Category Archives: pterodactyls

get off my lawn

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This morning my husband told me a story from his childhood. He talked about how, when he was a kid, he lived in a place that didn’t have a lot of green spaces for the neighborhood kids to play and so they played stuff like rugby and football (soccer if you’re American) in the streets between homes, and in peoples’ driveways. He said there was an old lady across the way who didn’t like them doing this and would stick her head out the door or window yelling something like “take that ball away” repeatedly in an effort to try and get the kids to clear off. Then he said, “when you yell at the squirrels on the bird feeders, that’s what it makes me think of”. Like, literally his whole point of telling me about this formative memory of his childhood was to draw a comparison between that crotchety old lady…and me.

And I suppose he’s not entirely wrong.

You might remember last winter, when I was complaining about how the grey squirrels would launch themselves off the railing or the snowbank, trying to get up to the small bird feeder I had suction-cupped to my actual window, and how hearing them bodily hit the exterior wall over and over again was driving both me and the dog kind of bat-shit. Back at the start of THIS winter, determined to be a problem solver as always, I got two bird feeders and hung them up across from my office window. Obviously I wouldn’t be able to see the birds as up-close as with the window feeder, but at least I wouldn’t be listening to the dog scream-bark about the squirrels thudding and scrabbling against the wall all day every day.

I set the feeders up once the danger of bears had pretty much passed, and immediately had a flock of juncos (the birds, not the pants…you have to be of a certain age to get that reference) visit. The chickadees came shortly after, as well as the sparrows. Everything was pretty copacetic for a while. Then one day, I noticed a red squirrel at one of the feeders. It seemed very polite, sitting nicely on the edge of the feeder eating one seed at a time and dropping the empty hulls down on the ground while it quietly took in the scenery. I have no beef with that type of behavior and so I let it snack in peace. We went a couple more weeks with no issues, but the calm was clearly too good to last…

…because then came the grey squirrels.

Grey squirrels are cute, but they’re absolute birdseed hoovers. And worse, they’re destructive. They’re smart enough to know that if they can’t get at the bird feeder directly, then bringing it down is their next most direct route to stuffing their faces. Within two days of the grey squirrels showing up, I went out to find the roof of one of my feeders pulled apart – the squirrels had been hanging upside down from the edge of it to get at the seeds because they couldn’t fit their fat asses onto the perches at the sides, and had ended up pulling the roof halves right off the nails of the piece holding them together.

I fixed the roof and decided the squirrels no longer got a free pass going forward. I might not be able to keep them out of the feeders entirely, but I could at least make them have to work harder for their ill-gotten gains, and be really fucking annoying to them in the process.

I have this crow call I bought a couple years ago, thinking that I’d bring crows to the yard with it and finally get to live the Crazy Bird Hag In The Woods With Pet Crows life of my dreams. As it happens, that didn’t pan out because crow calls are actually quite difficult to master. If you don’t have the right technique, the thing basically just ends up sounding like you’re blowing through a glorified kazoo…but it’s a loud, sharp sound that is very startling if you’re not expecting it, so I started using it to scare the squirrels off.

Again, I will give credit where it’s due: grey squirrels are smart. The first maybe 20 times I blew the crow call at them, they dove for cover and would stay away for a few hours at a time. Eventually they got used to it, though. Not so used to it that they completely ignored it, but used enough to it that they’d just retreat to a nearby tree branch and sit there staring over at me like, “Bitch, please. The second you move away from the window, we’re going right back to that feeder”. Which they did. Repeatedly. I switched it up on them and started either banging on the window or opening the window and hissing or yelling at them when I caught them on the feeders and again, that worked for a few days, but now they just hop off a little ways and wait for me to go back to my desk. My next plan is to try Slinkies on the shepherd’s crook that the feeders hang off of, but that will have to wait another couple days because said Slinkies haven’t arrived yet.

I’m fairly sure it’s all for naught at this point, as the feeders are close enough to the propane tank that I believe the squirrels could just jump from the top of the tank on to the feeders if they wanted to, and the ground is frozen with a bunch of snow on the ground at this point so I can’t easily move them until spring. But I have to keep trying, just out of principle.

Plus, you know, at least I’m yelling at rodents and not actual kids, so I’m not QUITE as bad as that old lady my husband (rather un-generously, I feel) compared me to. In theory. I’m sticking with that.

“You know you don’t even sound like a crow, right? Like, you don’t even sound like a BIRD. You sound like a middle aged woman with a little bit of disposable income, an internet connection, and too much time on her hands. I’m just saying.” – that squirrel, probably.

what have I done

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A couple weeks ago, the weather was dreary and depressing around here. I mean, it’s late autumn in New England. The odds of dreary, depressing weather are usually pretty good. Anyway – on this dreary day, I was looking up information about forcing flower bulbs indoors. I have some mini daffodil bulbs I bought as a pot of actual blooming flowers last spring and then, predictably, left them in their pot out by my front steps all summer long and never put them into the ground. The bulbs had started to sprout new growth recently and it got me thinking about whether I could just bring the pot inside, let them grow over the winter, and end up with another cheerful pot of mini daffodils next spring. As with most things in life, the answer was, “well, it’s not quite THAT easy, buckaroo”, which was just about the time I got distracted with the idea of instead buying some crocus bulbs to plant outside for spring. There are currently three individual crocuses that come up in our yard each spring and the amount of joy they bring my serotonin-starved brain come late March or early April is hard to quantify. The idea of being able to multiply that joy many times over simply by digging some holes and dumping some bulbs in and then forgetting about them was especially appealing on aforementioned dreary and depressing day, so I indulged in a little retail therapy and bought a selection of crocus bulbs. I got two different sets: one is just crocuses, and the other is a “Farewell Winter” mix (which I immediately renamed as the “Fuck Off, Winter” mix) that has crocuses, mini hyacinths, and…I don’t know, other stuff. I’m not a botanist. I’m just a person with seasonal depression, regular depression, a credit card, and poor impulse control.

So, I placed my order for the bulbs. There was a warm spell coming up in the forecast and I thought, ‘perfect, I’ll be able to get the bulbs in the ground while it’s warm and they’ll be so happy that, come April, they’ll completely fix my life and everything will be glorious’. A few days later, I realized I hadn’t had any sort of shipping info yet, so I looked up my order on the website. The order still showed as pending, but the company is based in Connecticut, which is only like a four hour drive from here (which, for the non-Americans that might be reading this: that’s what qualifies as relatively local here. I know, it’s bonkers, but this place is huge), so I thought to myself, you know, no big deal. Once they ship, it won’t take long to get here and I can still get the bulbs in the ground while the weather is warm. Certainly before we have any hard frosts, anyway.

I’m sure you can see where this is going by now.

I placed the order on Oct 20th. It shipped…yesterday, Oct 31st. Not only is the few days of warm weather we had long gone, but we’ve now had two nights of hard frosts with temps in the low 20s. Conventional wisdom with bulbs is to plant a few weeks before the first hard frost (which, as an aside, I have always found that to be problematic logic because how the fuck am I supposed to predict when the hard frost hits, you know? This is New Hampshire. It’s like the weather spins a roulette wheel every couple days and you get what you get. Snow in mid May! 75 degrees for three days in mid October! Mother Nature does what she wants and we all just hold on for the ride. But I digress). That window has clearly slammed shut and been locked for the season. Crocus bulbs specifically are pretty hardy though…they come up through the snow, for fuck’s sake…so I’m thinking probably putting them in the ground after a few hard frosts isn’t going to ruin them.

Today, I got an email from UPS saying that my shipment has been delayed and that they’ll be delivering the bulbs tomorrow rather than today. Ok, fine, I wasn’t going to get to do anything with them until the weekend anyway. While looking at the tracking info, something struck me, though: the weight of the package shows as 15lbs.

Fifteen. POUNDS.

I guess I didn’t realize just how many bulbs I was ordering? Because I was not expecting it to be 15 GODSDAMNED POUNDS. Like…that’s a lot of holes to dig. And I am not what you’d call a very ambitious person when it comes to physical labor. I pay someone to mow my lawn. I whine when I have to shovel a path through the snow for the dog. I will 100% call roadside assistance to change a flat tire rather than do it myself. I am a modern woman who certainly CAN do hard things, but I’ll be honest, I’d kind of rather not most of the time if it can be helped. Which, should I have taken this into consideration prior to hitting that “Place Order” button? Probably, but that’s really giving me more credit than I deserve in the realm of capacity for forethought.

So, yeah. It might take me several weekends worth of hole-digging to get these shits planted. I may very well be out here in the yard digging through snow to plant them by the time all is said and done. But you know what? Fuck it. Worst case scenario, none of them take and I have created a makeshift snack vending machine situation in my yard for the local rodents come spring. Best case scenario, I put all the bulbs in the ground, completely forget where I put any of them, and then have the unmitigated joy of seeing them all pop up around the yard in the spring.

Best BEST case scenario, I get all the joy of seeing the crocuses coming up and also have some kind of life-changing revelation about how hard physical labor is a means to salvation or some other Puritan bullshit and I suddenly gain a new interest in doing yard work and cleaning my house.

I’m not going to hold my breath on that one, though.

I want a whole yard full of this in April.

snoozeberries

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I bought some weed gummies last weekend. They’re called Snoozeberries and they’re a 5mg 1:1 THC:CBD situation that’s supposed to promote restful sleep. Yes, I am the boring person who buys cannabis products not to get high, but just to try and sleep better.

Look, I’m no stranger to weed. It was often easier to get than alcohol when we were in high school, especially since I grew up in backwoods Vermont and basically every third classmate’s dad had a plant or two growing in their basement or garage or back behind the barn at any given time. It wasn’t fancy weed – there was no like, Apple Pie Gonzo Balls or Purple Hazy Headwrecker, or any of the other stuff you can get now. All the weed we got ahold of came in crumpled plastic baggies and usually looked a lot like dried oregano (side note: we smoked actual oregano once by mistake. Very much do not recommend). There was just one flavor profile available in our backwoods weed: an unholy mixture of roadkill skunk, gasoline, and those pine tree air fresheners everyone had in their car in the 90s. It was pretty weak stuff for the most part, which suited me fine because I am generally not one who enjoys the feeling of loss of control. I would go from “oh, this is a nice floaty feeling” to “SWEET FANCY MOSES, I CAN’T FEEL MY LEGS, THIS IS THE END BEAUTIFUL FRIENDS, TELL MY CAT I’LL MISS HIM” very, very quickly. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I have been Too High, and those all involved drinking copious amounts of alcohol in addition to the weed I smoked.

Point being: I’m not a total n00b, but I also was never a heavy user to begin with, and I’m not generally looking to get high anymore so much as I am interested in whether cannabis can help some of my chronic issues (no pun intended).

I’ve never slept well, even as a kid. Over the years I’ve learned some things that help: taking a magnesium supplement in the evening, for instance. Eating less refined sugar. Not firing up TikTok after 7pm if I can help it, because otherwise I’ll enter a time warp for three hours and only be able to hear snippets of Doja Cat songs on loop for another two hours while I lay there watching the flashing lights on the insides of my eyelids. However, there’s always room for improvement, and I felt like adding a little THC to my existing CBD regimen (I have taken 25mg of CBD oil daily for years, I find it helpful for some of my pain and anxiety) to see if I could dial the sleep in a little better.

Enter: Snoozeberries.

Vermont has relatively recently allowed the sale of cannabis for recreational use and new dispensaries have been popping up all over as a result. We happened to be near one last weekend so we stopped in. It was nice and the staff were very friendly, which was good because their menu was totally overwhelming. A huge blackboard ran the whole width of the back wall of the shop, listing all sorts of different flower, edibles, and other cannabis products. I stood there blinking at the board for a couple minutes before the large jovial man behind the counter asked if I needed help. I told him I wanted something edible to help me sleep and he said, “ok, you want Snoozeberries then”. He handed me a jar with a cute little sheep on it, fully of little bitty purple cubes. I handed over my $55 (which, I’m sorry, but $55 for 20 5mg gummies seems like A LOT, doesn’t it? *shakes cane*), and went on my merry way.

When I was ready to test the gummies out that night, I cut one in half to start with. They’re only 5mg each, but I fully subscribe to the “start low, go slow” doctrine, especially since edibles are absorbed differently than smoking. I don’t want to end up one of those “I ate too many gummies and ended up plastered to the bed for six hours having hallucinations of emerging from my own womb over and over” cautionary tales. So, half a Snoozeberry went down the hatch. I sat around watching TV for a bit, then went to bed and read for a while. I was maybe a little more yawn-y than usual, but otherwise felt no noticable effects. My sleep tracker didn’t indicate that I had slept any better the next morning, either.

I did the same thing the next night, and the night after that, to the same result. Tuesday night I finally bucked up and decided to take a whole dose. Tuesday night is game night at our house, and that’s not a euphemism for anything, you perverts. We literally play a board game or card game most Tuesday nights. I took the full Snoozeberry right before we commenced with game night. We played 4 or 5 rounds of Exploding Kittens and then it was time to get ready for bed since we had to be up stupidly early the next day. Mark took Keppo out for the last walk of the evening and, as usual, I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

That was just about the time my brain entered the Snoozeberry Zone apparently, because I…could not brush my teeth. Like, I COULD, and I DID, but I had to think so, so hard about how to hold the toothbrush and move it around in my mouth the whole time. I kept having to stop and adjust my grip on the toothbrush to try and get a different angle because it would start to feel all wrong. And just to show you a little slice of how my brain works, I stood there wondering if I was having some kind of stroke or seizure for like 30 seconds before I realized it was probably the gummy. It was so weird though, because I truly didn’t feel the least bit high otherwise. I felt totally normal, except that my fine motor skills had apparently fucking left the building. I had the same issue with my water-flosser after brushing, and it’s a genuine wonder that I didn’t end up blasting myself in the face with that thing, I swear.

I sort of just shook my head at the whole situation and headed to bed. I checked the CPAP tank, fluffed my pillow the way I like, got my little battery-powered candle turned on and shut the light off, and laid down. At that point I did notice that I felt markedly more relaxed than I usually do when first laying down. I sort of just melted into the mattress, in a good way. I laid there enjoying that for a couple minutes before I cracked my book open, when suddenly the whole “struggle-bus tooth brushing due to weed gummy consumption” thing actually hit my brain and it. was. HILARIOUS to me. I mean, I laid there laughing like a fucking loon for probably like three minutes straight. I will admit that I did feel a tiny bit high at that point, but it really didn’t last long. And, again, no discernable difference in actual sleep quality or duration.

So in summation, I believe I paid $55 for some cutesy-named weed gummies, a brief lapse in my dental hygiene, and yet another confirmation that I may now officially be too old to hang…but it was a weirdly good time in its own way, I suppose.

On closer inspection, that sheep does actually look kinda high…

lemon aid

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Life with ADHD provides endless opportunities for self-inquiry and self-discovery. Every day I find new things that make me wonder about myself and how my brain works. For example:

What is this semi-desiccated half of a lemon doing on my kitchen counter at 11 in the morning, when the last time I used lemon for anything was while making salad dressing at dinner last night? Nothing else from the dinner-making process is still on the counter. Why did this half of a lemon, in particular, get left out? It’s not even the squeezed half. I could have put this in a container, stashed it in the fridge, and gotten another salad’s worth of dressing out of it. If there were any part of this lemon that it might make SENSE to have left on the counter, surely it would be the squeezed half. But, no. I wasted a perfectly good half of a lemon by inexplicably deciding to not put it away last night.

The really funny part is, I made breakfast this morning right next to this lemon half. I made my husband’s lunch right next to the lemon half. I stood at the counter taking my vitamins and the lemon half didn’t register. I went back to the counter an hour later to make a cup of coffee, which involves standing around waiting for the kettle to boil, which is certifiably the most boring thing ever and I had plenty of time to become aware of my surroundings in that two minutes that I stared off into space probably thinking about bears doing an interpretive dance to Billie Eilish’s song, ‘Bad Guy’, or some shit…and I DID NOT NOTICE THAT LEMON. The lemon did not reenter my realm of consciousness until just now when I went to the kitchen again for a handful of crackers. And why did getting some crackers trigger the realization that the lemon existed, you might ask? Good question! I have no fucking idea. The crackers were nowhere near the lemon. I could have just as easily gotten a handful of crackers and wandered right back to my desk again without ever clocking the lemon. But for some reason, some scientific mystery that will forever be unsolved because who the fuck would ever want to look that deeply into the percolating pile of rot that is my brain, 11:00 AM was apparently Counter Lemons Exist Again time.

Oh my god.

What if we really ARE all just brains in jars lined up on a shelf somewhere, and whatever entity that’s keeping the collection decided that my brain-in-a-jar needed some freshening up so it dropped a lemon into the jar? Maybe the lemon is meant to be enrichment for my enclosure. Maybe it’s an experiment to see if something as benign as half a random lemon could make a brain short-circuit and self-destruct.

I need to make some calls…

…OR DO I?

white noise

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I am the type of person who can’t sleep without some kind of white noise. I mean, half the time I can’t sleep anyway because my brain is a dick, but still. With the white noise, sleep may happen. Without the white noise, sleep will definitely NOT happen.

The source of the white noise isn’t super important. A fan blowing, the A/C unit running, even a white noise track playing over headphones will usually work if I’m travelling.

In our bedroom, we have one of those round twist-top white noise machines like what you often see used for noise cancellation in doctor’s offices. We’ve had it for many years. It has two speeds (white and…whiter, I guess?) and you can twist the top to change the size of the openings the air comes out of, thus changing the tone slightly (regular white, off-white, ecru…ok, the joke wasn’t great to begin with and I’ve now officially ruined it). I am so in the habit of turning the white noise machine on at bedtime that I still turn it on even when we run the A/C at night. I literally cannot hear the white noise machine over the A/C, but turning it on is muscle memory at this point.

Taking that into account, you can then imagine that when I woke up yesterday morning after the A/C shut off and there was no white noise machine going, I noticed immediately. I figured I must have just been out of it when I went to bed the night before and somehow forgot to turn on the white noise even though, like I said, it’s muscle memory at this point. Last night when I went to bed, I was very deliberate in my turning on of the white noise machine and my acknowledgement that it was, in fact, ON. I turned it on before the A/C, even. I KNOW that sucker was on when I got into bed.

So, why was it not running again this morning when I woke up? Did my husband shut it off, maybe?

Me: “Hey, did you shut the white noise machine off in the night last night?”

Him: “Nope. I noticed it wasn’t on this morning, too. I figured you just didn’t turn it on last night.”

Me: “No, I definitely turned it on. I made extra sure I did, because it was off when I woke up yesterday morning too, and I figured I must have just forgotten it the night before.”

Him: “Hunh. Weird.”

And for him that was the end of it, because he is not insane. My brain, on the other hand, immediately took the How Did The White Noise Machine Shut Off By Itself torch and RAN with it. My first three thoughts were exactly as follows:

1. Maybe someone has crept ultra-silently into our bedroom the last two nights and shut the white noise machine off while we sleep. Nevermind that I have the world’s most attentive watch-dog, who can hear mice farting in walls three houses away, who can smell traces of the last podokesaurus who stomped through proto-New-England 145 million years ago, and whose most favorite thing ON THIS VAST GREEN EARTH is to bark, specifically at strangers.

2. Maybe a mouse was on the desk that the white noise machine sits on, and maybe they walked by and brushed against the power switch, thus shutting the machine off. We’ve never had mice inside this house. Also, see above references to dog who hears / smells everything ever and would raise the unholiest of rackets immediately if a rodent was present. He wouldn’t chase and kill the rodent because he’s not useful a savage, mind you. But he’d sure as shit let us know it was there in no uncertain terms.

3. Maybe one of the rather large wolf spiders recently spotted in our basement (OH GODS WHY) came up the stairs (ACK), got into our room (PANIC-FLAIL), and hit the button with one of its extra long, extra hairy, EXTRA FUCKING CREEPY AND WRONG spider legs. I am convinced that at this point, my brain was just taking the piss, just trying to see if it could send me into an actual nervous breakdown, because I am super, SUPER anti-spider. I mean, in the house, anyway. Outside? Fine. Spider on with your bad self. Build all the webs, eat all the bugs. And honestly, small spiders in the house aren’t generally a problem either as long as they don’t do dumb shit like TOUCH ME. Big spiders in the house, though? No. Big spiders in the house make me want to move out…preferably without packing a damned thing, because fuck only knows where those hairy bastards are hiding at this point and OMG WHY AM I STILL THINKING ABOUT THIS, UGH.

Basically, my brain now won’t stop coming up with increasingly disturbing and/or convoluted ways in which the white noise machine may have gotten shut off in the night. At one point I was even wondering if maybe I had started sleep-walking and had shut it off then. Our bedroom is kind of cramped though, and I am large and klutzy, so I feel like even if I WAS sleepwalking, I wouldn’t have made it as far as the white noise machine without tripping over something and waking myself up, or bashing into something and doing myself noticable harm. But as far as I know I’ve never sleep-walked, so maybe that’s not how that works.

So, I guess there’s only one thing for it: we have to set up a night-vision camera pointed at the white noise machine and see what’s going on. Except I can’t do that either because I’ve watched one too many episodes of Ghost Hunters (read: I’ve watched exactly one episode. Not even a whole episode. I watched like ten minutes of it once, eight years ago), and I know that all the poltergeists show up as weird flashes and blobs on night vision in the middle of the night while you’re asleep. IT’S SCIENCE, BRENDA. You can’t argue with science.

And I’ll tell you what: finding out that there are poltergeists flitting around my bedroom all damned night isn’t going to help my sleep issues AT ALL.

“Hello, PETA? Yes, this is Keppo. Again, yes. Could you please send Sarah McLachlan to come pick me up? My human has finally lost it for real. Also, they haven’t fed me in weeks. MONTHS, even. Maybe years. I’m a dog, time works differently for me. But seriously, could you…hello? HELLO? Man, maybe the poltergeists got into the phone, too.”

turkey tracking

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Tell me you live in a very small town without TELLING me you live in a very small town. I’ll go first:

This morning on my town’s community Facebook group, there was a post about a “rogue turkey” hanging around someone’s yard. There were a couple of comments asking if the original poster could get a picture so that people could try to ID said turkey, but the original poster couldn’t provide a photo.

“It’s just a huge white turkey”, they said. “There are no markings, it’s white all over from what I can see.”

A little while later someone commented saying they thought they knew where the turkey belonged and posted the address. This was followed by debate over whether that was actually possible, as surely a domestic turkey wouldn’t be willing to travel so far afield, especially with so much snow on the ground. A series of photos and comments then followed which tracked the straying poultry’s progress across yards and pastures all along one end of town.

Someone finally got in touch with the bird’s owner, who joined the Facebook group so that they could arrange a pick-up. There were a bunch of comments expressing relief that the turkey was finally going to get back to his rightful home.

But then, drama! The owner arrived at the last known location of the turkey and it wasn’t actually there anymore.

“I’m here and I can’t see him”, they wrote. “If anyone has eyes on him, please let me know ASAP”.

A photo with a reply that read as quite exasperated in tone popped up moments later:

“He’s in my yard again, trying to get in with my chickens. PLEASE COME GET YOUR BIRD.”

A little while later the owner was back on the thread posting again about how they were at the spot and the turkey wasn’t around.

This started SEVEN HOURS AGO. I just checked the thread again and as of six minutes ago, the turkey still hasn’t been apprehended. It apparently keeps circling this one woman’s property and she (of the COME GET YOUR BIRD comment from mid-day, among others), is getting prettyyyy saltyyyy about it.

The incident has spawned several other spinoff threads with pictures of the wandering turkey, as well. Multiple people have asked for his name. There might be an “I Saw The Stray Turkey” Tshirt in the works. I made that last one up but I would sure as shit buy one if it were true, because this has easily been the most entertaining local social media thread I’ve seen in years.

Look at that magnificent bastard. Free as the day he was hatched. May the road rise to meet you, sir.
PS: this is not my photo, I jacked it from one of the spinoff threads. I live on the other end of town so alas I did NOT get to see the stray turkey.

box of hair

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We have a squirrel problem.

Thankfully it’s still a lower-case problem and not a PROBLEM…but still.

And yes, I know, I’m the person who is obsessed with chipmunks, and goes to outlandish lengths to befriend them. Chipmunks are not squirrels. Chipmunks hibernate in the winter. They’re tiny and cute and the holes they dig in my lawn are very small. They don’t inhale entire pounds of sunflower seeds on a daily basis. And, key point to this particular story: they don’t launch themselves bodily up the side of my house, trying to gain purchase on the siding so they can claw their way up to the bird feeder that is attached to my office window. 

Did you know that a chunky grey squirrel traveling at a high velocity can hit a wall hard enough to knock things off the interior windowsill of the affected wall? It’s true. I’ve seen it with my own eyes multiple times the past few weeks. 

The squirrels are also stressing Keppo the fuck out. Between the thumping on the wall, the scratching noises of them trying to climb the siding, and the chittering tirades when the red squirrels show up to invade what is apparently historically grey squirrel territory, there has been SO much barking. Patrols of the perimeter, which necessitate me being on the end of a leash because it’s not safe to let him out on his own, have also increased dramatically. Today we had to go out every 90 minutes all morning, for instance. I enjoy the walks but it’s really doing a number on what was my frankly already dismal rate of work productivity. 

All of this is what led up to me desperately Googling “how to repel squirrels” the other afternoon. The top three ideas that kept coming up were:

1. Spray predator urine in the area you want the squirrels to stay out of. If you’re a country person or grew up around hunters, you probably know that bottles of synthetic fox and coyote pee are readily available in most stores that sell hunting gear. Some hunters use it to mask the human scent on their clothes before going out into the woods. Initially this seemed like the best and most effective option for my squirrel issue but then I realized that:

  • we already have foxes and coyotes all over the place here and I really don’t want to pique their interest, thus bringing them closer to the house that my small defenseless dog lives in, 
  • the main spot that the squirrels hang out is under the bird feeder attached to my office window so that means I’d be spraying a canine-piss-scented substance directly under a window that I open multiple times a day, and 
  • the smell would probably drive Keppo almost as bonkers as the actual squirrels have been doing. 

2. Put up an owl decoy. This appealed to me simply because I like owls. I also got very excited at the prospect of neighboring owls possibly coming by to check out the decoy. Then I read that if you go the decoy route, you have to move it regularly because otherwise the squirrels will figure out its fake and then never respect the decoy OR you ever again. Which…that seems reasonable, honestly. What did NOT seem reasonable was the price of owl decoys though, so we were on to option number 3, which was…

3. Spread human and dog hair around the area you want to keep the squirrels out of. The idea is that they don’t like / are scared of the smells of humans and dogs so scattering hair around will keep them away. Since this was the cheapest, easiest, and most readily actionable of the top three ideas, I figured I’d give it a try. 

Mark brushed Keppo on Friday evening and collected all the hair in a little cardboard box. We put the box out in the mud room so that, should it get knocked over, it wouldn’t go all over the house. That turned out to be fairly smart because literally the next morning I was out in the mudroom putting a bag of trash out and what did I do? Knocked over the box of hair. Side note: this is how we learned that Keppo will attempt to eat clods of his own hair once they are detached from his body. My special, special boy. 

On Sunday morning I cut Mark’s hair and while that doesn’t result in a lot of clippings anymore (sorry dear), we figured what the heck, we’ll throw those in the Box of Hair as well. I also cleaned out a couple of my hair brushes, and I shed almost as badly as Keppo does, so by the time it was all said and done we had a pretty good stash going. 

This morning when I took Keppo out for our first patrol, I also took the Box of Hair. I carefully sprinkled it all around under the bird feeder and my office window. Keppo only tried to eat one chunk before he found some bird seed hulls that were even more illicit and therefore became his sole focus. We got everything set and then did our circuit of the house and returned back inside. Once back in my office, I opened the window a little bit and looked straight down just to make sure our placement was good. Perfect…a nice even coating of…hair. A hair barrier, if you will. A…hhhhhbarrier? Hair-ier? Wait no, that’s something different. But you get my drift. Pleased with my ingenuity, I sat down to get to work. 

All of ten minutes later I hear the characteristic scrabble-clunk-scrabblescrabble-crash of a fat-ass grey squirrel launching itself up the exterior wall. By the time I got up to go look out the window, a second had joined it. A red squirrel came barreling around the corner shortly thereafter. 

Not one of them gave a sweet blithering fuck about the hair barrier. They didn’t even slow down to sniff at it. I might as well have just scuffed my feet around the leaves a little as far as they were concerned. It was right back to business as usual for them and lack of ability to get any business done for me. 

So I guess it’s time to invest in an owl decoy and see how that goes. 

This is not a drive-through, sir.

cannot unsee

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Me this morning, cutting strawberries: You ever notice how strawberries really look like human tongues?

Mark: What? No.

Me: They do! Look! (holds out strawberry)

Mark, shaking head, moving in the other direction: No. No, I don’t want to see. Once you see you cannot unsee.

Me: I know, right? But seriously, look…it looks just like a very red human tongue. (wiggles berry)

Mark, still refusing to look: Noooo! I don’t want to think about it! (shields his eyes as he leaves the kitchen)

I don’t know what he’s got against delicious disembodied tongues, frankly.

I’m sure that yellowing at the tip would not be a good sign if this was actually a tongue but since it’s not we can all just laugh about it and not spend any time obsessing about our actual tongues in the mirror today, right? Right.

stupid human tricks

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Sometimes it seems like my life is just a series of things I do to amuse myself that end up backfiring and causing me extra work or costing me more money.

Case in point: today’s vegetable peeler incident.

I have Fridays off for a while – I won’t bore you with why (it involves needing to use up a bunch of vacation time at work because I can’t roll it over). Just know for the sake of this story that for the last six-ish Fridays I have been largely home alone, with only the dog for supervision. Which, being an only child, a latch-key kid, and a social pariah for most of the 90’s, you’d think I’d be used to functioning under those conditions.

It’s not that I can’t function when I’m home alone, so much as that I have a harder time filtering the near-constant stream of questionable ideas that my brain produces. Especially the ones that I think are funny. This isn’t even a case of ‘doing it for the ‘Gram’ or making TikToks or whatever…this is literally me just indulging the stupid shit that pops into my head because I know no one is around to judge me for it (not that my husband would judge me for most of the stuff I do…not out loud, anyway. He IS British, after all).

Today I was making a batch of soup ahead for tonight’s dinner. I had my dance mix going and was grooving along to Jamiroquai (I know that guy is problematic – I assuage my guilt by reminding myself that he’s probably only getting like half a penny from Spotify whenever I listen to one of his tracks. And yes, I know Spotify is problematic, too. I assuage THAT guilt by reminding myself that I get to pay the student rate rather than the full monthly subscription rate because I take one measly college course per semester. Also, good luck finding someone / something that ISN’T problematic these days, mmkay?), as I peeled some carrots. I peel the carrots over the garbage can because I hate cleaning up carrot peels off the counter, but my garbage can is also across the room from the counter where I chop stuff and there’s no flat surface around the garbage to put anything down on, so I was taking one carrot at a time over to the garbage can to peel it, then bringing it back to the counter and grabbing the next one.

That makes it sound like my kitchen is huge. My whole house is like 1100 square feet. The kitchen is like three paces across, max.

Anyway.

So, carrot peeling got tedious very quickly. As I finished the last carrot and was half-dancing back to the counter, the song I was jamming to reached a funky breakdown part. Carrot in one hand, vegetable peeler in the other, I did a little twirl, then flipped the vegetable peeler up in the air with every intention of catching it.

Now, it’s worth noting here that I’m actually pretty good at doing this. Flipping things up in the air and catching them, I mean. It’s a random stupid human trick that I’ve been doing for as long as I can remember, with basically anything that has a handle. I’ve done it with screwdrivers, hammers, paint brushes, all manner of kitchen utensils, pans, a curling iron twice (once it was on…had to up the stakes, apparently. While home alone. I am very stupid)…you get the picture. There is literally nothing else physical that I’m good at, so I’ve really honed this one craft, trust me. As a result, I almost always catch whatever I flip.

I’m sure you can see where this is going.

The vegetable peeler flipped end over end, almost up to the ceiling. I reached out with perfect timing, right on the apex beat of the song’s crescendo…and missed the handle by a hair’s breadth. I watched the bastarding thing hit the floor and, in seemingly slow motion, the blade popped out of the handle and skittered directly under the stove. I got down on the floor to try and fish it out with a wooden spoon, but the thing was so far in that I couldn’t even see it. It is officially lost to the Beneath.

So now I have to shop for a new vegetable peeler. I’ve had that one probably ten years. Have there been exciting new innovations in vegetable peeling technology in the last decade? I’m guess I’m about to find out.

Rest In Peels, Peely. You were a real one. Carrots won’t be the same without you.

annoying realities of being an adult with ADHD, #457

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Some days I can’t read.

Like…technically I can…but there are days where anything more than two or three sentences in one go turn to smoke somewhere between my eyeballs and whatever half-rotten corner of my brain is responsible for word comprehension.

Part of it is definitely interest-based: I can read what I’m writing right now, I could pick up the novel I’ve been reading and be perfectly fine getting sucked into that for an hour. But I have this 11-page instruction manual that I’m supposed to be reading (and understanding) right now and it’s just not happening. It’s not even that my brain is making a specific choice in that regard, either. I’m not sitting here saying “I’ll read this but I won’t read that”. Rather, what happens is that I go in with every intention of reading the thing I’m supposed to be reading and my brain is like “hey, here’s something else we definitely need to do RIGHT NOW”, and that just keeps happening until it’s 4pm and all of a sudden I’ve done everything except the one thing I really needed to get done in my workday.

Urgency is a big thing for a lot of people with ADHD. Many of us joke about leaving important things until the absolute last minute as a strategy for success and that tends to sound kind of unhinged to neurotypicals but the thing is…it works. It SUCKS, don’t get me wrong. I definitely don’t enjoy sitting here knowing that I have six hours to do a thing and then waiting five and a half hours before I start it, but I’m so much more likely to get the thing done if I start it with half an hour left before the deadline than if I start it hours ahead. My brain literally needs that pressure, that sense of dread, to function some days. It sounds masochistic, I know. Trust me, most people with ADHD wish we didn’t operate this way as it causes us a lot of stress and aggravation…but sometimes you have to do the best with the maladaptive coping mechanisms you have, and some days putting things off until the last minute is the way that happens.

I sat down at my desk this morning with literally two things on my to-do list: deal with emails, and read this 11-page instruction manual with enough understanding that I could then put it to use in the software it’s for. The emails part was easy because it’s quick snippets of stuff with definite answers, and I get a nice little dopamine hit from each one that I deal with. But since I’ve finished emails, I’ve done the following, all in the interest of not reading aforementioned instruction manual:

  • clipped the dog’s toenails
  • made a snack
  • made tea
  • spent an unmentionable amount of time on Instagram (my dopamine peddler of choice)
  • downloaded a video editing app I don’t need and will probably never use
  • spent 20 minutes practicing German (another way I try to feed the dopamine beast)
  • had two fully unnecessary chats with coworkers
  • did some stretches
  • did a circuit of planks, push-ups, and various other upper body exercises with a resistance band (which, to be fair, the physical movement did at least settle me enough so that I could sit down and write this, so…winning?)
  • writing this blog post, which originally started out as an Instagram stories post but for once in my life I realized maybe writing on the blog rather than just word-vomiting on IG would be good practice for, you know, writing…which is a thing I claim to want to do more of

And probably other stuff that I don’t even realize, because that’s how ADHD works. See the shiny, chase the shiny, go back to the thing you were meant to be doing three hours later with sticks in your hair, missing one sock, a strange taste in your mouth, and the inability to think of sea anemones without shuddering in fear.

All because my brain decided it can’t read today.

But, soft! What fuckery through yonder window breaks? It is the west, and oh fuck me, who cares.