Deb, you've read "My Family and Other Animals", right? I love the names of the different houses, the Strawberry Pink Villa et al. I have loved all of my houses thus far, though I haven't owned any of them (YET), and see each one as demarcating a specific period in my life.
This one is the 1900 House, and will always be about the sozlet's babyhood. Memorizing which parts of the floor were creakiest so as to avoid them while walking her around to sleep, that kind of thing.
(The hubby is still waiting to find out whether he has any job offers -- out of three possible, one has tanked due to departmental incompetence, which was especially excruciating because everyone tells him he was the front runner -- and so we are pacing and chewing fingernails and rending garments and generally not dealing with the suspense well AT ALL. Will we be moving this fall [really July] or NOT??? It's crazy-making, I tell ya.)
Yikes! Good luck!
Everyone laughs when they drive around with me, and I point out my ex-houses - I was a student for a long time, and shared various houses - but they do, indeed, represent memories - some great - some not so great.
Since we moved into the current house (a characterless rental, like the last one, that should rightfully be demolished and rebuilt by somebody with a vision and a license), the dogs have taken it upon themselves to revisit history by excavating the backyard. Since the backyard was nothing much to begin with, this has been somewhat tolerated, though it does form bad habits for when the house and yard are loved and nice.
We've learned that at some point the property we live on was the site of either a small manufacturing plant of some sort or an industrial dumping site. Many rusty gears, pins, and spikes have been brought into the house as gifts. The ground (oddly, just like the last yard) is also a repository for numerous old bottles. These aren't played with; generally they are just exposed and left to be found -- and many are inconveniently broken when turning the oily, clay-heavy dirt over in the hopes that something might grow in it.
This weekend, though, provided the impetus to fence the area off and reseed it with grass. One of the dogs -- the smaller, more excitable one, I think -- dug up a bone. The bone was intact and had no marks on it of any kind, though it was quite old and decayed, so small knife nicks might have been obliterated with time. They've dug up a number of bones before, so this wasn't really much to remark upon at first. The other bones, though, are generally easily identifiable as steak bones or ribs. This new bone bears a disturbing resemblance to the ulna of a somewhat short person; comparing it to my own forearm, I'd estimate the height at about 5'3" or 5'4". I prefer to think it came from a pig, myself...
So now, hopefully, grass will grow over the ground and put local history back to rest. At the very least, it should help us get our deposit back.
!!!!! A greened sepulchre????
What dogs find is altogether weird - more is unearthed from yards than ever went into them, I say. I have always imagined a comedy where the dog unearths successively bigger items, which eventually dwarf the house - crescendoing with the fully articulated skeleton of a full grown blue whale, perhaps?
Any dog owner would understand.
man, soz, you gotta figure out where you're going.
Speaking of naming houses...
A particular house I lived in will always be remembered by me and by a few others as "the 514 House" -- uncreatively named after the address. It was a very, um, stimulating place to be, though.
A tattered Victorian, the 514 House began life at the turn of the 20th century (or so) as a modest summer home. What had been the formal dining room was, by the time I was there, the living room. The front parlor, with it's four walls of windows (it was a hexagonal room opening out on the street) was now a bedroom. The door between the erstwhile and what had been the sitting room (situated alongside the dining room/living room) had been turned into a closet and the room into another bedroom. Upstairs were two more "proper" bedrooms; because the house sported a steeply peaked roof and had no attic, these rooms had a limited amount of space in which a person could walk around. There was another tiny room upstairs that was my bedroom for a time; by the time I moved out it had been thankfully turned into an office: the room was about eight feet square, most of it overshadowed by a 45? roof/ceiling. A small gabled window thankfully let in a little light and gave me enough room to stand up and put on my pants.
The kitchen was at the back of the house, and it would have looked out on a great view of the boardwalk and the bay in the distance. Instead it looked out on a trailer. The trailer housed Bob, who worked as a handyman for our landlord and was a little touched. Rumor was he'd been working a roof job for our landlord and fallen off on his head; the landlord felt bad for him and let him have a place to live in exchange for his ongoing services. The trailer had no septic system, and the crawlspace of the house smelled vaguely of sewage. It was hard to be angry at Bob, though. He would eventually be diagnosed with diabetes after he slipped into a coma on a sidewalk in an unsavory neighborhood and nobody could find him for a few days.
The house did have a basement with about a five and a half foot ceiling. A very short couple lived down there, a bit like the diminutive Alfred Jarry on his half-floor, where he lived at about the same time this house was built. Instead of a fondness for bicycles, absinthe, and anarchy, though, these folks had an enormous catfish in an aquarium (who seemed to like being scratched at the base of his skull; more like a cat than a fish) and they tolerated but never attended our occasional loud and, by virtue of their location and visibility, public parties.
Another Victorian stood alongside it. This had been turned into a boarding house for an astonishing assortment of freaks. While I was there, there was a 6'9" near-catatonic man who probably weighed about 130 pounds, stood by the window under a naked light bulb all night, and seemed to subsist entirely on a diet of 64 ounce coffees and 40 ounce malt liquors from the 7-11 down the street. He'd totter off down there about 3 times a day. The round trip -- about a third of a block in length -- took him roughly 45 minutes, and if he was in the way when you wanted to pull out of the driveway you just had to wait for him to get past. Once a year he shaved his head and beard; this was the only grooming he performed. There was also an old hippie gardener (the brother of a woman I'd vaguely known a couple of years previously) who maintained a fleet of three absolutely identical blue Tercel hatchbacks in the driveway. A very energetic and very fat man lived there, as well, and he seemed to be sucking the life out of the tall catatonic man. A previous resident told me that the house had a very small water heater, which explained the tantrums the fat man (really, I'm talking about a quarter-ton here) sometimes threw in the shower. He'd jump up and down, bellowing and shaking the house, whenever the water went cold. He drove a very small truck which tilted noticeably to the right. The bartender who rented the front room was not particularly remarkable in and of herself, but her boyfriend had a penchant for getting in loud arguments in the driveway at about 4:00 am with his friends, which was generally followed by a loud reconciliation and bottle smashing. The shed behind the house had at one time housed a neighborhood junkie of long standing, but they'd overdosed and only been discovered because they left the water running so that eventually their sink flooded and water started pouring out the door. Now it was rented to a prostitute who sunbathed naked and spent a lot of time in Bob's trailer.
Our house had twice been visited by drawn guns. In one instance, the hooker and her boyfriend ran back along the side of our house and hid in our backyard. This was shortly followed by several gunshots, one of which hit the front of the house. The other time the police came looking for Bob, who'd apparently been up to something in the 7-11 parking lot. We didn't know where he'd gone, and they apparently didn't think too or didn't want to go into the ****-smelling crawlspace, from which Bob emerged the next morning.
One spring, my housemate Brendan decided to cut back the blackberries and reclaim the backyard. When he did so, he discovered tons of bricks buried in the ground. It eventually came to light that in the '89 Loma Prieta earthquake our landlord had lost three or four houses, and had used our backyard (which had then been much lower) as a dumping ground for the ruined chimneys, which he then filled in with landfill. Our house had survived the earthquake unharmed, though it did creak and sway whenever somebody ran down the narrow stairs. The windows had survived as well: you could see that the glass had been distorted from a century or so of standing upright.
On the other side of the house was an innocuous looking motel, which catered mainly to drug dealers and prostitutes, but would also fill up with vacationing families on summer weekends, who apparently figured that such a new-looking motel on the main road to the boardwalk must be perfectly savory. Late on Saturday nights, the fathers could often be seen peering through the crack in the curtains at the flashing lights, police officers, and prostrate men and women in the parking lot.
Across the street was the resource center for nonviolence, which had a great Mexican mural across its front and was a frequent staging ground for United Farm Workers protests, which turned our driveway into a parking lot for TV news vans.
All in all, a great house, even in the absence of any sort of centralized heating system. I've never lived anywhere with such energy and vibrance, our charming-but-ragged little Victorian sitting in the middle of this spirited chaos. If you were short on cash and couldn't afford to hit the bars, you'd just take your drinks out on the front porch and watch the freaky world roll by, and on sunny afternoons everything was settled down and the world was beautiful.
There's probably a cookie-cutter apartment building there by now.
Oh wow. Great stuff, patiodog. Reminds me a great deal of The Co-op By the Lake, which I've referred to often and will come back to.
(Very long stuff. The gf has posited using it as the setting for a book, but since neither of us will ever write* one, it's up to one of the other former denizens.)
* Initially, this was spelled "right." While I don't have a problem with most of my accidental typos, such an asinine misspelling begged for correction. "Correct me! Correct me, please!" it begged.
Go for it, dude! What you already wrote, presumably off the cuff, is killer bee.
Depending on how serious you would want it to be, "killer bee" reminds me of Kinky Friedman and his "mysteries" which are really an excuse to string various character studies and humorous observations along a very basic "plotline." I could imagine the house as the backdrop for some sort of whodunnit.
heehee - we had a house a bit like that! Not so mucc character, though. I will tell some stories later.
A couple of squirrels seem to have invaded my loft ! I had my builder poke around and he found a small hole, but that has been plugged and today morning I heard them running around again !!!
Any ideas how to get rid of them ? I am thinking portable ultra sonic pest controllers - but am afraid that they might make the dogs in my neighbourhood go crazy !
Squirrels are cute - I agree, but when they run arnd yr loft at 0600 in the morning on Sunday creating a racket u just want to drop the mother of all bombs on them !!
As I have just tortured myself with a move from one apartment, small one bedroom to a much larger two bedroom apartment the new abode had not much personality yet. I would add that the old place was making me nuts and the new apartment is still stacked with boxes has created some interesting paths so one can move about.
Carlotta was my main concern as cats generally do not like to move or any change their circumstances but in this instance she seems more than happy. Bean can no longer find her and she happily suns herself on the enclosed balcony every afternoon. If and when Bean does spot Carlotta she jumps on top of a box and is able to tease Bean at will. This teasing of Bean by Carlotta seems to have made up for the disturbance in her life.
Going from 798 square feet to 1100 is a big change it will be interesting to see how this mess develops and what type of personality it will take on. Same stuff plus things that were in storage so the tale is yet to be told.
Squirrels in your loft, Gautam? Sure they aren't rats? Can you get a humane trap, and release them outside? For possums it helps to put a den for them up in a tree - dunno if it works for squiggles.
Hope the new place works out, JD - does it have a good feel?
My cats are very blase about moving - except I had an Abyssinian once whom it made go weird. Siamese, I think, do not mind change, and they seem not to care a toss as long as I am there.
I have a friend who is getting a series of wire tunnels and enclosures put into the garden for her cats - all getting very high tech, balancing animals and their safety and need for stimulation,and the needs of the wild-life.
The big, sulphur-crested cockatoos are gathering on my building, and in the park across the road. There was a gang of them on a balcony railing when I got home tonight - I bet if I bought them some seed they would be at mine! They are so big and noisy - and they have wise, cynical, humourous faces - they look as though they have covered the waterfront and like beer and dirty jokes - but also love nature and their wild, free life.
Sadly I think, if I encouraged them, they would take to terrorising the cats - purely for the fun of it - and the thought of waking to their raucous quarreling and calling, like so many drunken midnight choirs, at sparrow's fart every morning as they gathered on my balcony for breakfast is not so very appealing!
dlowan, these squirells seemed to have made a home in my garden (my neighbour has a huge tree which overhangs in my garden) - and come in the loft only when they need some shelter. So I am afraid that a "squirrel" trap is not the answer. I have no problems in them living outside (infact when they play on my conservatory roof, they look adorable) its only when they get in the loft that I blow my top !
Gautam, my mom has this problem, too, and did EVERYTHING she could, didn't work, she gave up, and they eventually disappeared.
My, isn't that encouraging. :Shock: Try this:
Quote:Q: How do I get squirrels out of my attic?
A: Try soaking cotton balls in peppermint oil and placing them around the attic. It's not an unpleasant smell for humans, but it is too strong for squirrels. Please consider doing this before setting live traps and relocating the squirrels. The squirrel you relocate could be a mother, and the babies surely won't survive without her.
This is quite discouraging but rather funny:
http://www.ccreations.com/squirrls.htm
Somewhat more encouraging:
http://www.factsfacts.com/MyHomeRepair/squirrels.htm
Hmmm - you have all ignored my post about the breeding of super squirrels that you are doing!
gautam - -sigh --- block all the holes they can get in by - trap any left in your loft - release them outside - put some squirrel dreys in the trees as an alternative. get me?
Yes, my morning-befuddled brain does not deal well with moral ambiguity and philosophical implications. "Squiwels -- not yours! Birdies'!" Now that I understand.
Soz, I got the builders to close the most apparent point of entry - but they seem to have made another one - which I just cant figure out where. Cunning creatures they are !!!
Trap ?? No way - I don't think I will be able to handle a squirrel, even though it is in a trap <yech>
Peppermint oil sounds good - will try it this weekend - else a high frequency sound repellant or the pest control people <sigh>
