The last few days I've been feeling quite knocked out; I guess it's payback time for the accomplishments of the last couple of weeks, in the garden and so forth. Also, I am tapering off some sleep medication and I've reached the point where getting enough sleep is problematic. I will persevere, but it is not fun. There was a couple of weeks when I was feeling quite proud of myself for tapering off so easily, but now it is a slog.
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I am in a battle with a rat. After Hapi died I threw a very old bag of dry dog food in my compost bin. It was too old to give away to another dog owner, so I thought it would be good to add to my garden compost. The rat agreed. It started digging tunnels into my bin and I started blocking the tunnels with rocks and bricks. Then it learned how to open the hatch at the top of the bin, so I weighted it with more bricks and rocks. Then it pried off the lower hatch for removing the finished compost. I blocked that with roofing shingles.
At that point I thought it was time to resort to more serious measures so I went to the hardware store to buy rat poison. The clerk there suggested that a rat trap was better so I got that instead. The first night the rat set off the trap without harm and dug a tunnel beside the trap. I filled in the tunnel and reset the trap on top of the tunnel site. Last night it again set off the trap without harm, but I'm guessing it scared itself because it did not dig another tunnel. I'll try it again tonight. A friend wants me to use a live trap and maybe that is the best idea, I'll try that next. In the meantime it has probably managed to make off with half the dog food so soon there will be nothing left in the compost bin that it wants.
The other very annoying thing this rat does is dig up my seed potatoes. Apparently it does not like potatoes because it leaves the dug up potatoes on the ground beside where they used to be buried.
In the photo above the black box in the upper left is the compost bin, you can just make out a couple of the bricks I put on top.
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I am reading A Life of One's Own by Marion Milner, first published in 1934. The author went on to become a distinguished psychotherapist, but the book is based on a life experiment she conducted in her 20s. She wanted to learn first hand what her life purpose was, how she should conduct her life, what principles she should live by. Should she "follow the herd," or abide by what the experts (at that time, mostly the Church) told her, or follow her own inclinations? And if she was to follow her own inclinations, what were they exactly? She decided to study her own life and to that end she began to keep a diary.
In the beginning, her diary appalled her. It seemed that she could only write about very superficial things, and when she tried to look at what exactly she wanted from life, it was not very inspiring. At one point red shoes were high on her list of most wanted things. I had to laugh a little bit to myself reading her early entries, it sounded so much like my own attempts at a diary. I started a diary (or a journal, as we liked to call it when we were seeking those kinds of answers in life) on several occasions and each time that I actually read what I was writing I found it so embarrassing that I immediately quit. Nobody—not even me—wants to know what goes on in my mind on a daily basis. Ms Milner had pretty much the same reaction to her own diary, but she persevered.
Each chapter of her book starts with a literary quote, most often from Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. She looked on her seven-year experiment as a kind of exploration similar to Crusoe's on his desert island. After all, we are born into bodies and families and situations not of our own choosing and must somehow make a go of it. Crusoe explored his island in order to ascertain what his situation was, what resources he had at his disposal, and how best to survive and perhaps escape the limitations of his lonely exile. Milner had the same idea for learning how to conduct her life.
When I was writing my embarrassing diaries I had the naive idea that the simple act of writing down what was happening or what I felt about what was happening would somehow be enlightening. It was not. Milner had the same doomed hope, but over time she perceived patterns that were enlightening. The things she learned in the course of her seven-year experiment it took me many more years to discover, and some of it I still have not discovered. So I admire her systematic and bold experimenting with her own life. More importantly I admire that she actually wrote down the stuff she learned.
5 comments:
I am glad the clerk talked you out of the rat poison. It doesn't just kill rats. A friend online nearly lost his dog to just licking it in a park. The veterinarian told him that if he'd gotten the newer brand, there'd have been no saving the little Yorkie. And if the rat dies and a hawk or coyote gets the body, it dies too. There are various types of traps and it's worth looking into them for which works better. When my husband has trapped ours, he throws their dead bodies out where the coyote or surprisingly a road runner gets the food. Burying would also work but definitely warning for all who live animals-- don't use poisons as the most recent is neurotoxin and no veterinarian can save the pet that is exposed to it. It was touch and go for the friend's pet as it was as it makes them bleed internally.
Hi Rain, around here they sell rat poison in sealed boxes that you put out where you have the rat problem, there is one hole big enough for a rat to get in and a bit of a maze for it to find the poison. Only rat-sized critters can get at it, but you make a good point about other animals eating the dead rat. I was planning to put the rat poison box right inside the composter so cats, dogs and birds couldn't get at it. Rats are a big problem in my neighbourhood and I see the rat poison boxes everywhere. I think the live trap might be a good idea because the rat is more likely to go into it and then you can transport the rat to somewhere it can't come back from. But there will always be more rats...
That's one tenacious rat!
I remember reading Milner and have journaled/diaried all my life though many of them, when I last moved, were destroyed on my instruction. Far too personal.
XO
WWW
WWW, did you feel that you gained insight into your own life through your journals? You must have gotten something out of it to continue so long. I felt that my own journal entries were too personal even for me to read, it seemed daft to write stuff that not even I wanted to read.
I was always reluctant to start a journal lest somehow others might read it. Years ago a friend gave me a journal book in which to write so I finally guardedly wrote a bit on the first page in coded language meaningful only to me. Before I wrote again our house was broken into and my book was stollen. That discouraged me from writing further in a book. I have written some on my computer but have not re-read my thoughts though may eventually. I do think that writing process can have value in numerous ways. One way I've discovered is that I release the thought(s)from my mind which I find beneficial.
Sorry you are having a rat problem. When we had a peach tree we also had a fruit rat take up housekeeping in our attic. We lay in bed one night and heard sounds like a race track overhead. Later we discovered the rats. My husband set traps and also had to have someone come out to inspect the house, determine where they got in and then seal all possible access areas. Unfortunately, the tree is gone due to my husband pruning it without knowing what he was doing. We never had rat problems after that and I hope I don't now that I'm alone.
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