Scram mole

Night shift

Miss me? It's amazing how much a person can get done in the early morning hours. That is, when they don't have their nose glued to a computer. I cleaned house, did laundry, cooked, washed windows, played my ukulele, watered the garden and took a break from screens, including TV. (OK, I looked at my phone occasionally.)

I was never much of a night owl and after decades of early alarms I suppose it's too late to learn how to sleep in. Even after John retires, we'll probably still eat early-bird dinners and go to bed at 9. But I envy those people who wake up at 4 am, roll over and go blissfully back to sleep.  The sign of a clear conscience. As soon as I open my eyes, my mind starts spinning like a washing machine and after a cup of coffee,  I'm rarin' to go.

These Seattle summer mornings are so brief and beautiful, it seems a shame to waste them sleeping.  Before the sun is even up, the hummingbirds are clicking outside the bedroom window on the crocosima.  The Yellow-faced Bumblebees seem to be multiplying and getting fatter. 

Gosh, this wonderful technology is time-consuming!  I waited around all morning yesterday for the Centurylink repairman to show up. I finally called to ask what's the deal, and the service department said they had already fixed the outage, which was "somewhere else." Indeed, when I picked up the land-line we had a dial tone again. Well, a call would have been a nice courtesy to let me know. On Monday, they claimed there weren't any system outages at Centurylink and the problem was inside our house. Well, it's best not to overthink these things. We're back on the grid.

As you know from reading this blog, I have a soft spot for all the wild and semi-wild creatures just trying get by on this harsh planet. Moles are one exception. For the first time in years, we have an infestation going on and big messy mounds of dirt pop up overnight.  True Value Hardware has an entire shelf section of complicated traps and diabolical poisons, so moles must be a common problem. You could easily spend hundreds of dollars on solutions that might not even work.

I don't wish them a miserable death, I just wish them someplace else.  So I bought a big $16 jug of Mole Scram, an "all natural deterrent" that smells a little like mothballs.  Which would probably work just as well, if you can still buy such an old-fashioned thing.