– in which Dorn has to decide between two misgivings.
s I mentioned in the last post (here), we’ve started hearing strange noises in our attic. They’re mostly early in the morning, but can happen any time. Kathleen can have just lit the candles, turned on Calm Radio, and slipped into the scented bathtub, when suddenly she hears a caterwaul of scratching and rasping that sounds like Gollum frantically clawing a tunnel through our roof to get to his preci-i-i-ious (well geez, I don’t know, how would you spell it?).
This would be enough to unnerve the hardiest soul, but Kathleen and I both get especially spooked at unexplained sounds in our house, for good reasons that I’ll explain in some future story (best told on a dark and stormy night).
So we had a desperate choice to make: live with our fear of things that go bump in the night, or face our fear of exterminators (or anyone else) entering our house and breaking our covid isolation safety shield.
Things in the attic can do more than unsettle us, of course, they can carry germs, bite the wires, leave a stinky mess, die, and generally mess up the smooth internal workings of the house. So we had to opt for discomfort number (2), and called in an exterminator.
We called Tommy’s Pest Management because we had used them before with success. We had originally picked them because of their ad in the yellow pages (you won’t remember these of course, as this was long before you were born, but they used to publish thick books of telephone numbers of all the local companies. By social convention, these books were printed on yellow paper, and consulting it was how you knew how to contact someone you wanted to do business with, before Gooogle.)
We picked Tommy, as I was saying, because in their ad in the yellow pages, they had included an exterminator joke about alligators. I wish I could relate the joke, but I just can’t remember it, so instead I’ll provide a Norwegian alligator joke I found while researching my master’s thesis on Norwegian pig humor (here).
Lars is walking down the street one morning leading an alligator on a string, when he meets up with Ole.
“What on earth are you doing with that pig?” asks Ole.
“That’s no pig!” Lars exclaims.
“Hush Lars, I’m talking to the alligator.”
Anyway, we arranged for the exterminator to come out, but he wasn’t allowed into the house–external inspection only. That was fine with Tommy, he got paid either way.
Tommy brought an assistant with him. The assistant was garbed for the season in face mask and gloves, but Tommy wasn’t. With only one of them masked, I figured, my chances of getting the virus were about half of what they would be if neither was masked, and I decided this would have to be good enough. They weren’t coming inside anyway and I was properly protected and keeping my distance from them. (I did feel, though, something like when I reduce my chances of my car getting broken into by 50%, by only locking the doors on one side.)
They looked around outside some, and pronounced, “mice!”, and pointed out where they were probably getting in. They offered to come in real carefully and place some traps and materials inside, as well as set some outside traps. I said no thanks on coming indoors, just tell me where and how and I’ll do it.
So now I have some rodent death traps, that ironically I’m leaving in quarantine until I feel like any virus on them has died of old age and they are harmless enough to deploy. Full story at eleven (or when something interesting develops).
Thanks,
Dorn
4/xx/2020