It's White-Trash Repair Month

I truly loved July but felt something sad around its edges until I realized it was my beloved house, The Divine Cabin.

After 17 years without interior paint or new carpets or a working fireplace or insulation in the winter, it is, frankly, shabby. Squirrels occupied my screened porch after ripping holes in now-fragile screens worn by decades of weather -- ragged holes too extensive for normal patching. They chewed some of the wooden frames to bits. I couldn't enjoy my porch because squirrels ran around on it, destroying it, and I didn't see what I could do.

The dishwasher fritzed. The essential housekeeping tool, it saves hours of trying to wash and rinse dishes and pots in a sink the size of a salad bowl. When I could't revive it with fervent prayer and fasting, I had to unload it and do dishes in the yard. Fortunately it is summertime. Last time I phoned for dishwasher repair help, in 2014, I was jeered. "Aw, just run a couple cups of C.L.R. through it," drawled the Maytag Repair Man who is supposed to be so lonely. I called again and he made other addle-pated excuses for not coming. I figured he was on drugs. Finally I repaired it myself. This time I knew I would have to repair it again, and the problem is electrical. About which I know nothing except the red wire goes in the red slot.

Some corners and edges never get clean. They should be stripped of paint and refinished. I tried that with a cupboard door and the bathroom door. It took days and I sanded by hand because the garage has no electricity. The paint layers were a history going all the way back to lead paint and I couldn't help but breathe dust and chemicals.

The kitchen floor is the saddest case. It records all the bootheels and gouges laid into it by my husband, who died in 2009. The stained grout in the shower stall is also sad. Call the landlord? I did. They no longer bother with cosmetic improvements. If it's livable, they're not changing it. They also told me, this year for the very first time, I should be cleaning my own gutters and throwing broken tree limbs off the roof. I have never once been on the roof.

I had already bought, dumped and raked 1000 pounds of rock to make my own path through grass I couldn't find a cutter for. Not normally a DIY sort of person I finally had to tell myself, once again, the old refrain: "Ain't nobody gonna do it for you." And didn't I move here to be self-reliant?

In the coming days I will show you how I did something the hell about it, one item at a time. Today: the porch screen. There's a closeup of some of the ripped screen and frame damage, and also my solution. I patched the holes as well as I could and bolted hardware cloth in place. It looks nowhere near as horrid as I imagined. Measuring, cutting, fitting, finding wood screws and those ring things that go around the wood screws, gluing back as much wood as was salvageable, took an entire day, from cool 7 a.m. to hot 3 p.m. But now I can enjoy the porch.

Anti-Squirrel Strategy #4,381

The squirrel-proof seed feeder is suspended on a wire between two trees quite a distance apart, but squirrels have learned to leap from one tree or the other onto the feeder's roof so that seed mix flies from the "squirrel-proof" feeder, hits the ground, and is eaten not by birds but by horrid little rodents. I have tried many ways to combat this. "Grease the top." "Put mousetrap sticky-paper on top." "Put baffles." (Baffles made of wire, paper, etc. were all ineffective; I've been at this now for 17 years. They don't crawl over the wire. They fly from the tree directly to the feeder.) "Put a nice deep tub (like a trash can) full of water underneath." "Shoot them." (I wish!). Today while picking up branches broken by the storm, I had this camouflage-type idea. I am hoping that it seems to the squirrels impossible to gauge a perfect landing on the feeder's roof. And that if they try, a whole bunch of sticks will rain down on them.

It's been working for the past 45 minutes! But you know what? If they don't get the seed they eat the suet. If there's no suet they drop onto my roof and, hanging upside down, suck nectar from the dangling hummingbird feeders. Eight ounces of nectar doesn't last the day.

A Good Mum

Much smarter now than when I moved here, especially in the ways of plants, when I watered the sunny yellow potted Belgian mums I frittered away $5.99 on and chose from dozens, and the water ran right out through the bottom and the blooms drooped as if aphids had got at 'em, I said to myself, "They're root-bound, that's why."

So animated with color and life that they are great company, they attracted another friend, the green one whom you see here. The mums come indoors at night because squirrels will wantonly destroy anything they see that I treasure. I was, however, thrilled to correctly identify the problem, tickle and rip their tough strangled roots apart, and transplant to a slightly larger pot where the mums now thrive. I've always been a talented transplanter; even Demetrius, the genius gardener, agreed I had the knack. Maybe I should try heart and liver transplants. The blooms perked up, and from day one have brightened the whole scene. So glad I paid the $5.99. When September comes, one must do everything possible to stay an optimist.

I Set a Tomahawk Trap

Friday night the creature sprung the Tomahawk trap and got away with the peanut butter, stupidly placed (not by myself) on a piece of foil. It grabbed the foil from the outside and moseyed it along out of the trap without triggering the trapdoor and then left the trap yards and yards away in tall grass.

Disgusted for the whole day after that I decided then, after dragging concrete blocks in front of the hole in the wall, to set the trap, but never having set one before I pulled and yanked this way and that for about 15 minutes, before reasoning that:

1. A man probably designed this trap.
2. Men do things the easy way (such as leaving me the trap on a Friday so I would have to set the trap Saturday and Sunday).
3. They can figure out very clever ways to do things the easy way.
4. Man stuff, such as car engines, motherboards, etc., looks much more technical than really is, and is simpler than it looks.

So I went on YouTube and learned in two minutes how to set the trap (lift, push, pull), this time dolloping the peanut butter (a lot of it, to appeal to the greed of the little xxxx) directly on the platform so there would be no shenanigans. Am waiting to see if it works, but I think an actual tomahawk would be better.