Making the Cut

I used to spend hours and days outside with these tools saving the property from invasive cedars and Japanese honeysuckle vines, and after about seven years the clippers and weed whip, dulled and unusable, sat in the garage until I realized a while ago, "I can now pay to sharpen these," and, to be honest with you, also thought, "When the apocalypse comes, any day now, I will wish I had sharpened these tools" to cut a clearing in the underbrush and clip and trim branches to build my lean-to, and so on.

Nobody else, I was sure, ever let their tools get so dull. Embarrassed to bring them to the sharpener, I prepared a fib -- "I bought these at a garage sale" -- in case the sharpener said, "Whee doggie. I've never in my life seen garden tools in such a deplorable condition." I wasn't sure whether the weed whip, my favorite, with its double-edged and serrated blade, could even be honed. I never knew anyone who cleaned or sharpened garden tools; Demetrius left his crusted with clay and soil. Also needing treatment were two lopping shears and a very old pair of hedge shears with wooden handles. The hedge shears were already here, rusted stiff, blades blackened with time and handles sticky with dust, when I moved in long ago. I wondered whether they could be salvaged. In the garage when I moved here was also a scythe, an actual scythe, but I think it's gone.

The sharpener sharpened and spiffed up all four and covered the freshly honed edges with paper, a courtesy unexpected and appreciated. Here they are back home, and out I go because I like cold weather for doing the heavy work of cutting.

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.

Home Improvement

It's not my house (it's rented) so I don't improve it. Has been my home for 15 consecutive years on October 1. Thought I'd celebrate by improving my daily home life.

This doesn't mean interior decoration. I'm "adecorative," if that's a word. My focus is elsewhere. Like, on my vertebrae, now 15 years older than when I moved in. Vertebrae first disqualified me from mowing the lawn with a push mower. Some years ago one of the two wooden garage doors (measuring eight feet by nine feet) I permanently shut; after wet weather it was hard to lift and a few times I wasn't able to stop its downward momentum so it slammed the concrete, one time shattering a window.The landlord replaced the window with glass that made that door even heavier. I gave up and now use only the other door; it's identical but a bit lighter.

Lifting and lowering got dicier with time. I considered leaving here solely because of the garage doors. It got so I had to raise the door using two hands and shoulder muscle I built at the gym especially for that. A recent soaking rain brought the door's weight into my danger zone. I felt it. (There's no electricity in the garage for automatic openers.) So then I lifted and lowered only once a day: morning and night. Birds flew into the gaping garage and couldn't find the way out, and, panicked, threw themselves at windows and died there.

The fault lies not with the garage door or landlord but with me, so I chose as my 15th anniversary gift to my home a new garage door, without knowing how the heck to get one. It involves people. Went to Lowe's, saw the millwork guy. He showed me samples and colors of steel doors and sent full-time garage-door installers to my house to measure. Lowe's priced the project at $830. People I told cried out at the horrible expense. True, the garage is not my property but my vertebrae are, and I decided they were worth it, because slipped disks or crushed bones cost far more. The new door will be installed within the next two weeks.

Now for home improvement all I needed was a handle to help me out of the shower. I'd been using the towel bar just outside of the shower for balance and one day pulled it out of the wall. (The landlord repaired that.)  How the heck to get one? Would somebody have to drill? No: For $11 at Walmart I got this cool suction-type handle that latches onto and grips tile. Undo the latches on the back and you can move it. That, now, is my own property. Home improvement is so satisfying.

There's a Hole in the Roof

Some HUGE quadruped--I could hear it sniffing! I could hear its fur!--thumped and shuffled in the attic above my head, rattling my ceiling. Mice teethe and scramble in the bedroom walls all winter, but mice this was not. I phoned the handymen saying, "I think there's a hole in my roof." Before they got there I checked the Internet and learned that if there's a raccoon there's almost always a nest with little ones crying and squeaking, and getting them out requires professional pest controllers trapping them and releasing them 10 miles away. I didn't hear any crying, but because I'm so often 100 percent wrong when I self-diagnose house problems I figured 1) there was 100 percent chance there was no hole in my roof and 2) that there were baby raccoons I didn't hear. It's so great to be me.

The handymen came with their ladder, checked the roof, and found Something Not Human had pulled off a patch of hardware cloth--not "cloth" at all, but flexible metal--at a juncture between roof levels. There was indeed a hole in my roof. I was ecstatic to be right. Pete and Tim stuffed the hole with more hardware cloth and screwed down more on top. "If it's a squirrel or raccoon," said Pete, "it's usually out and about during the day." Haven't heard anything but mice ever since.

Cold and Bright, or Dark and Warm? Pick One

From the inside

From the outside

Last winter, the coldest since' 98-'99, I froze in the Divine Cabin despite weatherstripping, caulking and heavy, doubled plastic sheeting  taped over the windows, a special problem because most windows here are single-pane. They're original, I wouldn't want them changed, but gollywogs, all the propane and space heaters couldn't make up for it and I ended up living in a hooded sleeping bag for two weeks.

This year I began winterizing in August, hoping to use bubble wrap as window insulation--the Internet said it was great. I'd done major spray-styrofoam and caulking when a smart and personable, loyal, humorous, and occasionally prosaic engineer friend visited and said bubble wrap wouldn't work and that in winter he put foam-board insulation over his north-facing windows.

So he did it for most of my windows. The bedroom has pink insulation and some daylight does get through it as you can see. I insulated two doors and left one door and window clear so I could watch the road and the bird feeders.

From outside the house looks either abandoned or under construction, but I don't live outside, I live inside. Or want to. I'm hoping, hoping, because tomorrow comes the test: The season's first polar blast.

Last of the Moguls

Missouri's a great place for antique home furnishings. Have two big ol' hand-me-down floor lamps, one brass (1940s), and one chrome (1930s; has a translucent marble base that lights up when you kick it a little). So old they don't have those modern plugs. So old they take an outmoded type of bulb not found on store shelves anymore, although I've been looking for a couple of years, hoping to stock up. I told the clerks,"It's called a Mogul bulb." They'd say, "Come again?" and "Never heard of it." Has a big base to fit a big socket. Expensive.

Found some Mogul bulbs online at "Bulborama.com" but then I saw they also sold ceramic adapters for reducing a Mogul socket to a regular socket -- for $4. So I bought two. That way my big lamps could use modern energy-saver bulbs. I also bought three-way energy-saver bulbs that don't work three ways, but I'm glad they work at all. (Have you seen the current prices for floor lamps?)

So my quest through the hardware and lamp stores for Mogul bulbs has ended, and along with it a part of history that was built into my home furnishings. Above you see the last of my Moguls, the adapter, and the new kid on the block.

My Machete

Demetrius the Gardener died almost two years ago now, and left in my garage his machete, his favorite and most savage tool, which I never touched until today because I was afraid of its size, weight, and wickedly sharp double-edged head. It's 54 inches tall. I'm 62 inches tall. He also left me all the heavy outdoor work he used to do.

My winter project is clearing two years' worth of weeds, briars, fallen branches and Japanese honeysuckle around my twin oaks, with an eye toward a hammock or treehouse between them someday, and I've toiled along with a weed whip and then brushcutters, but in places the brush (you can see some of it behind my blue jacket there) made barriers so dense I couldn't cut through them except with an axe -- or the machete. As usual when I'm reluctant I told myself, "Ain't nobody gonna do it FOR you," and got to work and learned it. The concave side was good for hacking down piles and layers, six feet tall, of dry fallen branches; the convex side for pulverizing them.

While I worked I kept peeling off clothing and wondered why I dreaded winter when it wasn't that bad at all. And every now and then I rested, because I'm older now, and saw that the machete was really a handsome tool. And when I got tired I took off my work gloves and told myself, "Put the machete away now; you have no business using such a thing when you're tired," congratulating myself on my wisdom, except I told myself, "Just a few more minutes" and that's when I cut and scraped my hand -- not on the machete, but on a dry branch sticking up. I said, "Okay, I get it; that was a warning," and put the machete away for the day.

Dickey Bub Farm & Home

Birdseed and suet is one-third cheaper at Dickey Bub's, a medium-large hardware store with three locations: Union, Potosi, and Eureka, MO. They sell the Dickey brand of work clothes for men and women, along with tools, seeds, rock salt, John Deere riding mowers & that. When they opened I was scared to go in there. It was too "man." My haircutter tole me she was almost brave enough to go in there until she heard their sound system blasting a song about tequila.

Several score of fat and lazy wild birds depend on me for seed and suet, and needing a way to cut the cost, I finally sidled into the Dickey Bub's, and wandered in a daze (what IS that metal thing?) until I found the pallets of 35-lb. bags of Tru-Value mixed birdseed. I was used to backing my car up to a loading dock and they'd put the bags in the trunk for me. But at the Dickey Bub's there were no clerks to be seen, nor loading docks, nor shopping carts -- men don't use em, I guess --and I had to hoist the sack over my shoulder and carry it if I dint want to look like a helpless female gettin weak and whiny in her change of life.

It's got easier to go in there and easier to carry the bags, and I am so pleased with myself. Plus, the birds and I both eat better. Nowhere else around here sells 100 percent wool socks, which stay warm when they're wet, a necessity: it's not only men who get shin-deep in creeks or muck and that, and then have a ways to go to get home.