for any more rodent road-trips.

We are not sure why they seem to enjoy our house, especially the roof with the solar panel, as evidenced by the debris left there. Our next door neighbors’ house is an exact mirror of ours, so it should be just as appealing, and the neighbors on both sides have bird feeders that double as mammal feeders for the squirrels and raccoons, so they should like their houses better, but they were surprised to hear we had any trouble.

The next memorable time the raccoons invaded they tried to dig through the window in our loft, that is easily accessible from their favorite roof. After making a hole in the screen they continued digging, even after we lifted the shade and came face to face with them. It was dark at the time so I think they could see us better than we could see them, but they continued trying that unsuccessfully for quite a few days.

It seems that it is this time of year that they care that our house exists, even though they don’t care every year. So the day before we wanted to leave to bring Ashley back to college last year, pieces of the foam from the rat proofing started appearing in the yard. We made a quick makeshift repair, since obviously the warranty had long since expired, and hoped for the best. We found a bit of that in the yard later also, but not enough that they could have gotten back into the attic.

During all the invasions the raccoons had decided that climbing up the corner of our screen enclosure was the most popular method of getting up and down off the roof. Sadly it has caused the screen there to get quite shredded. So the point of this entire post is that the raccoon(s) have made such a large hole that they can get into our screen enclosure, and we got some pictures. It is slightly unsettling that the raccoon stayed around while I got Rich, Amber and Alyssa from inside the house to see it, and that it stayed there until we got some pictures. It figured it was safe where it was and didn’t have any reason to go anywhere until Rich shook a can with pennies in it to scare it.

Hopefully they will soon lose interest in our house again for at least a year. It is funny how something can be both cute and annoying…

Karen