I had a City Council Pest Control guy round yesterday to sort out a wasps nest I’d discovered in the electricity meter cupboard on the side of my house. He took a look at it in the corner of the meter cupboard, listened as I said they were entering underneath it, and said, “Oh yes, what you can see there is just the tip of it. I’d say that the total size is about… this big,” he gestured with his hands a span of about 4 feet. “It’ll be in the wall cavity to the left of the cupboard.”

THERE WERE WASPS IN MY WALL CAVITY. No amount of exclamatory punctuation can even come close to expressing my horror.

I shuddered back into the house and he got out his beekeeper’s protective clothing and powder poison canister and nozzle, and set to work. I watched from the (firmly closed) upstairs side window as a load of white coated wasps flew away. He also pulled down the visible part of the nest, told me that any wasps currently out foraging would return soon and get the poison on them too, and took a £48 cheque off me.

I didn’t go near the cupboard until this morning. Sure enough, the visible part of the nest is in pieces, and there’s a hole in the wooden backboard of the cabinet that the wasps must have eaten their way through to get into the wall cavity.

The pest control guy expressed his surprise that I haven’t seen any wasps in the house. I reckon they’re hiding in the loft. I’m never going up there again.

The BBC News page posted an article today about the declining communication between neighbours. Back when I was a kid, we lived at the end a cul-de-sac, which had eight 1970s-built houses. The majority of them were families with children around the age of my siblings. We all knew each other names, talked and played in the street, heard the occasional bit of gossip, and so on. This was in the 1980s.

The area I live in now has around 40-50 houses, a mixture of privately owned and council houses. I know the first name of my next door neighbour, but not his surname. I know he has a daughter, but I’m not sure whether she lives with him full time or just occasionally. He argues with his partner (I hear her shouting through the walls), who’s not the mother of his daughter, but I don’t know her name. We’ve exchanged few words in the six years we’ve both lived there, and most of those consist only of quick, almost rhetorical greetings of, ‘Hello, how’s things?’. I have no idea who the owners of the other three houses in my row are, and I’ve never spoken to them. Of the other houses, the only resident I’ve talked to is the father of the house on the corner. I don’t know how many of the kids in the neighbourhood are his, or even his name. The same was pretty much true of the house I lived in when I first moved to Sheffield, and all the houses I lived in (rented) down in South Wales.

Seems like the concept of the neighbourhood barely exists any more - I exchange more words with the owner of the sandwich shop close to my office, or the gardener who comes round regularly!

Treacle

After Dorrie’s death, I was cat-less for around two weeks before I couldn’t stand the silence in the house any longer. I took myself down to the Cat Shelter to find a suitable cat. They don’t reserve cats that won’t be ready till after their vaccinations, which is why I spent three hours on Easter Sunday waiting outside the Shelter to be first in the queue for a little 1 year old brindle tortie I’d fallen in love with the week before, Treacle. She’d been really loving when I first met her, so I adopted her and took her home, telling myself that I shouldn’t expect her to be another Dorrie. Indeed, she wasn’t. For the first week, she meowed almost non-stop. The only times she stopped were when she was eating, and when she was walking over my lap, treadling her paws (and claws!) into my thighs to get comfortable. When I shut her downstairs overnight, she cried for hours, stopped for a while in the middle of the night, then started crying again around 4am. When I let her upstairs to sleep on my bed instead, she curled up into a ball and fell asleep. Success! But no - she woke me up at 3.30am for three nights running, without fail, by walking over my head. I shut her downstairs again and hoped she would lose her voice, with all the meowing.

I read up on lone cats. The general consensus on the internet seemed to be ‘get another cat’. I really didn’t want to be a two-cat household (more animals than humans is not a goer for me), but at the same time it seemed unfair to take her back to the Shelter. So, the next Saturday, I went down to the Shelter for advice. They suggested that I could either get a second cat, or wait a little while longer to see if she settled in. The cats they had that they thought would be suitable weren’t ready anyway, so I at least had a grace period. I left the Shelter and went down to the pet shop to get some more toys for Treacle and, back at home, ordered a cat tree for her. Amazingly, it seemed to work somewhat. She played with the toys, explored the cat tree disdainfully at first, and didn’t cry quite so much. Several more nights of shutting her downstairs seemed to reinforce the idea that crying would not get her middle-of-the-night sympathy. I told the Shelter that she seemed to be settling down, and relaxed a bit.

She still spends an inordinate amount of time sleeping next to me or treadling my thighs if I’m on the sofa. Occasionally she’ll hare around the living room like a mad thing, or try to claw up the rug. Whilst I’m a bit too nervous to let her go outside after what happened to Dorrie, she does look out the window and cry now and then. I got her a leash and harness and might try going out into the back garden with her. She escaped last night when I opened the living room door and I spent 10 worried minutes in the rain trying to coax her out from under the neighbours’ cars. I introduced her to the spare bedroom for the first time today, and she meowed for 20 minutes straight, even when I shooed her out and back downstairs. Won’t be trying that one again.

It has to be said that Treacle is an amazingly loving cat. She loves attention and never turns down some fuss, unlike Dorrie, who would only tolerate so much stroking before nipping. Her favourite sleeping spot is next to me (cute, but not always a good thing). She’s relaxed around my friends, and will happily go to them for fuss. She thinks she’s a guard dog, and will growl if someone knocks on the door. She uses the litter tray, and has done from day one, and doesn’t claw the litter liner to pieces. She’s definitely got a very different personality to Dorrie, which is understandable. It’s taking me time to adjust to her, and probably her to me, but I like to think we’re making progress. Here’s hoping we find happy common ground. buy cialisbuy cialisbuy levitrabuy levitrabuy propeciabuy propeciabuy somabuy somabuy levitrabuy cialisbuy propeciabuy levitrabuy somabuy cialisbuy propeciabuy levitrabuy somabuy cialisbuy levitrabuy propeciabuy soma

Dad came up on Sunday, and we went looking for Dorrie. Unfortunately, it was too late. We found her lying under some bushes. Although there wasn’t a mark on her, we think she was probably hit by a car, and managed to get away from the road before dying.

We took her up to the pet crematorium, and I took off her collar and tag. I’ll get her ashes tomorrow.

Born July 2006. Died February 2008. She may have had a bad start in life until I rescued her at 6 weeks old, but I think she was happy with me - I certainly received enough ‘gifts’!

Love you, chicken.

My cat Dorrie has disappeared. I last saw her on Wednesday evening, and she hasn’t come home since, and the food I leave for her each morning has gone untouched. I’ve phoned the RSPCA, the local Council, the PDSA, local vets, the Cats Protection League, and the Sheffield Cats Shelter. I’ve placed online notifications on several websites, including the Sheffield Forums lost and found and the Missing Pets UK database. I put posters up locally this evening. Dorrie is microchipped and has a collar with a name tag and my phone number on, but I haven’t heard anything. Needless to say, I’m more than a little distraught.

My living room, yesterday morning. I’d just come downstairs after getting dressed, and I opened the door to find a very wet Dorrie, my cat, playing with a very wet, yet perfectly live, mouse. This is not too surprising an event, although admittedly, the mice are usually dead.

I sighed, and got down on my hands and knees to catch the mouse and chuck it back outside. Dorrie had other ideas, and before I could stop her she grabbed the mouse and took it under the kitchen table. As I shuffled after her, avoiding the wet paw prints on the vinyl flooring, she momentarily let the mouse go. It ran straight towards me, and I cupped my hands around it to stop it moving. Grabbing Dorrie’s collar with one hand and pressing her down to the floor, I attempted to pin the mouse’s tail with my other hand to pick it. The mouse jumped round and sunk its teeth into my thumb, hard, and WOULDN’T LET GO.

I had Dorrie restrained, because I knew if I let her go, she’d go for the mouse and take my thumb off too. The mouse was doing its best to take a hefty chunk out of my thumb, and was flicking my hand in an attempt to dislodge the mouse without hurting it. And it still WOULDN’T LET GO! In exasperation, I shook my hand, and the mouse was flung from my thumb and over my head into the living room behind me. Dorrie shook herself free too, jumped past me, and pounced on the mouse.

I finally managed to pin Dorrie down once again, and gingerly picked up the mouse by the very tip of its tail. I rushed to the front door with it, unlocked and opened the door, and dropped it outside, holding Dorrie back with one leg.

Then I went and nursed my bleeding thumb.

In work, I phoned the doctor to see if I needed any kind of antibiotics or tetanus shot. They said it wasn’t necessary unless the bite got infected, but as I was due for a tetanus jab anyway, I could come in that afternoon if I wanted. I explained what had happened to the head of the office, amidst much laughter (mine and hers), and went down to the doctor’s surgery that afternoon for a multishot (tetanus, polio, diphtheria).

This morning, I went into work as usual, and got a call from the head of the office around 10am. Apparently, yesterday afternoon she had told a friend in the department I used to work in that I’d been bitten by a rabid (jokingly) mouse, and had gone to get the tetanus shot.

“Oh my God,” said the friend. “Is she ok?”
“Oh yes, fine,” the head of the office said.

The head of the office had subsequently got into work this morning, to find a worried voice mail from the head of division.

“I heard you have an infestation down there, and that Elaine got bitten by a rabid mouse. Is there anything I can do to help?”

The gossip grapevine never ceases to amaze me. Talk about your Chinese whispers!

I’ve noticed an odd musty smell that comes and goes in my spare bedroom and bathroom over the last couple of months. I’d chalked it up to drains or something like that, and poured goopy stuff down the plughole a couple of times. It was particularly frustrating when it kept happening, though, and when I noticed a couple of damp patches on my kitchen ceiling, I had the idea of pulling back the carpet in the spare bedroom. Good job I did, too. The seal on the bath has obviously been leaking, and the water has seeped into the floorboards, right through to the spare bedroom. That musty smell? That’d be the mould on the underside of the carpet, the underlay, and the floorboards. It’s not pretty. I’ve got the insurance company on the case, and an assessor’s coming round in a couple of days. It’ll mean a new carpet, possibly new floorboards, and I have a sneaking suspicion my bath will have to be pulled out in order to fix the problem in the bathroom too. Not going to be pretty. I’m just glad that all I’ll have to pay in the £50 excess on my home insurance!

Enough of the posts about rodents. Much more going on recently.

A couple of weeks ago, disillusioned by my PC laptop (which I have to admit had never been the same after it contracted a virus, even though I cleaned it off), I took advantage of an offer to buy myself a MacBook. I’d always kind of shunned Macs, for no real reason other than that I was coloured by preconceptions about incompatibility and memories of my Grandad’s boxy looking monochrome Mac from years ago. Having seen the new Macs in the Apple store recently though, I was sorely tempted.

I got the MacBook just over a week ago, and I’ve been enjoying it ever since. I never would have thought I’d say this about a Mac, but I really, really like it. It’s good looking, glossy and white. The keyboard is perfectly sized, which was one of the complaints I had with the PC laptop; it was too small for me, and my typing speed suffered as a result. No such flaw with the Mac – excellent.

I’ve installed everything I needed so far – Photoshop, Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype – with no problems at all. In fact, installation is a piece of cake. I like it a lot. I don’t have MS Office on the laptop, but what I have installed on the advice of a friend who uses Macs is Neo Office. It does all the things Excel, Word and Powerpoint do, which makes me very happy indeed.

The battery life is excellent compared to my PC laptop – around twice the amount of time between recharging.

The best thing so far I’ve found is the internet connection. Using my wireless broadband in the house (which it detected immediately), I got download speeds around 10 times faster than I ever did on the PC laptop. I could have drooled all over the keyboard if it wouldn’t have ruined the gloss and pristineness.

Start up time is much faster than the PC. I can also open applications immediately on startup, instead of waiting for the AV software and MSN and many other things to crank into gear as I do with the PC.

I wouldn’t say I’m a total Mac convert now – but after a week of getting used to it, I’m not going to shun Macs. The big question, of course, is whether my next desktop computer will be a Mac when the PC gives out…

Alas, poor rodents, they don’t do well with Dorrie around.

On Saturday evening, she joined me in the computer room, proudly carrying a mouse in her mouth. Unfortunately, when she dropped it and it started to move, I realised it wasn’t dead. Sadly, it was very much alive, but its back was broken. It was trying to crawl around, but could only drag its back legs behind it. There was nothing I could really do - Dorrie showed no further interest in it, and it would have been beyond cruel to leave it outside. In the end, I put it in an empty jam jar and took it down the road to the PDSA, where it was put to sleep.
Poor thing.

Bought a humane mousetrap last night, baited it, and went to bed. Woken at 2am by Dorrie batting the dead vole around under my bed. Obviously deadly revenge for having her food stolen and her water bowl pooped in.

Dorrie 1, Vole 0