Composting

This summer I decided to try composting. I was intimidated at first because of all the rules about what you can put in, what you can't, what constitutes "green" compost vs. "brown" compost, the delicate balance between the two, the moisture content, the temperature, the turning....


Then my friend Cindy told me you can compost without following all those rules. She calls it "throw it all in a pile" composting. So I dove in. The house came with a big black plastic composte bin. It was a little beat up, with cracks and holes, but I decided it was good enough.

After careful consideration, I placed the compost bin near the deck, beside the house. I knew it would be 10 times more likely to get used if I didn't have to put shoes on to dump stuff in it. Plus, there isn't really a good place for it out by the alley.




It's been kind of fun to dump stuff in there all summer--it makes me feel less wasteful when I empty out the fridge of all the vegetables that went bad before I used them. One thing I learned, though, is that I should NOT put apples and pears in there. My backyard is carpeted with apples and pears that have fallen from the fruit trees, all in various stages of rot. So each weekend I dutifully pick them all up, and this year I decided I didn't have to bag them and put them by the garbage pickup, since I have a compost bin now. So I dumped the first weekend's load in there. Bad idea. A couple days later when I went out to toss some moldy lettuce in, I lifted the lid to a swarm of fruit flies, moths, and bees. A literal cloud of them flew up in my face. Yuck. So no more apples in there.


This morning I emptied the kitchen of veggies gone bad and wandered on out to the compost bin, wondering how the moth situation would be now that I haven't put any new apples in there for a few weeks. When I lifted the lid, I saw something dart really quickly from one side to the other. A MOUSE! *Shudder* I nearly fell down backing away as quickly as I did. There's just something about animals that move quickly. They freak me out. I can't stand those spiders that run really fast across the wall, either.


I wonder if I could have avoided this if I had done a better job of turning the compost often and keeping a layer of grass clippings on the top. I seriously might have to stop composting. I can't have mice hanging out chomping away that close to my house. It's only a matter of time before they find a way in, and I will be VERY UNHAPPY if I find mice in my house. I'm trying to live peacefully with all the little beetles I have this summer, but mice are a very different, yucky story.

Signs of Life

Today was beautiful. Spring is finally here. So I decided to walk to crafternoon at Mollie's. While I was waiting on the front step for Sarah to show up so we could walk together, I scanned the yard for signs of new spring growth. Instead, I found a sign of death. Yikes! It feels a little bit like a bad omen.

Nightmare on 45th Street

Tonight I woke up at 3:45 AM to the sound of an animal scratching around. I held still for a moment, trying to be sure I was hearing what I thought I was hearing. Perhaps the sound was coming from outside my window. I shook the bedspread vigorously, to test the theory. The noise paused. Darn. It was coming from inside the house. But maybe from inside the wall. I turned on the light. By this time the little varmint had started up again. I sat silently in the middle of the bed in the middle of the well-lit room. The sound didn't stop. It was coming from my closet. As I stared at the closet, watching for any slight rustle of clothes that would let me know whether this menace was inside the closet or inside the wall. I was not at all comforted by the fact that there is a two-foot square area of the wall in my closet that is a gaping hole covered by a sheet of corkboard, remnants of some long past plumbing job (the toilet is on the other side).

At that moment, a spider slides down a web from the ceiling just inches from my face. Before I can gasp, I've slapped it away with my hand. It lands on the floor and quickly hides under a shirt. Never again will clothes touch my floor. I had this rule when I was in high school and my room was in my parents' basement. It was instituted after I reached down to pick up a sweatshirt off the floor, and curled up all cozy in the folds was a dead mouse.

At this point, panicked at the intrusion of not one, but two very rude and icky houseguests, one of which was still scratching away industriously in the closet, I send Kate an urgent text: "Animal in house!" She immediately calls me from her mom's house in Rochester to talk me down. I'm not easily calmed by her assertion that it's probably just in the wall, since that means it has access to the basement and therefore the whole house.

Kate tells me I should close the closet doors and try to go back to sleep. I start trying to do just that, but these doors haven't been closed in quite some time, and offer a bit of resistance. I lean on the middle of the bi-fold to push them closed. The first one closes. I do the same for the second one, give it a little hip nudge, and holy mother of god my arm gets pinched in the crack. There's an immediate huge welt with a bright red line down the middle, and two piles of skin peeled back on either side.

I'm now awake in my bed, with both the overhead light and the lamp on, arm throbbing and unable to sleep for fear the critter will wake me up again. Plus I'm sick and I can't stop coughing anyway. This is not a good night.

Ant Infestation

I had to go out and buy some ant poison, because I had a bit of an infestation. That poison must have tasted delicious, because after I put it out, I had about 250 times more ants than before. But in the end it does seem to have worked. However, as I type, I see a bug crawling across my t-shirt. Aunt Lola is not happy.

Toads!

Last weekend, like every weekend from May 4th until the end of time, I was working in the yard, pulling up weeds and dead stuff. I was picking up handfuls of wet dead leaves when I ran across this guy. He startled me so much I almost fell over backwards. Toads. So small, so motionless, yet so terrifying!

Now I approach yard cleanup much more gingerly. If a couple of toads freak me out, I can't imagine what kind of screaming banshee I'd become if I ever reached into a pile of dead leaves and pulled out a snake.