some things you should know:
- i live with my mom, on an island in maine
- i was homeless before i came here
- my mom is dying of lung cancer
- my mom is a hoarder
- but she knows it, and is learning why hoarding is bad
- i've been upstairs 3 times since i moved here june 9th
- i hadn't spent considerable time with my mom in 12 years before this
- i work at a real, live country store
- i'm a city girl at heart
- i'm from a pretty big metropolitan area
- i left behind 4 kids that i had a big hand in raising
- there's 1000 people living on this island
- 5000 in the summer
- summer's pretty much over as of today
- there are no secrets on this island, honestly
ok so. we have spiders. like, a lot of spiders. not as many as we DID have, before i vacuumed all those fuckers back up (don't comment and tell me they live in the vacuum. i know. and i empty it all the time and immediately take the trash out). and it's a lot of money to have the guy come spray for pests. on top of which, i have to provide access to all the doors and windows for the guy to spray. and the upstairs is in shambles. there's no two ways about it. i'm AFRAID of going up there and moving things around. i'm afraid of what i'm going to find in terms of, shit i'm going to have to get out of here eventually. like, i know there's one bedroom that's strictly boxes of books, floor to ceiling, with a pathway to the closet door. are you fucking joking? i'm not dealing with that right now. i need a dumpster in the front yard for that shit. anyway, so i found out online that you can buy osage oranges (also called hedge balls, hedge apples, horse apples, god knows what else) from people in the mid-west, who pick them off the trees that just line the streets there apparently, and toss them around your home and they'll make the spiders leave!
so i bought a bunch, and i'm psyched, because it's getting chilly already and spiders are gonna want to start coming in.
well now that i've (hopefully successfully) handled the spider problem... i'm preparing to give my mom her nebulizer treatment, and i see the cat in the other room playing with something that's squeaking. at first i thought it was a toy mouse i'd gotten for him that squeaks JUST LIKE THAT, but then i realised that thing was moving on its own. holy shit, there's a mouse in the house! WHY AM I SURPRISED? but i am. and i run up to him and the mouse and grab an empty plastic cup and try to flip it over while moose has the thing pinned by the tail - so i can catch it and let it go. well, the fucking cat! he let go of it, it ran under the extremely heavy bureau in the kitchen. the cat made a few half hearted attempts to go get it, and i swept everything out from under there with a brush specific to that purpose, but it's still under there. and this cat is not a mouser. he's a pure-bred former show cat (maine coon, he's super cute and snuggly, he reaches to pet my cheek when i'm petting him, awwww). a mouse is something of interest for 19 seconds. not something to kill and bring to master as an expression of love. right now, i would totally be into an expression of love from the cat.
please note: we have 2 cats - moose, and bubba:
moose is dumber than a bag of hammers, so i can't lay out mouse traps (which i hate), or poison (plus the mouse will just go die in the walls and stink the place up) and can't afford an exterminator, and let's be real, this is the country. the coastal country. there's mice. we need a damned female cat who's a natural mouser.
at least fly season seems to be mostly over. it's like, lower 50s at night, so maybe they're slowing down and not breeding and they're not so bad. seems that way any way.
THERE'S A LOT OF BUGS HERE.
oh! ok here's a good example of how my mom drives me nuts. when it first came up about the woodstove and using it as a heat source instead of oil heating, because let's be real, i've got her bedroom where the dining room was, and we don't go upstairs. we're not paying to heat a house we only use HALF of. well she's kind of hesitant because she's afraid of fire, but she said she had a chimney sweep in and had the creosote cleaned off, and the fire department inspected it and declared it fit for use. so i had to find out today if we CAN use the woodstove while she's on oxygen, and we can, yay (THANKS KEVIN!)! so i asked mary if she could come over and show me how the fuck to use the thing, because i have no idea. it's not a fireplace, it's a STOVE. i haven't used one since i was like 10, and i forget a lot.
so i called the guy with the wood to order a cord, and i asked around and apparently it's only like $120 for a cord, and my mom thought it was going to be like $400, and i come home to tell her all the good news (i even bought a covering to hang over the stairs to keep the heat down here!) and i ask her when the fire dept inspected the thing, and when it was cleaned...
TEN YEARS AGO.
so i call the head of the FD (this is really a small town) and ask her if they still do that, and she said no, cause if someone winds up burning their house down, the FD can be responsible) and she said to call the stove company. well my mom tells me to go get the phone book and look up such and such chimney cleaning company over in town and i'm like, are you nuts? they're going to charge us a fee to come do that, and someone around here will do it for free (seriously, small town). the stove company can tell us who can do it, or they can come look at it cause it's their damned stove, there's no need for a chimney sweep since there's no creosote. at worst a creature could have nested in there, but i see no evidence of it in the woodpit. but omfg like i'm trying to get all this shit done thinking that the situation is ABC, and i do what i need to do and find out the situation is @&$. it's driving me nuts!
i think that's all for right now. tv and my favourite chair are calling my name. i shall abide.
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