geekent’s stuff’n things

On Thursday night, or perhaps Friday morning (sometime between 11:30pm and 1am), Mina, our beloved hamster passed away.
She had a rough go of it in her last 3 months, and an even worse go of it for the last 2 days. About 11pm Thursday evening I watched Mina, laying on her side in the cage, her legs kicking a bare spot in the wood chips, her eyes caked shut with some gunk, her fore paws twitching. It wasn’t pretty. I said to her quietly, “It’s okay Mina, let go, let go. It’s okay,” before covering the cage again.
Emma proceeded to wrap Mina up and place her in the freezer (as she had done so in the past, only in this case, the hamster isn’t spending 2 years there before being buried. Emma’s father, while dropping off her new paper storage shelves for her bookbinding venture, picked up the hamsticle for burial along side the other one.
The thing I’ll remember best about Mina is that she had no fear of the cat at all, in fact, she’d be in her ball and barrell straight for Bailey, nailing the cat in the side and sending her running.
That, and her funny as hell hiccups (I need to make some audio files and upload them, thankfully I caught them on tape).
Here’s to you Mina!

It’s been a little trying around Queenwest these days.
Low cash flow due to job transitions and contractor delinquency have obviously made things tight and tense though we deal as well as possible in the interim. Support from family has been greatly appreciated!
Those same pesky contractors are also causing much aggrivation leading to tight shoulders and repeated headaches. Grr.
Speaking of headaches, the damn alleycats are still a major nuisance, trampling our gourd plants and causing our only pumpkin to be stunted… they’re also bringing fleas into our backyard which really isn’t cool at all. And we’ve noticed they’re associating with the Black Mask Gang, the wayward quintet of raccoons that periodically disrupt our balcony. Not to mention Rotundo, the wider-than-he-is-long raccoon who was knocking over garbage cans like the bandit he is.
Mina the Hamster’s waiting at the checkout counter to pay her bills. She’s not even on her last legs anymore. We’re all very sad because Mina’s been sleeping almost all day for the past 2 months and she’s nearly non-responsive. Last night she was on her side, her legs sticking out, twitching. We don’t know what she’s still holding on for and it’s really really sand and very hard to watch. We were hoping she would make her way towards the light last night, but she didn’t. This morning, Baileycat was whining profusely, even more than normal, and was hopping on the bed then running away then whining again. When I got up she led me to the living room where I picked her up and showed her our poor Mina laying in the cage, still twitching. Bailey was very concerned and kept stretching her neck closer to the cage, even putting a paw up against it. It was very touching to see how concerned Bailey was towards the little fuzzball.
And finally, to top all this off, I found a strange little node in my testicular area just off of one nut, which I’ll get checked out today. I don’t think it’s cancerous as it’s not a swelling of any kind, but it is an anomaly which does concern me a little. I don’t particularly enjoy having the doctor touch my personal parts, but, well better safe than ball-less.
This weekend bodes all right, with birthdays going around. Emma’s mother is coming down today and we’re throwing a steak bbq party for her tomorrow with family and friends. Should be fun.
Be kind, rewind, y’all
-30-

Friday
Week two of my nine months of three-day weekends. It’s supposed to be my day to write, but I get distracted easily as I’m out of any sence of writing rhythm.
I can’t focus and take my task for the day to be cleaning up. Within 8 hours I have my various email inboxes cleaned up (my two main one’s less than ten messages each, one of them hasn’t had less than 100 since the mid-1990’s). Most of the emails contained links or attachments of some sort which I spent the day checking out, including some very weird GI Joe cartoons
Digging the new Quannum emcees, Lifesavas, I plunged back into Epitonic after over a year of not downloading mp3s from them. I don’t find much new that I’m interested in, and they have a poor hip-hop selection.
The new batch of Samurai Jack episodes are beyond good, as Jack infiltrates a rave-meets-children of the corn scene (seeing Jack sucking on a soother and wearing a tall cat-in-the-hat hat was hilarious).
Saturday
With a rather disappointing morning of cartoon reruns, I polish off the final run of Marvel’s Black Panther comics from earlier this year. It still kind of bothers me that they felt the necessity to relaunch the character. *w*
Emma took off to a Book Arts convention for the early part of the afternoon, while it was my charge to get the car battery boosted somehow. Thank you CAA - they came and jumpstarted my car in less time than I spent on hold trying to reach them.
The car packed with dirty laundry we headed up to Owen Sound for a free washing machine and a dinner party (yes, it’s as cheap to drive 2 1/2 hours to do laundry as it is to go across the street to the coin-op).
For the dinner party I made some surprisingly adept pitta bread, which went over quite well. Emma’s mother also learned that you get a few drinks in me and you can’t shut me up. *Surprise!*
Emma and I hit the coils of the sofabed for the evening and after a few hours of fidgeting with the blankets, I was zonkoed.
Sunday
Getting out of bed and perusing the kitchen and the downstairs laundry room I noticed a few wasps hovering about. It’s been an incredibly waspy season but still…
As I was watching the wasps in the kitchen it became readily apparent that more and more were coming in somehow (I’d turn away briefly then turn back and there’d be more, turn away/turn back/even more). Soon there was nearly a full fledged swarm. While pretty docile, who wants a swarm of wasps in their kitchen?
Emma’s mother and sister returned from retrieving the niece (age 3) and nephew (age 6) only to be made aware of the infestation. We all (the grownups) tried to keep it low key as to not freak the kids out, but at the same time there’s a friggin’ swarm of wasps in the kitchen!
Em’s sister went to the store and purchased both an indoor and outdoor spray, the latter of which she used to hose down the nest where her husband was stung the weekend before. That only proceeded to drive more wasps indoors.
After breakfast and testing the effectiveness of the indoor spray (works nice and quick-like), we all went for a walk in the beautiful escarpment that surrounds the city. Upon returning, the kids disappeared and I proceeded to do as I do… track the bugs.
I came to quickly realize that the wasps weren’t coming from the hole in the ceiling (created by winter thaw leakage) but in fact were coming from a space in the corner of the open-spaced kitchen cabinet over the fridge. It was really weird as you could hear the buzzing of their wings in the wall, and you could hear it get closer and closer and closer until suddenly it stops… a yellow and black head pokes out of the crevice, and the insect emerges and proceeds to fly around looking for some glue or grime to suck on. (It reminded me of that episode of the X-Files where Mulder enters the expeirment house with all the cockroaches in the walls and the walls seemed to be moving).
With all the bug spray floating about and resting on things the bugs weren’t surviving too long, and they were spreading to all the windows and doors of the house, but at this point there were wasp carcasses (carcasi?) everywhere.
In the laundry room, I thought there were only two or three wasps frollicking about, but when I sprayed the room, well over a dozen all of a sudden swarmed the lightbulb (for some reason, whenever you spray them, the wasps head toward the brightest light source before they die… ie. they head towards the light… odd but true) and began to fall. In the other room I could hear the repeated thud of wasp bodies into the stack of empty cardboard boxes beneath the light.
Outside I scoped the vines growing up the chimney where Em’s sis sprayed the nest. While I did see the nest she sprayed (a rather large one, the size of my head) I also noticed that the wasps buzzing about weren’t coming or going from that nest, rather, there were two other nests, both under the wood siding which the vines had grown under and created space for them to be created. One nest had larger wasps than the other, though I’m not sure if that means it was a more mature nest or not. Either way it was one of these two nests that had a direct tunnel into the kitchen wall. Knowing that you’re not supposed to spray a nest until they’ve gone dormant (so early morning or late evening) there wasn’t much I could do about these two nests mid day (without severely pissing off the little bastards).
We ventured back home via a stop for dinner at my sister’s place in Barrie, and made it home just in time to catch episode 5 of Six Feet Under (the bestest show on tele today). Rah rah rah. The weekend’s over.
Monday morning
Woke up to find outside the kitchen one of the half dozen strays rummaging through a tipped over garbage can (I’d put the first kitchen bag of garbage out last night…grrr) and there was chicken fat and spaghetti sauce and cat poop (from our cat, not the strays, I hope) everywhere. I bleached down the deck, but still… grodie.