home alone

That’s me today.  Marc is in the city going to a memorial service/wake for a friend.  Well, Ken wasn’t exactly a friend but he was the brother of a friend’s best friend, someone who we associated with on occasion.  We’re all actually surprised that Ken lived this long.  Ken was a drug addict, on disability from the government though I don’t think it was related to the addiction.  Probably helped to fuel it though.  I don’t have all the facts related to Ken because he sort of creeped me out and I avoided him as much as I could on those rare occasions our paths crossed, but he’s been on death’s door a couple of times.

So Marc is in the city...again.  Out of the last 6 days, this will be the fourth time he has had to drive into the city.  (If you don’t remember why we went the last three times, you can read my last two posts.)  It won’t be all duty as he is meeting up with our friend Craig and they were going to go by the opening of St. Arnold’s Brewery that just opened a place downtown.  I’m sure they will be in a fine frame of mind by the time they get to the wake.

But that leaves me here by myself.  I think this is the first day that I’ve had to myself out here.  It’s been a beautiful day, sunny, not too cold, no wind.  The first time down after that freak snow earlier in the month, I noticed that the large ferns that grew there had been hiding an opening under the house about the size of the palm of a man’s hand.  In retrospect, the cat had paid undue attention to that spot.  I’ve always thought that she had a way under the house but I had never been able to find it.

This is what I saw when I looked out there Tuesday late afternoon.  In case you can't tell, something dug a big hole.  Since it was still foggy and drizzly I just filled it in with bricks and concrete blocks as a temporary measure.  I was telling my sister about it the next morning.

‘Armadillo,’ she says, ‘we had an armadillo dig several holes under our house.’

Armadillo?

‘Or could be a skunk.’

Skunk? 

‘They’re nocturnal, you know’ she continues.  ‘Better hope you didn’t trap it under the house.’

Great.  Thanks, sis. 

So she tells me that the way you get rid of the varmint is to flood the hole.  That’s what she did, flooded the hole with the hose and the armadillo ran right out.  Works great if your house is on a slab instead of pier and beam.  Like mine.  So I just hoped that I didn’t trap an actual animal under the house, or if I did that it would dig it’s way out again.  

Well, I haven’t heard any mad scrambling and no new holes have appeared.  Although the cat was very insistent about going outside in the middle of the night the other night, and then she just sat there staring at the ‘spot’.  So, today, I pulled out the bricks and tried to get the large asbestos shingle off that had been pushed back so I could see what was what under the house.  It was still nailed in one corner though and wouldn’t budge.  Well, nothing for it but to fill it back in and hope for the best.  

Which is what I did.  And then I decided that as long as the fern was down and I had to dig anyway, I would go ahead and get all those fern roots out of that spot.  I have something else I want to put there and I don’t especially like those ferns.  They are tall and scraggly and the roots form a tight weave that eventually forces everything else out.  After about four hours, I had filled the hole and secured the shingle and dug out all but a corner of the flower bed.  Four hours was enough, especially combined with the seven hours of work from yesterday.  

I’m spending the rest of the day watching silly girlie movies about love and weddings all the way through without the channel being changed once!  If Marc were here, the channel would be changing constantly, jumping back and forth.  Ai-yi-yi  Drives me nuts.

I’m going to open a bottle of wine in a bit, put on my scruffy sweat pants, put my feet up on my brand new double recliner couch and ease my sore muscles.

I will be glad when he gets home though.  The house is much warmer when he’s in it.