Consequently, the shed became a splendid palace for at least a dozen mice and one packrat. And my parents’ cabinets became their playground. Or rather, their poop-ground.

Incidentally, for most of my monthly trips to the property this past year, it was Man Versus Wild. Not only were there mice and packrats in the shed, there was a persnickity packrat in the potty house and a woodpecker managed to invade the Pumphouse. I didn’t get much done around the property except evicting the local wildlife, repairing the damage they did, and attempting to prevent future invasions.

The potty house and pumphouse were relatively easy to deal with, but the shed, packed full of cabinets, was a terrible front. Normally I am a catch-and-release kind of guy… if the wildlife invades my home it’s my fault for creating such an inviting place and not taking steps to exclude uninvited guests. Doing what God made you to do isn’t necessarily a reason to die. But the mice in the shed had to go. Not only were they making a total mess of our cabinets and shed, but they are also vectors of hantavirus and therefore potentially very dangerous. So out came the snap traps.

Just before Christmas, wifey and I together finally defeated the rodent menace and reclaimed the shed and its contents! Of the dozen mice and packrat, I only managed to remove the packrat and one mouse alive; the others were killed in traps. The live critters were released many miles away.

The shed is now rodent-proofed and rodent-free!

In the process we learned a lot about rodent-proofing and removal. The process is pretty simple but things have to be done in the proper order. First, rodent-proof the building. Second, trap the rodents by killing or removing them. Third, clean up the mess.

Rodent-proofing

• If you want to build a storage building, rodent proof it before you put anything inside.

• Great rodent-proofing materials include coarse steel wool, sheet metal, hardware cloth, aluminum window screen, and wood at least a half inch thick. I’ve seen a packrat chew its way into solid wood to make an existing opening wider, though.

• Mice will fit through any opening the diameter of a pencil. If you use hardware cloth make sure the openings are smaller than pencil-size.

• Mice and rats are accomplished climbers so don’t neglect the roof. Our shed has a corrugated steel roof; mice would crawl through the gaps between the steel and the wood structural members, so I had to plug them with steel wool and caulk.

• Pay attention to what is around the outside of the building. Eliminate sheltering brush, low branches, or tall grass that provides cover for rodents. Also prune trees back away from the roof or walls. Don’t stack lumber, firewood, or other potential harborage next to the building; keep it off the ground and at least ten feet away. The basic idea is pretty simple: don’t give rodents places to hide.

Rodent removal

• If you have a rodent-infested building, educate yourself about the rodents you have and the types of diseases you risk contracting before you begin work!

• While packrats don’t carry hantavirus or plague, they do harbor the infamous kissing bug. Make sure their nests are completely destroyed or else the kissing bugs, now with no rodent blood to eat, will come after the next best thing: you. The bite of the kissing bug is often painless but can trigger a severe allergic reaction. If you are highly sensitized you can go into shock and die, much as someone allergic to bee stings when stung by a bee. (Rodent removal is fun, isn’t it?)

• Don’t start trapping or removing rodents until after you rodent-proof. Otherwise you create a revolving door for the rodent population. You could increase your risk of coming into contact with a diseased rodent.

• Snap traps work great. In our case we made monthly trips to check on the property, so live traps would result in starved mice. Better to just kill them quickly.

• Live traps, especially the multiple-catch kind, work very well if you can inspect them regularly and are careful to release the rodents far away (several miles). Some claim that even then the rodent will return, but we haven’t had that experience.

• Do not use poison bait! Mice and rats are prey to many species of wildlife, including many endangered ones. Predators tend to pick off sick or wounded prey, and if they eat poisoned prey, the predators get poisoned and also die. That’s bad enough, but since you’re killing off the predator population, in the end you wind up with even more rodents! Snap traps and live traps work too well to warrant the use of poisons.

Cleaning up

• If there’s a chance that you’re dealing with fresh mouse excrement, don’t disturb it. Follow the procedures available from the CDC to minimize risks related to hantavirus. Mice may also have fleas which in turn may have plague, so don’t try to handle the cuddly little guys or otherwise present yourself as an alternative host.

• Once you’ve cleaned up, if you’re concerned about rodents returning somehow try to organize things to minimize rodent habitat. I’ve found that this actually works to deter rodents in non-rodent-proofed structures like our potty house. When we leave the property, I disassemble the seat and arrange everything such that there are no spaces that would seem sheltered to a rodent. Rodents can easily enter and leave the potty house, but they don’t stay or move in because there’s no inviting place to build a nest.

The farm he mentions in the message is Polyface Farm.

Andrea has a more complete photo memorial on her Facebook page.

Spaz as a kitten in 1997.

Spaz liked to be up high. Winter 2004.

He liked baskets, boxes, bags... anything his size to curl up in. Spring 2004.

Enjoying a fresh decorating job on the master bedroom. Spring 2006.

Chief inspector on all our building projects. Summer 2007.

One of the few with whom LE was willing to share her toys. Summer 2009, just before the accident.

After being struck by a car in early summer, 2009. While on pain medication, Spaz didn't mind sharing space with a baby.

He couldn't go outdoors after the accident, which was hard for him. He had to settle for a potted plant.

Some time after the accident, Spaz started fur mowing as a stress response to the healing process. So he has been on a series of medications to manage a raging infection, inflammation, and depression (yep, kitties get depressed when they can’t play outside or jump anymore).

The antidepressant he was prescribed did not work for him. It basically stopped him up, threw his levels off, and he wound up severely dehydrated. I took him to the vet today and had him checked out, and the vet took him off the problem med, stuffed him full of fluids, and prescribed several others (including another antidepressant).

The whole thing is difficult because

1. it costs a lot of money we don’t really have,
2. it is stressful for Spaz to be on all these medications when they may or may not work, and
3. the recovery period is so long it makes us wonder if he will ever really get better.

So we are faced with hard questions about Spaz’ continued life and how far we are willing or able to go to provide medical care, and how and when to determine when it is time to stop. Spaz could recover very well over the next few months. Or not. We just don’t know.

We have considered declining the new antidepressant since it is so expensive and we don’t know if it will work. It takes 3-5 weeks to see a change in his behavior… but if he’s fur mowing because of the healing process and he’s better healed in 3-5 weeks, do we even know if the medication did anything? Not really. But then again, he might really need it and it doesn’t have the nasty side effects the old one did. We won’t know unless we try. So.. do we fork over the money and hope it helps? Or do we leave him be and hope he stops mowing on his own?

Either way, what if another setback befalls him? Do we invest another $300-500 to keep him going? How many times do we spend that kind of money on our cat? He’s a member of our family and we love him, but medical care for him is coming out of our accumulated savings, and we aren’t making enough to replenish it. If we are not careful, we will be taking a financial risk on our family’s future by investing large sums of money into our cat.

In a small sort of way, this is a preview for the time when we will have to care for our parents. How much is too much? How far is too far? I for one don’t want to answer those questions. It feels like putting a dollar value on a person’s life. Maybe it is. But do you invite, say, bankruptcy to keep an ailing family member on a treatment plan that is, at best, delaying the inevitable?

It also gets us thinking about what we ourselves would want if we had to face life disabled, on unpleasant medication, and with an uncertain prognosis. What would we want our kids to do for us?

So what’s happened in the last month or so? A bunch of projects, among other things.

Since this blog is mostly about projects and such, here’s a summary:

• I made good on building my Christmas present a stand. I used a salvaged plywood pallet for the top, some 2x4s, and a lot of screws. And I bought some casters so I can wheel it in and out of the shed.
• I hung a lovely pine 10-lite interior door between our kitchen and Arizona room. I had to construct my own door frame and trim the door down to an odd size. It was a challenge and a story in itself, but the results are worth it.
• I built a pair of sturdy sawhorses out of 2x4s (my other sawhorses are at our property in Benson, so they were no help at all).
• I swapped out our old, over-sized, energy-hogging room air conditioner with a right-sized Energy Star unit. While the old one would quickly turn the room into an icebox, it had no thermostat and was loud with the sound of our money being sucked from our wallets and out through the exhaust. So we never ran it. The new one raised our electric bill a jaw-dropping six dollars!
• I rebuilt our Windows computer, which had contracted a rather nasty variant of the windowsclick trojan. That was a pain in the arse.
• I started the process of cleaning out our shed to use part of it as a woodshop.
• To have a place to store our camping gear outside the shed, I am constructing a 2′x4′x8′ cabinet under the shed’s patio cover. I’m using mostly materials on-hand so it should be pretty cheap.
• I put casters on an old workbench made of scrap materials, and now it serves as a stand for my el-cheapo table saw.

Pictures and more details on some of these projects forthcoming…

Yeah, baby!

Ever since we borrowed a miter saw to build our deck a couple years ago, I have been quietly pining away for one. Specifically a Makita LS1013 dual-bevel slider. It can cross-cut a 4×12, weighs only 46 pounds so one could conceive of it as “portable”, and is legendary for its accuracy and smooth action. It’s a really nice saw. It also costs at least $500, which is far more than I could imagine spending on a single tool.

Well, Makita decided to retire the LS1013 and replace it with a new model. I discovered this on a routine shopping trip to the Home Depot, where I saw they had been marked down to $299. They had an open box left, and the display model. I thought, “Gee, it’s almost affordable, but still more money than I have. And it’s big, so where would I put it?” I let it go.

Today I went back, suffering from non-buyer’s remorse since $200 off is a sweet deal and I had almost enough in Christmas gift cards to spend on tools. I really didn’t expect to see anything left. But lo, there was the display model sitting lonely on the bench, marked down to $199, and it called to me. It was missing a few parts, namely the vertical clamp, side supports, work lamp, and safety button. It also looked used since, well, it’s the one that everyone messes with at the store. But a good used one is more than $199, and it turns out the replacement parts aren’t that expensive and the only really necessary one is the safety button on the trigger ($1.50).

So I sprang for it. Now I can cross-cut a 4×12! Yay! Not that I have the need to cross-cut a 4×12 right now, mind you, but I could if I wanted to and that’s important.

I think my first task for it will be to build its own stand.

UPDATE: So I got the replacement parts installed and it works flawlessly! The blade is amazing. It cuts hardwood smooth as glass.

Homemade teardrop trailers

Stayed up late last night to feed Ian and stumbled upon something that has captured my imagination: do-it-yourself teardrop camping trailers! They are just so cool, they’re better than Tumbleweeds!

So I am presently addicted to browsing forums, personal construction odysseys, and photo galleries of how ordinary folks built their own replicas of 1930s and 1940s miniature travel trailers. Oh, and you can camp with them, too!

Crisis #1: Baby Ian has been in and out of doctors’ offices while we try to diagnose his tummy issues. He has been in a lot of discomfort and pain. We think we’ve figured it out, though, that it’s severe acid reflux. So the doctors have prescribed a variety of medications to help keep things flowing smoothly and relatively painlessly.

Crisis #2: Just as we were beginning to resolve Ian’s medical problems, Wifey got the call for her outpatient surgery. So she went in on Friday. It went well and she’s doing fine now, but the timing wasn’t ideal. We had arranged respite care for Ian but our respite provider came down with the flu, so I had to pick him up before mommy’s recovery was over.

Crisis #3: As we were heading out the door Saturday morning for another of Ian’s doctor visits, our 12-year-old kitty, Spaz, practically knocked me over trying to get inside. It took me a minute to realize he wasn’t moving his hind legs. Apparently he had been hit by a car. I had to take him and LE to the emergency vet while Andrea took Ian to his appointment. Spaz had a fractured pelvis, a fairly typical injury for an auto accident. Surgery was recommended but would cost over $3000, and as much as we love our kitty we can’t justify that let alone afford it. He has a very good chance to recover on his own, so we got kitty pain meds and a pet crate. He will remain in the crate (with a few outings for lap time) for the next eight weeks while he heals up.

Things are a little more settled now. Ian is feeling much better, mommy is feeling much better (though still sleep-deprived), and Spaz is pooping (which is a great thing if you are a geriatric cat with a fractured pelvis).

We aren’t going to build our homestead in Benson after all.

At least not for a while. A while being like ten years or more.

It was a really hard decision to make. We’ve invested a lot already and it’s hard to switch paths in the middle. And we were this close (visualize my thumb and index finger almost touching) to getting a building permit. But we know sticking around our home in Tucson is the right thing to do.

Through our kids and other circumstances, it’s clear to us that we need to stay in our current local community. Our community, particularly the Village, offers us a lot of much-needed support. And we believe God is asking us to offer ourselves to both our nuclear and broader communities. (Pastor E even challenged the entire congregation to consider putting down roots here.)

We always figured we’d build a community wherever we went, but the reality is that we really want to raise our children where we are now. So we’re sticking around midtown Tucson.

We are still committed to getting mortgage-free (one of the reasons we wanted to build our own house was to accomplish this). It’s harder to do that around here but perhaps not so hard as we once thought.

What of the homestead? We have no plans to sell our property. We have no plans for it at all, at the moment. I’ll continue to make monthly trips to check on it. The “pumphouse” would make a nice artist or meditation studio if anyone’s interested.

It’s easy to kick ourselves or wonder why we invested so much in something that ultimately wasn’t the direction God was calling us to go. Except when we remind ourselves that we bought our property and started down the homesteading path with prayer. God is so funny; he leads us on such winding paths. All along the way we are wondering “Ok God, what are you doing now?” The way is confusing, often nonsensical, and somehow it always turns out to be good.

We’re looking forward to finding out how this change in direction turns out to be good!

It’s long but well worth reading. It is thorough, well-written, and balanced.

To sum up: there’s good news and bad news.

The good news is that climate change is probably not as big a deal as we might believe.

The bad news is the reason why. We are using fossil fuels so fast and in such great quantities that it will become less and less economically viable to extract them starting, well, about now… with the likelihood that demand will outstrip supply around 2030. There aren’t enough fossil fuels left to destroy the planet with CO2 emissions.

If you think last year’s gas prices were bad, hang on. It’s all downhill from here.