GONE BATTY
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moon phases � |
It has been a while. Sorry if anyone was missing me but it seems wiser to write nothing if I have nothing to say than to bore you all with chit chat.
So I am asking myself what has happened in the last five days. I remember this morning really well but before that is a bit of blur. Ok, methodical counting back five days. Let me see, that takes us back to around Thursday. Sorry too long ago for me to get into detail. I do, of course remember the weekend since that is consumed by the farmer's markets. This past weekend was made slightly more thrilling by the addition of the scraps of hurricane Charley being due. Saturday was a somewhat slow day with some sun. All in all uneventful. Sunday was supposed to be windy and rainy. My joke was that I would need a tether and a snorkel to go to market. Turned out to be a partly sunny day. A bit of a letdown but financially better.
Yesterday I borrowed a friends pickup and brought home a free refrigerator to put cheese in and age cheese in. This should allow for the keeping of food for family consumption in the kitchen frige.
This brings us to today. I have to say today had a bit of drama in it partiularly before noon. It is funny how ones morning can shift so damned fast. I had planned on taking A. shopping for some school basics. New sneakers, a backpack, that sort of thing. I had gone out to water the goats and when I came back onto the deck I realized I had left the umbrella on the picnic table closed. I don't often close the darned thing but a month or so ago a storm came through that caused the umbrella to lift off thus picking up the table and dumping in on the deck from a few feet in the air. So, I had closed the umbrella in anticipation of the wind and rain Charley would be bringing. Anyway, the cat (another story), likes to hang out in the clothes pin basket which was sitting on the picnic table and since it was warming up a bit I thought I would open the umbrella so there would be some shade.
This is when things began to shift. I mean I have heard of superstition about opening an umbrella in the house but I have never heard of any warnings against opening a large umbrella on a sunny morning. You may want to consider caution in this venture considering the way things went for me this morning.
I opened the umbrella. It is one of those market type things that has a pin you insert to hold the thing open. The cat got very into playing with the pin as it dangled from its string for a day or so so she was hanging out wanting to swat the pin before I put it in the hole. Well I put the pin in and thought that was that until a split second later I felt a sting on my right arm just below the elbow. I thought to myself I must have disturbed a sleepy bee. It had been a cool morning and the bees like to find a warm spot until things warm up. In reflex I swated at my arm and I noticed a grey fuzz fall to the deck floor. Odd I thought to myself, that is no bee. I took a closer look and was totally and completely freaked out. A bat lay at my feet with it's wings streached out and its mouth open with a nasty squeeking sound comming out. I got a fine look at tiny little fangs decorating the offending beasts mouth.
THEN I TOTALLY FREAKED OUT
Thoughts of rabies and rabies shots raced through head at amazing rates of speed. I flipped out long enough to realize flipping out was very very bad. I HAD to capture the damned bat or I would have to have rabies shots. I raced around trying to find something to catch it in. For a couple of minutes I was all for killing it with a shovel but realized if I caved its tiny skull in I would be getting rabies shots. Finally I ran into the kitchen gasping in fear and freakoutdom and grabbed my canning pot. I put the pot over the beast so I couldn't take flight. I then totally fell apart for few minutes.
The guy from the health department seemed to feel my batty buddy was going to escape through the cracks between the deck floor boards. He thought this so strongly that he was convinced that it already was gone. He wanted it caught and brought to the health department for examination but he really didn't believe it was there to be caught.
Having gotten back into my kitchen I began to function a bit better and ran for the super thin cutting boards that are flexible so you can poor stuff off them. These I could slide under the canning pot to prevent the bat from going throught the floor. When I slid the things under there the bat went batty making squeeky sonar sounds so I knew it was still in the pot. With two bricks and a large herb plant on top that bat was going nowhere. When I told the guy from the health department that I definitely had the bat but wasn't sure how to get it into something else to transport it he said he would come get it.
The good news is that the bat was still there when the guy from the health department came (an hour later). He put it in a coffee can and will call me tomorrow with the results of the rabies exam.
Lets hope the bat wasn't rabid.
Every year we have some kind of close encounter with a bat or two. Usually they get in the house and we have to get them out again. This was a bit overboard from my perspective. Although Mr. health department says only 1% of the animal population is infected with rabies.
After all that I did take A. out shopping but I got a nasty headache. All I could think was my brain was getting all mushy already. I began haveing anxiety about water and couldn't think straight. A hysterical reaction? We will see won't we. Come over here I wanna gnaw on you....
written at 8:45 p.m.
2004-08-17
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