Invasion of the Forest Animals, Spring 2022 Edition

We caught five mice in the greenhouse over the weekend and one in the house. The one in the house ran across my office floor yesterday morning and then disappeared. As I walked into the living room to collect my music from the piano so I could leave for church, I saw it dash along the edge of the baseboard, right into the trap sitting next to the piano.

RIP, mouse.

I don’t have a lot of tolerance for rodents. I won’t put up with ground squirrels in the garden. Most of the mice we’ve caught have been in the basement, and even those have been rare lately. When our dog, Rusty, was old and senile, he would take mouthfuls of food out of his bowl and drop them all over the house—in places I didn’t know about—and we had a big mouse problem; hence, the network of traps.

I’ve also got ants in the kitchen. I’ve been wiping things down with a borax solution, but I may have to go hunt for the nest. We had this problem one year and there was a huge nest under the front porch. The husband eradicated it with the pressure washer. Unorthodox, but it worked.

The robins have begun nest-building in earnest:

I couldn’t figure out what they were doing by starting a nest in every single one of the rafter bays, so I watched them for a few minutes. I think they just get confused about where they started. Every rafter bay probably looks the same to them. Eventually, they will get a whole nest built in one bay and have some babies.

I like animals, I really do. I just don’t want them living in my house or eating my food.

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The husband planted potatoes yesterday. I went across the road to my friend Anna’s house after church and got some strawberry starts from her. I’m moving and replanting my entire strawberry bed this year and that’s on my schedule for today I also want to plant the lettuce seedlings that were in the indoor growing system and dig up and pot more herbs from the herb garden to sell at the plant sale.

[This plant sale is either going to be a bust or an overwhelming success. It brought in a little over a thousand dollars last year and my goal is to double that amount this year.]

We’re traveling around the neighborhood in style now. The husband bought us a golf cart at a recent estate sale:

I drove it over to Anna’s yesterday and he took it to have dinner with our friends Tom and Marcie last night. They graciously fed him because I had a dinner meeting to attend. I think the cart goes a whopping 3 miles per hour, but it’s going to be useful.

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We were asked not to show pictures of the mystery make from the serger class this weekend, which I why I don’t have any. I enjoyed the class very much and I hope Marianne, the store owner, invites the teacher back again next year to do another mystery make class.

I pick up my new serger from her on Thursday. I’m trying to arrange my schedule this month so that I get some sewing done early in the day, work in the garden for a few hours after it warms up, then sew a bit more. My calendar is much less crowded than it was in April. I don’t know how April got to be such a mess.

In any case, I’d like to finish the quilt projects I’ve started and get all my serger classes prepped and scheduled. I’ve also got some clothing projects planned.