I wanted to go up on my roof to check out the roofer's work and to see if leaves were catching in the gutters.
But I'm afraid of heights and my 6-foot ladder isn't tall enough, so Jim brought over his extension ladder and went up first, so I was a little less scared then.
The view from up there is great, but I don't plan to go up more than once a year to scout for leaves.
Because it's scary.
Jess Chen told me that Wildcat lives near me in Jersey City, so I made a house for wild cats.
It's entirely likely this is more a community hangout for skunks, opossums, cats, squirrels, smaller raccoons. I'm not sure this will end well.
Here's how I spent Christmas morning while the rest of yous were seeing what Santa brought you.
Happy Christmas from Lafayette Small Mammal Reserve.
I have a lot to do today--none of it the sort of thing I'd normally do on Christmas.
But I have a ton of food I picked up yesterday, two tame cats and at least four wild ones, several projects, and Janice Chiang sent me delicious cookies. I'm set, and the weather is warm.
Enjoy your pandemic holiday.
I was talking with some colleagues about growing up in the DC area...of course they're younger than I am but we all have certain common points of reference, and one of them is from Annandale.
She's too young to know about this, but when I was a kid, we'd go to Memco in Annandale every Friday night when my dad would get paid. It was like Costco before there was Costco, where you had to be a member. There was a little snack bar and I'd get a hot dog and a 7-Up from a fountain. My sister and I were made to walk single file behind my dad as he pushed the grocery cart around, while he smoked Kool cigarettes. In the store. People did that back then.
I found a photo online of Memco...and these memories came flooding back. Here's the Annandale Memco.
I flew out in mid-November right after Bundt Day, with plans to quarantine, then rent a car to drive alone to see my family in the Shenandoah Valley.
My sister got a routine covid test ahead of the family meet-up, and that was the end of our planning. She has it, isn't sure how, but any idea of imminent risk-taking went right out the window. (She's okay, it's not fun, but she's monitoring her temperature, oxygen level, and being exhausted a lot.)
We've all had some unanticipated adventures this year. Well, non-adventures, mostly, as we learned to relish the most minor novelties. Baking. Sewing. Learning about bidets. Catering to the whims of hungry opossums.
Under normal circumstances, I'd be packing up to go around the world for a year as the ten-year-anniversary of the first and second MariesWorldTour is here. My aging physical self aches a bit with the recollection of stuffing myself into a Congoloese minivan with 8 other people and some goats anyway, if I'm honest, and then along came an unexpected detour at the virtual office, so I'm not going anywhere that involves a bad wifi connection and more than a 3-hour time difference from Burbank.
Who would have thought the most mundane things we've done this year could hold so many surprises?
I agree with Jay Garrick the orange cat.
Risked a 6 train full of eccentric unmasked people to go to the Museum of the City of New York to see this.
They took our digital comic and included it in an exhibit. We are all honored.
“I hates This sign” but it does make me laugh.
Proofreaders matter!
Snow! Plenty of it.
We still have to work and go to school, I guess.
No such thing as a snow day when you're supposed to stay home anyway.
I don't have the necessary items to make a feral cat shelter, but I started to worry about the cats and the opossums and the skunks. (The raccoons live in the nun's garage where it's warm.) So I used my heat gun to soften the plastic on an old bin, and a box cutter to cut a circle. I made the circle into an awning with the heat gun and some packing tape, taped an old piece of shower curtain over the opening, and threw in an old towel and an old thermal shirt.
I don't know that the animals will be impressed.
Tomorrow, I'll see if I can get a foam cooler for the inside, and maybe some hay, but I'm not sure where to get straw.
Here was my morning adventure! You ever wonder what happens to Aeron chairs when offices get rid of them?
Me neither, but then I read an article and now I have a fancy chair I bought in North Brunswick. I had to get a rental Jeep and drive to an industrial area, but now I have a decent chair for my pandemic home office in JC.
It’s complicated being a small mammal in winter at the Lafayette Wildlife Preserve.
Here are some of the images I get on my game cam at the Lafayette Small Mammal Preserve (aka my backyard in Jersey City).
