Homegrown terrorists
Blue gloves anyone? Maybe if I get sick of being a systems analyst, I can get a job at the TSA? I wore about five pairs of blue glubs today before I was through. This morning. Continuation of the current round of Landfill Dungeon rodent turd eradication. This is not a recent invasion, these turds are old. Not that they aren’t infected with hantavirus…
The first time I heard about the hantavirus pulmonary syndrome was in 1993. I was sitting at an old desktop computer over at That Darn EPA not feeling particularly well and thinking, “Am I sick? Or not?” I am so rarely sick that I can’t always tell right away. That day, a mysterious virus was on the news. My [beloved] then-boss walked in and said (dramatically, in his lovely Spanish-accented English), “Deed you hear about thees theeng? Eet eez coming from thee west.” Indeed. Well, yes I had. I had been comparing those symptoms to mine. Respiratory? Not. But still. I love you buddy and thank you very much for reminding me that healthy young people in Arizona have died quickly of an unknown disease and I don’t feel all that hot today so hopefully I don’t have it…
And of course I didn’t have that disease, which turned out to be a virus borne by mice. Not that we don’t have mice here (sheesh!) but there are zero Michigan hantavirus deaths. I think that’s *ever*. I ended up taking a couple sick days. I had a garden-variety three-day diarrhea bug (sorry) that half of the Haisley Mafia had already recovered from (“oh, I had that last week, yada yada, hee hee hee)”. To add insult to injury, I realized that I had lice. Yes. I. Had. Lice. Me. The fanatic who washes her hair at least once a day! One of the more inglorious moments of my life as a parent was sitting in the Blue Bathtub with Nix in my hair and, well, let’s just say that the Blue And Only Toilet was maybe two feet away just in case…
Today, I got [most of] the rodent crap cleaned up and cleared the decks to run Rooooomba around down in the Dungeon for a while and then Mouse came over to do some gardening and I took a little walk to the back of the yard and… Yikes! Poison ivy was encroaching upon my back “garden”. It actually grows in the woods behind the Landfill but sneaks through the chainlink fence into our “loverly” [heavy sarcasm] garden. I suppose I could harass the school district to get in there and get rid of it but there really isn’t all that much of it and one of the things I do *not* want to be known as is the cranky old broad in the neighborhood.
Anyway, I won’t even try to describe the condition of the back of our yard but it took some doing to even get *at* the PI back there. For a while, I actually went into the woods and pulled out some PI on *school* property. As well as some other plants and junk vines that were impeding access to the PI IN MY YARD!!! Like, “Hey Mouse, will you throw some clippers over the fence?” I *think* I got all of the PI out. I think. I was working on the junk vines and as I was pulling some of them off a utility pole guy waaaarrrr, I looked up and there was a saggy utility waaaarrr. Was it a lucky-shuckial waaaarrr (yikes!) or a phone waaarrr. And did *I* do that or…
If it’s a lucky-shuckial waaarrrr, it isn’t affecting the Landfill because our power is on. If it is a phone waaarrrr, it *certainly* isn’t affecting the Landfill, since we don’t have a landline any more. At any rate, I decided not to mess with the vines and retreated back into Rodent City aka the Landfill Dungeon.
I don’t usually do poison ivy eradication. I usually whine until the GG does it. I am different this year. I don’t know why (but don’t cross me because I have *very* little patience.). I suited up to do my own damn battle with PI. So far, so good. I have been known to get a teensy tinesy PI lesion by standing next to a specimen plant in a botanical garden. Today there is no evidence of PI anywhere on my skin. Knock on wood!
May 18th, 2013 at 10:17 pm
You got way more accomplished than I did here. Rainy weather today so I mowed and weed whacked last night before some torrential rain started. Today I went to brunch and then to a Happy Hour. I need exercise now!! We’ve had a few instances of hantavirus, but in Eastern WA where it’s hotter and dry.
May 19th, 2013 at 6:22 am
Poison Ivy has reared its ugly head in our yard again, too. Mark got some, but not all in our front yard ground cover. (English ivy, vinca minor and some lilies of the valley.) I noticed that there is also some in the back yard ground cover. I was able to show our new next door neighbor what it looks like, in case she has some on the other side of the fence. Last year I removed a monster vine which had wrapped itself around our shared wooden fence. I didn’t see that one, but there were several others to show her. Unfortunately, even though I thought I was completely covered, and I washed with Tec-nu as soon as I came in, I still got some on both wrists. It was bad enough to need prescription strength cream and steroid pills. I will NOT do it this year. My dermotologist’s wife gave me the number of a garden service guy who is one of the lucky few who does not respond to urushiol oil.