When I was up on Whidbey, one of the wildlife issues was field mice.  In the city we deal with rats.  I know they are everywhere and lord knows I’ve had my adventures with them but I hated those adventures. On Sunday I went up to my local Fed-Ex to do some printing.  I like  Read the Rest…

At the end of Part One, I was crying on my kitchen floor, wearing a respirator mask and talking to an opossum with eyes as big as silver dollars who was under the house along with a family of dead rats: March 28 A beautiful, warm day but all that means to me is that  Read the Rest…

Feb 5 I hear scratching and scurrying sounds in the ceiling above my bed. It must be birds on the roof. Feb 10 I find a pile of sunflower seed shells dribbling from a bag of bird seed in the sun room. Outside the door is a fat squirrel innocently nibbling under the outdoor bird  Read the Rest…

You know sometimes you hear a noise in your house that you can’t identify? But one cat opens an eye and another one yawns. The third lifts his head up, but none of them summon a sense of danger or even curiosity. And so everyone relaxes. An hour later you find the shower curtain has  Read the Rest…

This story involves two rodents if you count opossums as rodents which they aren’t; they’re marsupials.   That they are related to kangaroos doesn’t make me love them.  They still look like giant rats. I found the aforementioned opossum, dead, under my apple tree on the morning I was leaving for a long weekend at a  Read the Rest…

During the warm weather, my cats come and go as they please.  They prefer doorman services, but they have cat doors: one from the house into the sun room and another from the sunroom to the outdoors.  I sometimes prop a house door open to spare them the onerous inconvenience of pushing through two flaps.   Read the Rest…