In addition to our usual busy work schedule, there’s been some cool stuff (besides the gardening) we’ve been working on the past few weeks:

1) The Cat Yard

The Catio now has a fenced area off it where the cats can hang out and eat grass, explore under the porch, and chase bugs. This has made Simon and Winter very happy, and even Olive seems to enjoy it. Because of our cats’ track record of injuring themselves in bizarre ways, the yard is only open to them when we are out there to supervise.

2) The under $20 composter

Actually now it is an under $40 composter since we have expanded by adding a second can. This way, we can alternate them so we have one being filled, and one full that is ‘incubating’. The first one we made is really working out well; the compost is maturing fast and every day I just lock down the lid then roll the can around on it’s side a bit to redistribute the stuff.

3) Chris’ latest woodburning/pyrography project

This is the “Fairy Cat” plate I made for Joy. It’s a combination of woodburning, watercolor pencil, and oil pencil, done mostly freehand from my own design.

4) The Homemade sisal cat scratcher

This was Joy’s idea and she did most of the work, which involved wrapping 150′ of sisal on a board and stapling it. I cut the ramp rails and did the assembly. It has earned the Winter-Hermione seal of approval.

I’m a bit stumped here. What you see below is an (albeit blurry) picture of two brand new, formerly antless, ant bait stations, an hour after I placed them on the desk. This morning while I was doing paperwork for today’s service calls, I kept finding ant after ant on my mouse, hand, and keyboard, so after killing the fifteenth one (and getting sick of the resultant formic acid smell) I decided to put out the bait stations to see if I could determine where they were coming from.

The reason I say I am stumped is because there is no food in this room, never has been, and no one eats at the desk. WTF is the attraction (other than to annoy me, which I will have to say is working splendidly) of the desk?

I can now see where the trail leads: behind the scanner, down a Cat-5 cable, along the bookcase, under Cricket’s crate, and to a hole in the baseboard. I am not sure whether to let them be, and hope they take enough bait back to wipe out their nest, or to get out the diatomaceous earth and try to block their entrance. The latter is more appealing but will result in hundreds of ants trapped on this side of the barrier, and the others may just find another crack to get in through.

I think for now I will just abandon the desk to the ants until the temperature drops a bit lower than the current 89 degrees it is in our NON air-conditioned house.

…stupid ants are becoming the bane of my existence…

The fun never stops around here. We are still doing battle with the ants. Joy’s cinnamon wall worked marvelously on what we previously referred to as the tiny ants that were getting into the cat food. I say ‘previously’ because the new plague of ants are itty bitty ones — so tiny they make the other ones look huge by comparison — and they are apparently impervious to cinnamon. We’ve had to go back to using the ‘ant moat’ for now and have tracked them back to the greenhouse. It’s a bit unnerving to see (a) how far they came to get into the cats’ food and (b) the sheer numbers involved, to make a continuous trail all the way across the room, down the wall, across the fence, and into the greenhouse. I bombarded the trail (and what seemed to be the place they were emerging from the ground) with diatomaceous earth but we may end up resorting to bait as these ones are a bit out of hand. Ugh.

I don’t think I ever even got to mention the infestation of little springtails or booklice a month or so ago, tiny (near invisible!) little long things that could jump — and apparently bite — but those have apparently been replaced by a predator that eats them, soil mites. I don’t know that we are any better off since now they are all over the bathroom; they are so tiny they are just little black specks that look like bug poop, except then you realize that the ‘poop’ is moving. I managed to cut the numbers, again with diatomaceous earth, but we are still seeing them. They are out in the garden as well, so I am hoping that it’s some seasonal population surge that will taper off? Or maybe they came to eat the booklice things, and something bigger will come to eat them? I fear our house will end up like the “old lady who swallowed a fly“…

The spiders, of course, are ever-present and Joy (probably rightfully) blames me for them. I like spiders and they seem to realize this, as I seem to attract more than my fair share of the little devils. They web my car, rappel down onto my head, and otherwise appear on a regular basis, to the point where I am no longer startled if, for instance, I happen to notice a big hairy spider on my shoulder when I am sitting on the couch eating dinner. The other day we were on the porch and after standing there less than five minutes I felt a tickle, and looked down to find a big orange orb-weaver making a web across my legs. We relocate as many spiders back to the Great Outdoors as we can (though some of the really tiny ones do get sacrificed to the vacuum cleaner) and I probably spend a ridiculous amount of time each day chasing spiders with a water glass and piece of cardboard. Most indoor ones are fairly slow-moving and easy to catch, but now we have Wily Willie to contend with:

(the specks in the web are some of the above-mentioned soil mites. Apparently they are not considered edible by Willie. If you click on the thumbnail you can see one of his eyes glowing from the flash, BTW)

Most species of wolf spiders don’t make webs, but Willie apparently is a member of one that does. And he is fast as lightning; I’ve made a few attempts to corral him and before I can even get the glass in position, he can zip back into the crack between the tub and molding so fast it looks like he vanished into thin air. I have to confess I do kind of admire him and have been feeding him mosquitoes, but as of this morning he has apparently invited a friend over and I think it’s time they both went to live somewhere outside. That bathroom is small enough as it is, without the extra bodies in there.