Critters

Sometimes, as Lily once so famously said as a bat flew around her in the bathroom, "Too much nature!" I think there may have been a roach in underwear involved there too. 
But it's been a slightly nature-ish day. Well, okay. The gecko in the sink was from last night. Now I like to think of myself as an old, strong, country cracker granny who can handle most things on her own but that is a big fat lie. There are a lot of things I can't handle, most them having to do with any sort of mechanical breakdown. Those things are Mr. Moon's job. Sorry but that's just the way it is around here. I cook, he fixes stuff. 
He also handles the wildlife which may mean taking care of a dead mouse, killing a rat in the dining room, removing a snake from a bathroom, or catching a darling little frog in the house and gently placing it outside. I'm not bad, really, at dealing with the dead things as long as they're not too big. I don't like it but I gird my loins, shut my eyes, and do what it takes.  
Dealing with the live creatures though is above my pay grade. So last night, when I discovered a gecko trapped in my kitchen sink, I was not happy. First off, I've never seen a gecko in the house, secondly, he or she seemed quite freaked out and last but not least- excuse me? How can a lizard which can literally walk on ceilings not get out of a damn sink? 
Just use your little suction cup toes there, Sister, and walk yourself out. 
But no. Not happening. So I put a cutting board at a slant in the sink so that the unhappy reptile could simply climb the slight incline of it and scuttle off to wherever it came from. 
Gecko was obviously not that smart. I changed cutting boards, thinking perhaps another size would work. 
Nope. 
So I finally just took a dough scraper and gently urged it out of the sink and before I'd even blinked, it had disappeared. So that was relatively painless. 
And then this morning, I woke up and came out to the porch to find that there had obviously been a drunken peanut party sometime in the night. I keep the crows' peanuts in a plastic bag and either I had forgotten to slide the little slider or else whatever had been having the revelry had figured out how to unslide it. This does not sound likely but raccoons have incredibly clever little hands. And I did suspect raccoons because they'd been up on the table where I keep the nuts although, possums can climb too. So who knows? 
There were peanuts and peanut shells scattered everywhere but they were easy to clean up and I wasn't too disturbed. Then I found the hole in the giant bag of sunflower seeds that Mr. Moon buys to feed the songbirds with, of course, sunflower seeds spilling out. 
I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that. I can't exactly animal-proof the back porch because there's a largish screen rip under the dog/cat door and I don't know what I could use to block it all off. 
Why, we may ask, did Maurice not chase off these nut and seed loving critters? Probably because she was asleep with me. 
And oh yeah- that bag of sunflower seeds weighs fifty pounds so I can't exactly move it. 

Too much nature.

Nah. Not really. It's just sometimes really annoying nature. I am sure the animals feel the same way about us, the clumsy humans who seem to fuck everything up but then again- there would be no sunflower seeds or peanuts without us. 
Glen'll deal with it when he gets home. Until then, I'll just be sweeping up stray sunflower seeds every morning. 

All right. I have some words to live by. As you know, I frequently say that I don't know shit but I do know some shit and one of the things I know for sure is that if you just think you smell something not right in whatever area it is you keep your potatoes and onions and so forth, there really is something that's not right and by the time you smell it, it really ain't right. 
I seem to have to learn this lesson over and over and over again. 
Today was this year's continuing education on that issue. 
First off, I did something I've been putting off for at least, well, I don't even want to admit how long it's probably been but I finally got around to mopping the kitchen, bathroom, and pantry. I have no idea why I do this so rarely. The whole process doesn't take forty-five minutes and that includes moving everything out that can be moved, sweeping twice, mopping twice, and moving everything back in. 
And it's so rewarding! 

 I always do this in the late afternoon so I can see how nice the clean floor looks with the late afternoon sun streaming in through the kitchen door. 

And let us not forget the wonderful smell of Fabuloso and vinegar that lingers after. 

Except today when there was another odor which seemed to be coming from the pantry and suddenly I knew exactly what was going on and yes, there were potatoes on my shelf in their basket that...well, look. Nature was involved. Nature's very own clean-up crew! So I immediately controlled my gag reflex, picked up the bag the offending, rotting, purifying, maggot-crawling potatoes were in and carried it directly to the compost and dumped the contents. Then I rinsed out the bag in the spigot because there was no way I was putting that bag in the trash in the state it was in. 
That is not all true. I didn't really have to control my gag reflex. I have a pretty strong stomach. 
But then I had to wash the potato basket and hang it outside and scrub the shelf it had been sitting on and somehow, still, the pantry retains a very slight odor of the horror which had occurred. 
I should be so embarrassed to tell you all this but somehow, I'm not. This is just life. Or at least my life. 
I tell you what- potatoes can turn on you in a heartbeat. Especially ones you buy at Aldi's. I am never buying any produce there whatsoever again. 

I have a lot more stories of my very exciting day but I think I'll go make my eggplant casserole and Crispy Masala Tofu that I am having for supper. These two things don't really sound like they go together, do they? 
Oh well. They are what I want. 

Here are two pictures I like. 

Cabbage palm transplanted from our property in Apalachicola to the old barn on our property. 

An extremely ancient oak on the back of our property which is so very sadly in the last decades of its life. I hope it's still decades. I could be fooling myself.
When we moved here twenty-two years ago, this tree was almost as big as the one next door. Majestically huge. Part of it split away in a storm, though, and this is what it looks like now. 

The moon is a beautiful waxing silver crescent hanging in a black velvet sky right outside my porch. A very tiny gecko is on the screen, patiently waiting for...what? A mosquito? A gnat? 

It's so young it's still almost transparent. 
Stay out of my sink, little guy! 
Thank you very much. 

Love...Ms. Moon