It is a late March morning.  The days are finally getting light early enough for me to take the dog on a real walk again.  As I head out to feed horses, I see that we received a dusting of snow overnight and the sky is low and grey, promising more snow to come.  It is barely light enough to see without a flashlight but if I walk out the door now, I will have just enough time to feed horses and walk “around the block” before I have to leave for work.  It’s not snowing as I head out of the house, but as we arrive at the horse compound, I can hear the tinny “tic, tic, tic,” of flakes just beginning to hurl themselves against the galvanized horse shelters.  Just a few flakes…

But the flakes are getting heavier and falling more thickly as I finish feeding and Kaylee and I head out for our walk.  “Around the block” in our world includes most of our front parcel and the neighbor’s parcel below us—a little over a mile.  First we head north down the ridge above the horse corrals.  As I walk down the ridge, I have to bow my head and hold a hand up to protect my eyes because I’m not wearing a hat.  The snowflakes begin falling fast and furious, driven by a wind from the northwest, and whenever I remove my protective hand, I invariably take a snowflake to the eyeball—not a barrel of laughs at six in the morning.

Next, I turn left at the north property line and head west on the neighbor’s road.  Occasionally, I catch a glimpse of Kaylee in her morning rambles—right before the snowflake hits my eyeball.  I whistle at the turn to let her know I’ve changed course although she’s probably perfectly aware of my location at all times.  Heading west isn’t nearly as bad and I can search for the dog a little more carefully on this heading.  I finally spot her about 100 yards ahead of me crossing the road at a lope.  She’s not chasing anything, just looking for good smells, reading the stories of all of the denizens who travel our little patch of earth.  I scan the sagebrush for coyotes, but don’t spot any.  We have come out of the trees now and are at the high point of this leg.  I like this route because for most of the walk I can see far enough around me to spot the coyotes well in advance.

The grey curtain of snow this morning had cut visibility down to just a few hundred feet.   It is really coming down heavily now and beginning to accumulate on the ground.  I can feel it hitting the back of my head—guess I get to do my hair again when I get back to the house!  Our nearest downhill neighbor’s house is about three eighths of a mile away as the crow flies, but this morning, I can’t even tell there is a house there.  As I turn left at the end of this leg to head south along the property line I try to keep Kaylee close enough that I can see her.  She is mostly a black spot running along the hillside, but it is amazing how many hidden folds and large clumps of sagebrush there are capable of completely concealing one medium sized dog.

Finally, we make the last left turn to head east up our driveway.  This is the uphill leg leading back to the house.  I never made it up this stretch at a run even when I was running marathons.  Now I labor and puff my way up the road.  Kaylee always gets pretty far ahead of me, and today, she disappears into the trees in the wash.  As I reach the gate, which marks the beginning of our property, I see her standing on the road ahead of me staring off to the north.  I follow her gaze and see the grey shadow of a coyote perched on the far bank of the wash.  As I unlimber my rifle to take aim at her, she spins suddenly and vanishes into the concealing snow.  I pop off a shot anyway, reload, and head for her last known position to take up the chase.  But after wallowing my way across the wash and up the bluff, I never catch sight of her again so Kaylee and I head directly back to the house.

Oh, don’t be too shocked and concerned.  My rifle?  It’s an air rifle, a pellet gun more correctly—but to every 11 year old Ralphie out there, it’s a BB gun.  It’s not even a really nice BB gun, purchased for maybe $20 at most.  The best I can ever do is put someone’s eye out.  My intention in chasing the coyote down is not to injure or harm her, but to train her to stay off my property and leave my dog alone.  And amazingly, it seems to be working.

All this pretty much started right after we got the dog.  At first, I thought it was mere coincidence.  We would go for a walk and accidently run into a couple of coyotes.  After we “accidentally” ran into the coyotes a number of times, I finally realized that it was no coincidence.  They were thinking “Oh look!  Snacky dog!”  And they were waiting for us.

There are four of them in the pack I think.  The two I see most often I named Frick and Frack.  Frick and Frack are not afraid of people and once they’ve spotted their prey, will follow doggedly (pun intended) wherever we go.  They are probably the same coyotes that got my cats.  Then there are the invisibles.  I first saw Mr. Invisible on a day when the coyotes did not see me down cleaning the horse corrals.  All three were trotting east along David’s trail probably sniffing Kaylee’s tasty dog scent and scheming to “invite” her over for lunch.  Later, I saw Mr. Invisible from the house a few times trailing along with Frick and Frack as they tracked the scent trail we left on our walk.  And now I’m pretty sure there is a Mrs. Invisible, but that comes later in the story.

One day while I was riding the horse, we ran into them.  I saw them and Kaylee running through the trees above me on the bluff of the wash and pretty much freaked out.  I called Kaylee down to me and spent the rest of the ride keeping her close.  They followed us for about a mile, then met us on the way back down and followed us almost all the way home—very annoying.  I tried to get Max (the horse) to chase them, but Max wasn’t too enthused about it, while Kaylee thought chasing them sounded like a marvelous idea so I had to give that up.  A couple of days after that, they were waiting for us on our walk and followed so closely that I could throw rocks at them and almost hit them.   Anybody whose ever seen me throw rocks will know that’s gotta be pretty close!

That was the day I had had enough.  I e-mailed David at work and asked him to pick up some bird shot for the 22.  I figured that I could try to shoot close enough to scare them and if I accidentally got too close, birdshot would mostly sting, but not do any real damage.  David informed me that he would be bringing home a wrist rocket instead.  Huh?  Having never been an eleven-year-old boy, I had no idea that a wrist rocket is your basic slingshot.  I was picturing those little crossbow things the bad guys were using in The Road Warrior only somehow firing little RPG’s.  It kind of seemed like overkill to me, but finally David straightened me out.  I suspect he was just nostalgic for the days of childhood when he and his friends would go around shooting rocks at each other and anything else that seemed worthy of targeting.  He also brought home a box of pellets for the pellet gun.

I went on the Internet and googled “how do you get rid of coyotes?”  The ideas were pretty much in line with what I was thinking.  Most pages suggest using noise and shooting at the coyotes with paint ball guns or other non-lethal projectiles.  One interesting fact I found was that if you kill the coyotes, the alpha female will just begin producing new litters of pup to replace the ones you killed.  Because of this, it’s apparently almost impossible to wipe out the local coyote population. Personally, I just don’t see the point of killing them.   If it were possible to train them to leave me alone, I would rather do that.  If I started killing them, I would just have to deal with the next untrained generation.

So I spent a couple of days shooting driveway gravel at fence posts, clumps of sagebrush, trees, cargo containers and pretty much anything else that would stand still long enough. I got to where I could hit a target if it was large enough and not moving.  Now all I need are large, immobile coyotes!  And I saw no coyotes—naturally…  A few days later, though, I ran into a pair on the ridge as we began our walk and it was game on.  I don’t think I actually hit either of them, but I came close a few times.  One of them took off pretty quickly, but the other circled around as if to follow us on our walk so I went after it.  I pursued them very aggressively because the web pages had said that it wasn’t enough to just make them run away—you have to pursue them until they leave your territory.  So I kept shooting rocks and chasing even after they began to run away. Kaylee joined me in the chase and I finally realized that when she chases coyotes, it’s not to go off and meet them, but to chase them out of her territory also, so we were a team.

Pretty soon, I saw two coyotes disappearing over the lip of the wash almost 200 yards away at a dead run.  Kaylee rejoined me quite proud of herself and we headed back towards the house—I figured that was enough excitement for one morning.  We were working our way through the trees that fill the wash through our property when we encountered the invisibles.  So Kaylee and I had another fun chase until the invisibles high tailed it out of our territory.  At first, I thought that Frick and Frack had circled back around, but as I thought about it I realized there simply hadn’t been time for them to run all the way back up into the trees.  That’s when I decided there must be a Mrs. Invisible in the pack.

After that, I started carrying the pellet gun on every walk.  It is kind of heavy and annoying.  I felt a little silly walking around like Stewart Granger in King Solomon’s Mines (only he had better hair and a much bigger gun).  But I have discovered I’m much more accurate with the pellet gun at a longer distance than I am with the slingshot.  I can even hit the occasional T-post on purpose now.  After our big encounter, however, I didn’t see any coyotes for weeks.  They obviously got the message loud and clear.  In fact, my encounter in the snow was the first coyote sighting since I chased them off and I would say that the alacrity with which she scooted out of there only proves that this really was an accidental encounter.

Since then, we’ve chased off the occasional coyote.   We still make sure they “leave the territory” every time.   I’ve stopped living every 11 year old boy’s dream and walking around looking like Ramar of the Jungle, but I continued to carry the slingshot for a couple of months.   The other day, Kaylee was outside.  I looked out to check on her and spotted her trotting around collecting good scents out in the sagebrush when I spotted a coyote down below her on the hill.  She looked up and saw it about the same time.  I watched, wondering what would happen.  Kaylee began to trot in the general direction of the coyote until it spotted her (they were still about 200 feet apart).  Suddenly, the coyote dropped its head and ears, put its tail between its legs and slunk quickly away into the trees.  Kaylee stopped, satisfied that she had done her job.

We had a simple plan.  We always think we have a simple plan.  We should know better.

Not all of our plans are simple, but we tend to get around to tackling the simple ones first because they seem so… well… simple.  Once begun, though, our plans seem to fall prey to whatever the opposite of entropy happens to be called—disentropy, antientropy, unentropy.

You know about entropy.  That’s the principal that says things tend to devolve into their simplest form over time.  It’s the principle that disproves the theory that if you give enough monkeys access to enough typewriters for enough time, eventually, they’ll write the complete works of Shakespeare.  Wrong, wrong, wrong!  Instead, the monkeys will find that flinging typewriters full of poo is much more entertaining than just flinging poo and they won’t type anything at all.  That’s entropy!  Another way to say it is:  we all rot.  Left to its own devices, nothing gets more complex over time.

Our plans, on the other hand, given enough time, tend to become infinitely more complex than we can possibly imagine.  (Or is that Obi-Wan Kenobi if Darth Vader kills him—I can never remember…)

I think I’ll call it Murphentropy!  That makes it the subclause of Murphy’s law that states that there is no such thing as a simple plan—only people foolish enough to believe they have one.

And I know it’s true, because it once took us two years to rebuild a bathroom.  What happened was, we went to a local home improvement store which happened to be going out of business and we found a corner shower stall.  And we thought, “hmmm… that corner shower stall would fit into that our teeny broom closet of a master bathroom, and then we’d have another shower we could use, and (everybody say this together): It will increase the value of our house!”  Uh-huh.  Only the corner stall wouldn’t fit in the bathroom with the existing vanity.  If only we could find a pedestal sink.  We kept on browsing and, lo and behold, we found one.  All we needed now was a new toilet—white, thank you—please God, don’t make us put the harvest gold one back in.  Soon, we found ourselves a white toilet, and it was all on sale, and all we had to do was rip out the old bathroom and install our new booty and our lives would be complete!

Uh-huh!

Have you ever tried to install a shower stall in a bathroom that doesn’t have an existing shower?  It’s not as easy as it sounds.  You see, your standard shower consists of “pipes” which make “water” come “out” when you try to take a shower.  Because our bathroom didn’t have an existing shower, there were no “pipes” and hence, no “water.”  The thought of standing around naked in a shower stall with no water seemed somehow inefficient to us in terms of getting clean, so we knew we needed pipes.  Only, to install pipes, you first have to perform a complex ritual involving seven plumbers and an African witch doctor dancing around a bonfire on the summer solstice offering prayers to Goombar, the god of bathroom plumbing.  If Goombar is pleased, you are allowed to install your pipes.  Apparently, we pissed Goombar off.

So what happened first was:  I hired a plumber.  I foolishly, naively, stupidly, hired a plumber.  The plumber came out and crawled under the house and made lots of important plumbing sounds by essentially banging randomly on any pipes he could find.  Then he cut out enormous hunks of wall board and sautered some new random pipes onto our existing random pipes and then presented me a bill for approximately half the national debt.  At this point, I foolishly, naively and stupidly believed that the plumbing was finished and we could install the new bathroom.  I believed that right up until David came home from work and laid eyes on our new pipes and declared them “all wrong!”

Now I know what you are thinking.  David is a computer guy, while the plumber is… well… a plumber.  So wouldn’t the plumber be far more qualified to get the job “all right,” than David would be to declare it “all wrong?”  I indulged in this sort of thinking as well—for about twelve seconds.  Then I realized that A. I have to live with David, while B. I do not have to live with the plumber.  So naturally I sided with David.  Unfortunately, by declaring the plumbing “all wrong,” it was now incumbent upon David to make it right.  And David didn’t seem to be in any big hurry.  Mostly, he seemed to be considering what he was going to do—you know—while he was watching TV or we were camping in Death Valley.  Maybe he was sneaking out every full moon and doing dances to try and get back into Goombar’s good graces.  All I know is that we had this empty little cave where our bathroom used to be and we had a bunch of unopened boxes containing a new bathroom taking up space in the shop and that was the state of affairs for a good looooong time.

So what finally happened was… we invited my parents up for Christmas.  Or was it Thanksgiving?  I can’t remember, but the end result was the same.  The thought of having to share a bathroom with my parents for up to a week was horrifying enough to motivate David to fix whatever it was he didn’t like about the pipes so that the bathroom could proceed.

This necessitated a rather comical scenario wherein David’s father came over and spent an entire day crawling around under the house banging on pipes in a vaguely plumberish way and attempting to carry on a conversation with David (who was in the house) that went something like this:

David:  “Can you find the hot water pipe?”

Dad:  “Mmmff mmmff mfff…”

David:  “What?”

Dad:  “Mmmff mmmff mfff…” (louder this time)

David:  “No!  Not that one, it’s the other one!”

Dad:  “Mmmff mmfff?”

David runs outside and crawls under the house.

Sounds of banging on pipes.

Sounds of muffled conversation.

More banging on pipes.  (Goombar likes it when you bang on the pipes a lot.)

Then David would reappear in the house and yell, “Okay, you have the hot water line?”

And dad would yell “Mmmff mmmff mfff…”

This went on for most of the day.  They were probably not as efficient as the plumber, but they made up for it by being far more entertaining and much cheaper.  In the end, I think it cost me a couple of sandwiches and some soda for lunch.  The toughest part was the physical discomfort of having to stifle all of my snorks and giggles whenever one of them was near enough to be offended by my mirth.  And in the end, they fixed whatever was “all wrong.”  Or perhaps they just banged on pipes in a manly fashion and didn’t change anything and just never admitted it.   All I know that when we finally got around to hooking up the shower, water did come out when you pulled the little handle—take THAT Goombar!

The part of the project that turned out to be the most difficult was actually the linoleum.  It turns out that your bathroom floor is glued on… with real glue!  (Who knew?!)  That means that if you put the glue down and then you put the floor down on it and you screw it up?  There’s no backsies.   You have to rip the whole thing out and go buy new linoleum and start all over again or you have to immediately sell the house to unsuspecting buyers.  If it hadn’t been for the fact that the bathroom was roughly the size of your average postage stamp (if you cut it in half), we might have been intimidated by the prospect of putting down a floor and hired somebody to do it.  As it turned out, we did just fine once we got brave enough to try.

You would think that this project would have turned us off to rebuilding bathrooms, but it wasn’t that long before we actually did it again!  The root of the problem was that we purchased a house that had been built in the early 80’s, but apparently, the people who built the house had really, really fond memories of the 70’s.  The carpet was avocado green.  One bathroom and parts of the kitchen were harvest gold (the kitchen counters were actually the kind with gold flakes embedded in them) and the other bathroom was baby blue.  The overall effect was to scream “POLYESTER PANTSUIT!”  If Donna Summer had dropped in, she would have immediately begun looking for the disco ball.  So it was either start listening to the Bee Gees again or start working on the house.

Ironically, the second bathroom turned out to be far more technical than the first.  That’s because this time we (again foolishly) went from a shower stall to a tub and shower combo and the bathroom wasn’t, technically, large enough for the tub.  In addition, the old shower had leaked down through the subfloor and we were afraid we would have to replace the joist and THEN when we went to replace the wallboard, we found out that we were the proud owners of “The Amazing Sort-Of Trapezoidal Bathroom.”  Which shouldn’t have surprised us because when we tore out the old dry-wall, we found an empty beer can inside.  And the piece de resistance (literal translation: stupidest thing we did) was that we installed a pocket door in the new bathroom which was so daunting a task that even the linoleum had no power to frighten us this time around.

This time, though, we were at least smart enough to know that it wouldn’t be a simple project, so naturally, we finished the second bathroom in only six months.  Maybe that’s because we had learned a valuable lesson when we rebuilt the first bathroom—invite your parents to spend Christmas sooner this time!  (I think I was actually adding the last coat of paint the day before my parents arrived.)

And of course, all this was by way of introduction to our latest “simple plan,” affectionately known as “the water project from hell.”  But now that’s going to have to wait for another day!

The other night I looked up from my reading and spotted an ant walking around my living room.  This event is not completely unusual, as we’ve been finding these ants wandering around the house for the last month or so.  They’re not the red kind that bite—they are sort of red and black mixed and about twice as large as the red ones.  They seem to have an affinity for my bathroom for some reason.  It always makes me kind of sad, though, knowing that they will wander aimlessly in their little DNA programmed search for food and, not finding anything interesting, die of old age lost in the carpeted wilderness.  Unless they meet THE SHOE, natch…

And since we couldn’t figure out how they were making it in to the house in the first place, it was kind of hard to plug up the hole.  Of course, there was always the danger that one of the little buggers would actually find his/(hers/its?) way back out to the nest with a stray grain of rice and announce to the whole world that there is FOOD TO BE HAD! in this direction, but the chances were pretty slim.  However, ants also leave trails so that others can follow, so I knew that my little Lewis and Clarks were merely the tip of the exploration iceberg and that, sooner or later, the inevitable “westward migration” would occur.  So I figured I should probably get around to putting out some ant bait.  You know—when I got around to it.  Pretty sure I spotted it in the horse trailer a month or so back…  Ummm… what was I saying?

Now I realize that there are some of you who are perfectly happy to live with the “wilderness” when the wilderness chooses to live with you.  I am not of that opinion.  I do not like to share my little domain with critters that:

a.  eat my food

b.  don’t clean up their own messes

c.  carry diseases that could possibly kill me

d.  might bite me

e.  refuse to curl up on my lap and purr while watching TV or chase tennis balls and worship me

And while I know my friend, Carly, would probably gladly die of Hantavirus rather than kill a mouse, I would not.  I think of it this way:  David and I own approximately 100 acres here.  Our house takes up approximately one twentieth of an acre.  This leaves 99 19/20 of an acre for the critters!  That’s 99.95 acres for the fractionally challenged among you who are still reading even after encountering a fraction (bravo for you!).  The others, of course, ran screaming from the room at the first hint of fractionage and are hiding in a darkened closet right now, shivering in terror.

I still hate to poison the ants, so I put this event off as long as possible in the hopes that they would magically just go away.  But they were bad ants.  They told their friends who told their friends and suddenly it was PAR-TAY!!!  I, of course, was oblivious.  I spotted the one ant and ignored it.  Then I spotted a second and a third ant a few minutes later and ignored them.  After the fourth or fifth ant, I got wise and started turning on lights and really looking.  They were everywhere!  This explains why, if my neighbors were nosy enough, and if they had a night spotting scope, they would have seen me hightailing it down to the horse trailer at 10 o’clock at night in my pajamas to dig out the ant poison.

Interestingly enough, when I went outside, they were swarming all over the ground out there also.  Must have been The Night of the Ants.  I was very disappointed, though.  I listened really close, but I couldn’t hear them singing.  You know?  “The ants go marching two by two.  Hurrah! Hurrah!” Apparently, that is merely a myth perpetrated by summer camps and scout troops.  My childhood unravels…

The one plus is that I was able to follow the trail back and find their access hole—under the front door.  So I stuffed a rag in the corner of the door.  Someday, I will probably strategically locate some weather stripping to block this hole.  Someday.  In reality, 20 years from now, there will still probably be a rag shut in the corner of the front door.  If you ever visit me, look for it there.

But the ants haven’t been our only invaders lately.  A couple of weeks ago, we were driving to town and stopped at the Lodge for some reason.  As we sat there, we both noticed that we could smell barbecue.  Yum!  It never occurred to us to wonder why the Lodge might be barbecuing at 6:30 AM.  We noticed it again when we stopped at a stoplight in town.  Wow!  One of these restaurants must be barbecuing also—must be national barbecue week or something.  And it STILL did not occur to us that 7 AM might be a wee bit early in the morning for pork ribs.  It did at the third stoplight.  It finally penetrated our fuzzy brains that WE were the barbecue!

So we stopped and opened the hood and found a veritable beaver dam in the front of our engine—a smoldering beaver dam!

We disassembled half the engine and cleared out the beaver dam and figured it must have been a pack rat since some of the sticks would have challenged your average mouse.  (Or maybe the mice have gotten a hold of a stash of steroids.)  And in our usual fashion, we ignored it after that.  Until David noticed the lovely barbecue smell again the next day on the way to work.  He figured we had missed a few sticks only to find a new and freshly built beaver dam under the hood.  This went on three days running.  And so it was war!  Again, I absolutely despise killing critters if I can possibly avoid it, but I have to draw the line somewhere.  I’d like to think that line is somewhere this side of my car bursting into flames as I drive into town!

We didn’t have any traps big enough to catch a pack rat, so we decided to use bait.  I popped the hood on the 4runner to find a lovely nest made out of insulation scavenged from under my hood sitting right on top of the engine.  So I cleared the nest out and replaced it with a bait tray.  Our new truck didn’t have any obvious nests, but the insulation had also been chewed on, so it got a bait tray also, as did the Camry.  This explains why there is a post-it note on the back door stating emphatically REMOVE MOUSE BAIT!  Look for that on your visit as well.

The next morning, all of the bait was gone and there were new nests in the vehicles.  Huh?  Apparently, (according to the label) this poison could take a few days to work, adding heavily to my already huge load of guilt over our terrible treatment of the wildlife.  This went on about three days running—bait gone—new nests.  Then David thought to disassemble the Camry’s air intake because we have found nests there in the past, and what did he find?  That’s right!  Most of the bait.  Apparently, the little blighters thought they’d stash a bunch of it in there for later—either that or they are hoping to kill us with the fumes from the mouse bait because they weren’t successful in their first attempt at catching the car on fire.  My friend Carly would be cheering for the mice and/or pack rats at this point if she wasn’t still shivering in the closet over the fraction.  However, tragically, for the mice or pack rats, they snacked a bit as they were stashing and in a few more days, we finally managed to claim the exclusive use of our vehicles once again.

I guess it’s one of those inevitable struggles of rural living.  After all, it was their home before it became ours.  On the other hand, I strongly suspect that the critter load on our 100 acres was not nearly as high as it is now that we’ve come along and provided food (hay) and water.  In fact, I would venture to guess that the critters are quite far ahead of the game here.  They even have their own water with a stick strategically placed so that they can climb out of it if they fall in.  I got tired of fishing dead rabbits, squirrels and mice out of my horse troughs and dog water dishes.  And if you examine the hay in my stack, you can see the places where the rabbits have chewed away at the bottom bales for the last year or so.   I’d love to hear them discussing this year’s crop.  “Do you think she’ll buy us any alfalfa this year?”  (Maybe they’d like some Trix.)

A few years ago, I declared war on the ground squirrels.  They have an exasperating habit of placing their holes right next to the foundations of my horse stalls.  They actually came up right in the middle of Dolly’s stall, but the mat was so heavy, they couldn’t work their way out from under it and gave up—and left a giant hole in the middle of the stall!  You don’t see it under the mat, but it is a booby trap awaiting the unsuspecting visitor.  We have this big juniper tree next to the arena and the squirrels spend all summer stripping it of berries and, presumably, storing them underground somewhere.  Either that, or somewhere on my property, there is a ground squirrel run gin factory that I have never stumbled upon.  Each time I walk by the tree no less than 8-10 squirrels bail out —another 8-10 of them don’t bother to bail—they just stay perched up there looking like live Christmas ornaments and laughing at me!

Anyway, my plan of combat was to get a couple of feral cats.  Their names were Romeo and Juliet.  I know—awwwww…  Romeo, apparently, had been handled as a kitten and was pretty friendly while Juliet was wild as a march hare.  They set up shop in the rafters of our tractor shed and I kept food and water for them in my little stack yard where they could be safe to eat.  They were cute and entertaining and I was even able to get Juliet to be near me, even if I couldn’t ever touch her.  And they did their job, which was to keep down the squirrel population.  They also kept down the lizard population, the rabbit population, the snake population, the mouse population, the bird population, and the pack rat population.  I wasn’t so thrilled about losing ALL of my critters, but figured the trade was worth it if I didn’t have to do combat with the packrats and mice for the vehicles or worry about breaking a leg in one of my stalls.  Unfortunately, the tale of Romeo and Juliet—cat version—also ended tragically.  I had had them a little over a year when the coyotes got them both.  I wasn’t entirely surprised that they got Romeo because he was a bit laid back.  I suspect that Juliet went off looking for her Romeo because she disappeared the day after he did—very Shakespeare!

Anyway, since then, the critter populations have all bounced back tremendously.  I currently frighten away no less than 4-6 rabbits almost every time I feed—and those are the ones hanging out in the stack yard.  They are all over the property.  You can see them hopping and bouncing and just generally frolicking about everywhere.  I feel a little like Lady Tottington in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.  Where are Wallace and Gromit with a giant vacuum when I need them?  There are also birds nesting in the rafters of the tractor shed now, lizards skittering around the back porch and we even found a rather somnolent and angry snake in the tractor shed the other day with a mouse sized lump in its belly.  So it’s all good, except for the poor cats.  I don’t plan to get anymore any time soon—I have made my peace with the squirrels (for the most part).  They coyotes are still around also—naturally, they are pleased with the smorgasbord I have provided them.

I’ve been thinking about rigging up one of my barrels as the ultimate humane mouse trap.  Put one of those humane one way live traps through a hole and seal it up really well so mice could get in, but not back out.  If I used a large enough trap, I could probably even catch pack rats.  I’d set it up on the driveway where we park the cars.  I could give them food and water through the top of the barrel and when I had enough in there, I could transport them elsewhere and release them.  Perhaps my crazy neighbor Tom is feeling lonely…

Okay, so I cleaned my house the other day.  I’m not proud of it, but sometimes it just happens.  What happened was that I needed to go to the dump.  See where we live, A. There is no garbage service, and B.  We generate garbage.   I have not yet figured out how to not generate garbage.  Wal-mart doesn’t seem to sell the handy Recyclohome, home recycling center, and in spite of the fact that we own 100 acres, I’m pretty sure the neighbors would notice if we started to bury it all back in the canyon.  So trips to the dump are SOP, literally Sort Of Problematic because the dump is in another state and is only open two days a week so you have to plan these things out.  I usually end up going every 3-4 weeks.   In the fall, if I plan carefully, I time it so that I can go by school and watch the football game too.

Now, your normal trip to the dump does not always precipitate a house cleaning on my part, but this trip happened to coincide with my reaching critical mass.  I don’t know how you clean your house, but the “Critical Mass Method” is how I clean my house.  This is the method whereby you keep noticing the clutter but not doing anything about it until one day, you get tired of looking at all the little dead bug bodies on the bathroom counter and actually begin cleaning something.

My mother-in-law, on the other hand uses the Good Housekeeping approved method of actually cleaning the dirt up when she sees it.  She is the absolute stereotypical, cliché, sitcom mother-in-law.  Her house looks like the staff from Architectural Digest, or maybe Sunset Magazine just finished up a photo shoot, only you never see them because she made them hide, along with all of their equipment, in the closet when she saw you coming up the driveway so the place wouldn’t look cluttered.  This is how she operates:  Say she is sitting innocently on the toilet doing what people normally do there and she looks up and notices a cobweb in the corner of the bathroom.  She will immediately (upon finishing her business) proceed to find a long handled brush or let’s say a small shop vac, which is what I would use.  But let’s say the shop vac is in the garage because my father-in-law has been using it to vacuum his boat, which is where it would be in my house.  She will immediately ask him in strenuous tones to indicate that this is IMPORTANT to please bring it into the house so that she can remove the cobweb.  He will do so (muttering under his breath because all of the Soule men mutter under their breath when put upon by their wives), and he will gallantly remove the cobweb himself because the Soule men are gallant that way.   My Mother-in-law will then suggest that next time he makes a trip to Home Depot (they don’t shop at Wal-Mart) maybe he should buy his own shop vac to keep in the garage strictly for boat vacuuming purposes.

This is how it works in my house.  I will notice as I am sitting on the toilet that there is a cobweb (usually it includes a spider in my house) in the corner.  I will think, “huh, there is a cobweb in the corner.”

I will immediately forget about the whole thing until the next time I use the bathroom.  You see, I’m okay with the spider unless it decides it’s a good idea to move into my shower.  I have been carefully weeding out the spider gene pool to remove the shower-dwelling gene for several years now and I think I’m beginning to have some success at that.  So the spider is really only in danger if I get the shop vac to clean up the cobwebs because then, it just makes sense to remove the spider as well.  In fact, the spider has a better than even chance of living a long and healthy life in my bathroom corner because the next thing that happens is that one day, I accidently happen to notice that the shop vac is not in the closet where it belongs.

Several days (or maybe years) after this, I will actually ask David where the shop vac is.  He will tell me it is in the garage because he has been using it to vacuum his boat and I will say in a very non-strenuous tone “huh, well if you get a chance, bring it in the house so I can use it sometime.”

Then one day as I am walking into the living room, I will trip over the shop vac and think “huh, David moved that into the house.”

Then, finally, after much time has passed, after I have tripped over the shop vac 47,000 times, after the spider has died of old age and is just a desiccated little exoskeleton hanging limply from one of the now multitude of cobwebs draped artfully around my bathroom to the envy of haunted house designers everywhere, I will reach critical mass and I will know that it is time to clean the house.

Only I don’t have time to clean the house…  So I will think about cleaning the house—while I am off riding at a clinic or on the Alzheimer’s ride—while I am off sailing with David on the Delta or Tahoe—while I am visiting my mom—while I am at work.  Until finally, one weekend, the stars align and I need to go to the dump anyway and my horse is lame and David has gone off hiking and I have time—and THEN and ONLY THEN, will I clean the house.

The cleaning itself is pretty unremarkable.  There is the usual amount of windex and pledge involved.  But most of what makes up cleaning in my house is REMOVING CLUTTER  (so having this coincide with a dump trip is a pretty good idea).  Only a portion of the clutter actually goes to the dump.  Most of the clutter is just stuff that has managed to crawl out of whatever place it actually belongs so that it can commune with the other clutter on some flat surface.  Right now, if you go into my laundry room, you will find at least two of my ball caps on the counter or on top of the dryer.  Why aren’t they hanging neatly on their hooks?  Good question.  And there are at least 10 pairs of shoes there.  This might make sense in some cultures, but at least 6 pairs of them ought to be in the bedroom closet.  Coffee table?  Books that ought to be on the book shelves.  Dining room table?  David’s sailing/camping stuff that has inexplicably clawed its way out of its storage container and is attempting to scuttle off of the table and into whatever dark corners it can find.

And the knick-knacks!  There is the decorative Grappa bottle displayed in the living room waiting, I presume, to be joined by other decorative Grappa bottles in the future.  I have to ask myself why I would want to broadcast how much Grappa I drink to casual visitors (one bottle folks—it is still waiting!).  I have to ask myself if I can really drink enough Grappa to make up a collection worth talking about after I get out of rehab and assuming I haven’t just blacked out the entire concept of collecting Grappa bottles.  I have to ask myself if I shouldn’t just recycle it right now and get it over with!

Which brings us to my Mother-in-law’s deepest darkest cleaning secret.  She CONTROLS CLUTTER (with an iron fist)!  If you look in any one of her closets, you will find where all of her clutter hides—banished there along with the Sunset photographers and their equipment.  Every few months, her house has a new “theme” wherein she allows certain items of clutter a reprieve from the dark, as it were, and banishes the old theme items to the closet.  If I were to pull this off, I would need about 8 more closets!  Still, I often think maybe I should spend about an hour once a week banishing clutter—hahahahahahahahaha…