I had a post all set with dark ruminations about the State of our Nation on it's 244th birthday.
But, y'know what? You've heard it all before. We're fucked, the Plague is running wild, 40% of the American public is fucking batshit crazy. Welcome to 2020, yeah, well, shit.
Instead, I went out front to work on a project we've been thinking about for years.
Our little house was built on spec in 1922. It was built cheap, and it shows; as my Bride says, "Our house has ugly bones." Everything in and around it was built to turn a quick buck, which means spending as little a possible on any- and everything.
That includes the concrete pavement.
The original plan included a walkway from the curb to the front steps, from there around the east side of the house and out into the back yard to where the original garage stood.
Well, the garage has long-since burned, the only remnants fragments of glass and charcoal we turn up in the back garden from time to time. A tiny portion of the path around the side of the house remains, out by the back door, but the bulk is gone, demolished when we had the east side deck built.
The front walk, though?
Still there.
Broken, overgrown, ugly, crude...like I said - this was cheap, gimcrack Twenties concrete flatwork.
Well, we're cowering under the barrage of COVID-19, and what better time for some home improvement projects?
So we went out front, cleared the grass turf that had overgrown the concrete fragments and pried them up...
..and stacked them in a pile with the object of breaking them into smaller fragments to make a 4- to 6-inch recycled rock, what in the soils biz we call "stabilization rock", the bulk material you through over soft soil to make a dense base on which to build.
And that's when the Little Cat showed up.
This critter's name is "Nine", because she lived in the #9 storage unit in some trailer park or something where she got sick and was generally neglected until the nice people at a Cat Rescue organization took her in. She's desperately shaky on her feet, is a fragile little thing, and is very sweet and affectionate. She also
looooves to be outside, and we don't let her roam nearly enough for her liking, so when she can get out she frolics around like a nut.
And this was pure joy for the little nut; outdoors, with these awesome piles of soft dirt to roll and dig in. And so she did...
...until even more fun ambled along, in the form of the Big Cat, Drachma, the senior housecat; black, comfortable, lazy, and plump. He's a solidly outdoors-cat, possessing enough physical eptitude that the Small One lacks that makes us confident he can take care of himself outside.
Full of the wildness she draws from her outdoor adventures, the Small One hunkered down in defilade of the dirt mount and waited for her victim to wander into the kill zone.
He did...and she went Over the Top:
Baruk Catzâd! Catzâd ai-mênu! The startled Drachma responded with a satisfying tail-bottle and crouch, and Little One was a Force of Nature...
...until he realized that it was just the annoying little spaz he shared his house with. Upon which he studiously ignored her, and she found something else intensely interesting in the manner of embarrassed cats since Ancient Egypt.
With the cat skirmish concluded, we could go back to work.
Okay, well, after
that we got back to work.
Got the first lift of stab rock in place and the alignment cleared in order to begin digging out towards the street.
So, as you can tell, even yardwork is More Fun With Cats.
3 comments:
I assume that you don't have a lot of coyotes around.
In our 'hood, they are fairly common (which is good because
they eat the rabbits which munch on the garden).
And, while it is true that no cat with even a whiff of
situational awareness will be caught by a coyote, young
and stupid cats do get snagged by them from time to time.
We have heard word of the vest-pocket-wolves...but we're pretty densely developed so there's little for them to munch on and not many places to lurk. We've got a ton of the usual urban pests - raccoons and opossums - but haven't seen traces of coyote.
Little Cat is a spaz AND kind of dopey, which is why we don't let her roam. But Big Cat is both sensible and sensibly-cowardly, so we trust he will scamper up a tree or in through the cat-flap (which leads to the basement only - the inner door is locked so Small One can't get out) in time to escape the Jaws of Death
You might be surprised at how much food there is for coyotes. if you have lots of raccoons / opossums / rabbits / rats / mice you have lots of coyote food.
They are pretty shy, but in the last few years have become much bolder.
As I age, I get up earlier and earlier. I sometimes spot a splash of brown fur patrolling the neighborhood in the early morning light.
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