Besieged

I skipped work (and blogging) yesterday, because I gave myself a personal leave day to take care of various and sundry things around the house. The dire fact is that most if not all of the major kingdoms of the biological world were encroaching on our domicile in increasingly hard to ignore ways.

The animal representatives were both specific and abstract. Specifically, wasps had decided to build a small nest on the ventral surface of our curbside mailbox. There were no incidents of terrible malevolence, but it was probably a ticking timebomb; best not to take chances when critters with stingers are involved. Abstractly, we recently became aware of some serious gaps in the exterior foundation of our house near the chimney, which is far too tempting of an open invitation for any old pest that might want to crawl into the shelter of what is intended to be a humans-and-housepets-only habitation.


Plant-wise, we are being slowly strangled by weeds once again. It's getting more and more tempting to rip out every green thing including the grass and cover every square inch of our property with inert sand and rocks. Or possibly Play-Doh, because why should the construction of homonculi out of stuff lying on your front lawn be limited to winter? And in addition to undesirable weeds, there are several desirable hedges and bushes and whatnot on our property which hadn’t been properly trimmed back since last year.

Not a fungal infestation per se, but my wife did make a dispiriting discovery of mold within some of the connection tubes of her breast pump, which in turn necessitated a round of corrective measures in and of itself. At the same time, both of the kids have gunked-up noses at the moment, which doesn’t necessarily qualify as a bacterial epidemic, but clearly it doesn’t help. Basically at this point the only major division of lifeform leaving no evidence of nefarious plotting to bring down my world is the protists, but I'm just assuming those schemes are in the works and too tiny to see. I was tempted to nuke the house from orbit to be sure.

But beating back the hordes of flora and fauna became my project for the day, and it was more or less successful. I had to make a run to the hardware store for heavy duty bug spray and quick drying concrete and electric hedge trimmers, and then (after a few other store stops which were much easier to tick off while the rest of the world was at work) I busied myself for a couple of hours spraying, patching, weed-whacking, cutting, pulling, raking and so forth. Partly I had put this off until Monday because of other pre-existing weekend plans, and partly in hopes that the recent killer heatwave might break. Which it did, ever so slightly, though my 120 minutes of pre-noon outdoor exertions still left me feeling a bit overcooked.
I suppose “weather” and “crumbling stone” and “backlog of errands” don’t really count as living things, so it might have been more accurate to say I needed a day yesterday to devote myself to battling entropy. That is life, I suppose.