Why Does Wildlife Love Us So?

If you haven’t already, first go read my tiny dog adventure about Fat Tony.

Then come back here.

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Posted by: ssjane | July 30, 2008 | 5:06 pm
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Where The Wild Things Are (Apparently Wherever We Live)

One of the few benefits of living in a condo on a busy street is the small yard. Our new home was chosen carefully to have a yard just big enough for three chihuahuas, but not so big that it could support, say, a herd of wild turkeys, a family of deer, and a really retarded rabbit.

I figured that at least here, we were urban enough to be free of the ticks and wildlife-induced diarrhea that plagued us in Wayland, but before a week had passed in the new house, we had spotted suspicious pellets on our deck.

The pellets looked a lot like the deer/rabbit poop we’d seen in our Wayland yard, and then when I saw flies congregating on it, I knew for sure that it was one of my worst fears: Poop of Indeterminate Origin.

The Poop of Indeterminate Origin soon became the Poop of Determinate Origin when Chris spotted the lone animal in our yard that didn’t require us to regularly feed it: a squirrel.

For reasons known only to himself, Christopher has christened this squirrel, “Fat Tony.”

Fat Tony nimbly jumps from one fence post to another, occasionally pausing to chitter mockingly at the dogs below. This never fails to infuriate Mina, who races along our chicken wire fence, barking madly and leaping in the air. Stanley is usually right behind her, although there was one time when he actually caught up with Fat Tony. I hadn’t seen this momentous event for myself, so Chris told me about it later.

“And then what happened?” I gasped, envisioning a situation similar to the Great Rabbit Massacre of 2007.

Chris shrugged. “Stanley didn’t know what to do with him once he’d caught him.” And so Fat Tony easily escaped, to return another day to taunt the dogs.

Paco has never had to depend on himself to find food, so although he allows himself to be peer-pressured into joining the barking, he soon stops and wanders aimlessly away. Paco knows only that these animals in our yard are apparently supposed to be fun to chase and/or eat, according to the other dogs, but he has never quite seen the point of all that running unless there was someone waiting at the end of it all to cook, slice, and serve the animal to him.

On days that Fat Tony doesn’t deign to show up himself, he will often leave his calling card on our deck. Instead of a large clump of tiny pellets of poo like the deer and rabbits left for us, Fat Tony appears to have a slower constitution. In other words, one or two pellets will appear at one side of the deck, and another pellet will show up ten feet away and around the corner at the other end of the deck. Cunningly, Fat Tony will secrete his poo pellet in the crack between two deck boards so that we humans cannot spot it, but Miss Mina Beana can.

It took me and Chris two weeks to start filling our refrigerator, but only a few days for Mina to find her own local, organic, sustainably farmed food source. We have Whole Foods; she has squirrel poop.

Posted by: ssjane | July 26, 2008 | 8:37 pm
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The Moment During Which Both My Sisters and My Husband Turned To Me In Fear That I Would Walk Out

The privilege of having your flight to California delayed six hours and your subsequent flight from California delayed four and a half hours: $379

The amount of the food voucher American Airlines gave you, upon demand, for the delay of the first flight: $10

The cash you stuff into an envelope as a wedding gift for your cousin: $200

The opportunity of hearing the reverend officiating at the wedding ceremony read from what sounded to be Ephesians 5, during which he exhorted the husband to love his wife, and the wife to submit, respect, and honor her husband, and concluded by saying, “you have made the two one” to which you mentally add, “although admittedly one of you is only worth 3/5ths of the other”: Priceless

Posted by: ssjane | July 9, 2008 | 12:15 pm
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This Strange Feeling Must Be What It Feels Like to Be Popular

Chris and I are moving in about a week and a half. Because we had sold our house before we found a new one, we hadn’t really started packing because we hadn’t known where our stuff would go.

But now that we’ve found a house and the home inspection will take place on Monday, I am no longer able to continue living in denial and was forced by Chris to pack today.

Packing was too overwhelming for me, so instead I threw stuff away. Sometimes I think packing would be easier on me if everything simply burned down; that way I wouldn’t miss what I don’t remember. But having to look at every item and make a call on whether it should be kept or tossed is incredibly difficult — how can you blithely throw away the totally useless turtle marionette that you purchased at a street fair in Australia and then dragged home for the kids you would someday never have?

Hmm. Perhaps that wasn’t the best example. Because now it sounds really easy to toss away a marionette like that.

The only item I knew I was keeping, for sure, was my wall hanging of 12 tiny stuffed Disney figures velcroed on.

“I had to eat like 16 boxes of cereal to get that,” I told Chris when he brought it out to show me. “I don’t care what you say, but I am keeping it.”

So I kept the wall hanging, but I felt guilty about it, so I decided to throw away all my musical equipment instead. I hadn’t used any of it in the 4 years we’ve been in this house because I just got too busy with work and dogs and life, and this house just didn’t have the space I needed to set up the equipment easily. Also, I was no longer depressed, and it turns out that I can only write music when I’m depressed. (Sample lyric: “You talk of love, but the words fall out of your mouth like the tears from my eyes.”)

Rather than drag the equipment to yet another house where it would only serve to remind me of how much more productive I used to be, and also how much more unhappy, I put up a Craigslist ad offering it for free. Hopefully, there would be at least one person who wanted a bass guitar, acoustic guitar, multitrack recorder, and random miscellaneous cords whose provenance I could not determine.

I was going to include the synthesizer which my father bought for my younger sister decades ago before I reappropriated it for my music, but then I happened to go on to Ebay and found that it was selling for about $200, which, OH MY GOD, why? Well, whatever the reason, people seemed to want this, so I stuck it on Ebay at 99 cents.

Then I promptly forgot about my auction and Craigslist ad, because I had a wedding to get to. When I came back home five hours later, painfully full of really delicious wedding food, the synthesizer was up to $60 and I had over 25 emails asking for the free equipment.

“How do I choose who to give this stuff to?” I wailed to Chris, who was busy being “a ranger of Hyboria” on the computer.

“Just give it to the first person who responded,” he said.

“But the first person was stupid. He wanted to know where we were located, and I already had our town name in the ad,” I said.

“Okay, then the second person.”

“Well, she sounds too perky. I bet she just wants it to re-sell.”

“Then delete your ad and put up a new one and ask for money,” Chris said, fingers busily tapping at his keyboard, brain possibly wondering why he had wasted two minutes on this conversation, two precious minutes when he could have explored a new room or killed some kind of creature.

“That seems unfair,” I muttered. “I mean, I already said I would give it away for free.”

I thought about the problem. And that’s when I came up with my idea. I would make people APPLY for the free stuff! HAHAHAHA!!! Make them do some work for it!

“Write a quick note and tell me why you want the stuff,” I typed into my Craigslist ad. “I will arbitrarily decide who gets it. Yes, some people will lie.”

Power. Some people thrive on it and become better and stronger. I am not one of those people.

Posted by: ssjane | June 7, 2008 | 11:37 pm
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When the Lone Gunman Needs a Haircut

In my never ending and so far unsuccessful quest for the best and cheapest haircut, I have not made a repeat visit to any hairdresser/hair stylist/hair salon in the last five years.

This means that every time I get a haircut, I go through a conversation like this:

Hairdresser: So are you done with school? College?

Me: Yes.

[slight pause]

Me: I’m [32, 33, 34, whatever age I am that year].

Hairdresser expresses shock.

I explain I look exactly the same as I did in high school.

If I am feeling particularly chatty, I explain that I had about three years when my hair actually looked somewhat different, but have now gone back to my old high school cut.

Hairdresser diverges into soliloquy about the way Asians all look young for their age.

Hairdresser is still wielding scissors, so I decline to say what I’m really thinking, which is that maybe Asians look so young because they don’t have the time/inclination to sit all day in the sun/in a tanning salon and bake on some wrinkles.

Hairdresser: So when did you last get your hair cut?

Me: Three months? No, maybe five. Or six. I hate getting my hair cut, so I let it go as long as I can.

Hairdresser is horrified and picks up a lock of my hair and eyes it dubiously.

I mention casually that I have gone to a different salon every time I needed a haircut in the last five [four, three] years. I try to imply, with suggestive facial expressions, that she/he could be the one to make me break my destructive pattern and actually make a return visit.

Except I never do.

Posted by: ssjane | May 22, 2008 | 4:11 pm
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Squirrels and Rabbits and Deer, Oh My!

I don’t know if Mina ate something that disagreed with her, or if she slept too much during the day, but yesterday night after dinner she was asking to go outside every hour.

“I think this is one of those nights where she’s going to bark at us in the middle of the night to make us take her out,” Chris remarked gloomily.

Sure enough, at about 2 AM, Mina began to bark. I was asleep and dreaming about a dog barking when I suddenly woke up mid-bark and realized the noise was coming from a real dog.

I lay on the bed, feigning sleep, and hoping that Mina would either stop barking or that she would bark just loud enough to wake Chris up. Neither of those events occurred, so I got out of bed and headed down to the dog room.

When I opened the door, Mina was sitting upright on the blue chair that she likes to sleep in, staring at me. Most mornings we have to dig in the blanket and pull her, cross and sleepy, out of the warm nest she’s created. If we put her on the floor, she will scramble to get back into the closest bed, so we usually have to carry her all the way outside to pee while she hangs limply from our arms pretending to be dead. At 2 AM, she had no problems walking outside by herself.

As soon as she got outside, Mina rushed to the edge of our chicken wire fence and started barking. She’s been doing this a lot lately, because the rabbits have become bolder and will hop just far enough out of range so that they can watch Mina fume at her inability to chase them away.

So I glanced up, expecting to see the usual white flash of a rabbit tail as a rabbit bounded away from our fence, and instead I saw three giant gray shapes at the edge of our yard.

I nearly screamed, and for some reason, my first thought was that these were coyotes. I had never seen a coyote but I knew there were some in the neighborhood. I was terrified that one of them was going to run toward us, leap the chicken wire, and try to snatch Mina away as an appetizer, and here I was in my pajamas and fake Crocs. As coyote-fighting gear, it left a lot to be desired.

Meanwhile, Chris would undoubtedly continue to snooze peacefully away upstairs while the fight went on, just like that time when I’d called him about twenty times to pick me up and he slept through all of the phone calls, and eventually I had to call the dogsitter and instruct her to run to our house and bang on the door to disturb the dogs so that they would bark, and that she had to keep banging on the door until Chris got up. Chris actually tried to just ignore the noise, but the dogsitter, determined to earn the $5 I’d promised her for this task, was a real trouper and didn’t give up until he staggered to the door, at which point she said, “Jane wants you to call her,” and left.

Then one of the shapes moved, and I saw that it was a deer.

Two of the deer were standing motionless, staring at Mina. They didn’t move even when I stepped out of the doorway to make sure Mina couldn’t get out of the fenced area. I had thought deer would run as soon as they heard a noise, but these deer seemed both terrified and mesmerized by Mina. The third deer was apparently accustomed to distractions while foraging in the suburbs, and completely ignored us as it bent down to nibble at something on the ground.

Mina was incensed by their continued presence. Though just one deer’s head was as large as Mina’s entire body, she was ready to take on all three of them. While she barked, she kept glancing over to me. “Just let me out to take care of them! Are you stupid, woman?”

The third deer kept eating. And possibly pooping; I saw the tail lift up a few times although I couldn’t see if it actually pooped.

Eventually, the third deer had enough to eat, and moved through the trees at the back of our yard and into the yard of the house behind us. Clearly, this deer was the leader (certainly in pooping prowess), because the other two sprang into motion and crashed through the branches of the trees to follow it.

Mina was still barking so I picked her up and brought her inside. Good thing we were moving soon — I was pretty sure my neighbors didn’t appreciate her deer alerts at this late hour, but I’d been so surprised by the deer that I had just stood and stared at them the whole time Mina had been barking.

We went back to the dog room, and Mina immediately got into bed. It was hard work, protecting our territory.

Posted by: ssjane | April 27, 2008 | 9:25 pm
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As If I Don’t Have Enough To Do Already

One of our windows spontaneously cracked about an hour ago.

At first I thought a neighbor’s kid had hit the window with a baseball or something, because of the loud noise, but by the time I got downstairs and saw the damage, there was no one around outside.

The window is mostly still in the frame, but it is just barely hanging together and totally destroyed. You can tell where the crack started and then spread out.

Upon further investigation, I realized the window was cracked ONLY ON THE INSIDE. The outer pane of glass was completely fine.

It is not possible for the dogs to have done it. There is no way for them to climb up to that window, and even if the three of them simultaneously flung their bodies against the window somehow, their combined weight would still not be enough to create a crack this large.

The buyers of our house are coming tomorrow for their home inspection.

Conclusions:

1. We have a ghost in our house.
    
2. The people who renovated this house did a crappy ass crappy job, and the window buckled under pressure from a poor installation.
    
3. We are the unluckiest people in the whole world, and God is telling us we should really consider renting.
    

Posted by: ssjane | April 3, 2008 | 10:41 am
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Spotted on a Station Wagon

A station wagon in front of me today had three bumper stickers on it.

The first two:

Re-elect Gore 2008
and
Draft Al Gore 2008 for a Change in Climate

People, I’m as upset as you are about the last 8 years; possibly even more upset given that we’ve lost like $130,000* in our house value if we sell, and then another $50,000 in the saga known as the Realtor Who Stole Our Money To Buy Victoria’s Secret Lingerie And Yet This Is Not A Crime From The Viewpoint Of Massachusetts Judges.**

But these bumper stickers are SO 2004. At some point, you gotta let Al Gore go. Al Gore is not running for president. Al Gore has a Nobel Peace Prize, and he’s not bringing it to the White House. We have new people running now; people who will be vastly better than the current administration, regardless of their political parties***.

Bumper sticker number three:
Nobody Died When Clinton Lied

All right, I’ll give you that one. Where do I buy one of these stickers?

*Number not inflated for dramatic purposes. Unfortunately.

**Thanks, Massachusetts judges, for teaching us that criminals can commit crimes without penalty, and that we should be committing crimes right now if we want to stay on top of our debts!

***This statement not verified on candidates named Ralph Nader.

Posted by: ssjane | March 31, 2008 | 6:17 pm
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Actual Conversations From My Recent Business Trip

CONVERSATION ONE

Coworker sitting a few feet away is talking to someone sitting across the table from her, and also to me. I cannot really hear her since there is someone sitting between us, but I nod. Suddenly she turns and asks me what I think.

Me: Oh, I’m sorry, I wasn’t really listening. I just had my interested face on.

CONVERSATION TWO

Boss is greeting us as we walk into the meeting. He asks all of us how we slept (in the hotel).

Instead of saying “fine” or even “good,” I say, “Well, I have this thing about bedbugs.”

Posted by: ssjane | March 20, 2008 | 5:21 pm
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Business Phrases I Hate

Posted by: ssjane | January 8, 2008 | 5:32 pm
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