Feeding The Spiders

My typical “parking spot” is downstairs, next to the basement door. When it’s raining or I am feeling particularly lazy, I come into the house through the basement. In the basement garage is our heating and cooling system, which, has a hose coming out of the bottom of it where it drips water into a 5 gallon bucket due to the furnace dehumidifying the air. Periodically we empty it or we forget about it and it runs all over the garage floor.

I forgot about it for a day or two last week, so when I came home late one night, I went in through the basement to check it. It wasn’t over flowing so I peeked into it to see how full it was. There was a mouse in the bucket. I didn’t make it in time and he was dead. This upset me quite a bit. There was a creature in our house, that struggled for his life for maybe 20 minutes until he drowned. I don’t think if I had been there sooner, that I could have saved him, but I still felt really bad about it. I stuck a bent PVC pipe in there to maybe save one of his brethren from the same sad, little end.

Now, OMG WE HAVE MICE. I’m currently in the market for humane traps…if anyone knows where I can find them locally please let me know. I haven’t really looked yet because I’ve been busy, but there will definitely be some peanut butter bait set out this weekend. I’m also thinking about getting a little cage, some cedar, water bottle, food….really cheap setup for the mice so i can catch a batch and then release them together. I plan on driving to a farm and letting them all out in the mountains, but I don’t want to make 9 trips up there.

I’ve been reading Earthpath more lately, and that coupled with my Herbal Remedies in Pots book I picked up used recently, I’m stoked for some wicked container gardening this spring. I need to get on the ball and buy some stackable plastic bins soon for my recyling. I’ve got a growing stack of paper here next to my desk that I’m planning on recyling. Hugo thought it was paperwork I was throwing in the floor and neglecting. Hehehe, that was a fun “fight.”

I’ve ordered my shopping bags. I’m thinking that once I start really living my values and practicing them regardless of what people think, I’ll be more comfortable. I don’t think you can call yourself a true practicioner of an earth based spirituality if you aren’t moved to “green” up your life a bit. Whether that is saying no thanks to plastic bags at the supermarket, recycling, buying a hybrid, reducing your meat and animal products consumption, or whatever it is that you can do to reduce the negative impact of our society’s tendency towards over consumption and pollution.

When I bought my car last year, I could have gotten a hybrid, but I didn’t. First, everything available at that time was ugly as sin. I own up to being very stylistically superficial, it’s just part of who I am. That and i couldn’t have gotten as good of a deal with, say, the Prius, as I did with my Cobalt. Oh well.

I suppose writing this was all worth it because while I was looking up the specs on the hybrids and comparing it with my car I learned that I am supposed to be running Premium gas with a minimum octane of 87, 91 preferred. Ahem. Oops. I’ve not ran it with anything lower than 87 octane, but I was using regular gas. That would explain my shitty acceleration, crap gas mileage as of late (i thought it was my tires), and the knock from the engine. Hopefully a tire rotation, oil change, proper tank of fuel, and a bottle of injector cleaner will remedy this post haste.

Drink more Pom/Cherry Juice! Vote Stewart/Colbert ‘08! Hug a Bunny!