Pingu makes drum and bass

An oldie, but it stillmakes me smile.

Outpost compost heap: a decisive victory

These past few weeks have seen a drastic revaluation of the battle lines in the war on mice, spurred by a trip to the tip with a load of weeds. The weeding was a subset of a wider garden landscaping operation, which has been taking substantially longer to complete than originally intended. Kevin McLeod would be chiding me for having unrealistic expectations and not enough of a contingency budget, but that's another story.

All that is relevant to the war non mice is that a substantial pile of weeds has been gently composting on the bare earth of our courtyard for about two months. The pile was always destined for the tip, but hadn't made it there for a variety of reasons - not the least of which being that I could not be bothered.

Little did I know that I was already paying for my laziness.

When I finally got around to removing the pile, I received a nasty shock - the mice had made themselves a mouse home under the warmth of the decomposing weeds. And it wasn't just made out of the organic matter of the weeds - they had been constructing earth works. There were several channels and even a little tunnel dug into the ground!

I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before (but I will surely mention it again), but the soil in our garden is a heavy clay which dries rock hard, but forms a sticky thick mud when saturated. The fact that the mice had managed to burrow into it was pretty impressive.

I only saw one mouse scatter when I deconstructed the nest, but I haven't had a mouse inside the house since. The bait on the traps hasn't even been nibbled. Three weeks without any mousey encounters is the longest we've gone since the war on mice began. I've done some reading that suggests mice only wander in about a 10 m radius of their nest.

I'm hopeful the elimination of the nest has solved my mouse problem, at least for this season. Next year I'm going to focus not only on the entry points to the house and trapping any that come into the house, but also on looking through the garden for nests.

What I'm listening to today

Diplo's 'Decent work for decent pay' LP, which is mostly Diplo remixes, plus a few that he's produced. Example:

And some proof that not all of High Contrasts remixes in the style of dnb are worth it:

Life in the bus lane

When I moved into the new place at the start of the year, I gave up my urban walk to work life style for a far more suburban existence.

This has had it's benefits and drawbacks. I now spend around an hour a day sitting on buses and a variable amount of time hanging around at bus stops. I also don't see the local drunks getting into their morning long necks at the corner store, or the small congregation of Turkish (I think) guys having their morning catch up. I actually rather miss these things.

What I don't miss are the regular break ins in the apartment parking lot and living on a main road, not to mention the occasional altercation with the local colour over my ownership of the beer I've just purchased from the corner shop.

You may think I include the time spent on the bus as a downside, and at first it was. However, as the morning walk to work becomes a more distant memory, the more I enjoy the contemplative moments jostled in amongst the other wage slaves, the more I enjoy starring out the window like a zombie insulated from the world by the glass and the small speakers nestled in my ear canals.

This is one of the best parts of my day. My mind is at its most relaxed and wonders with abandon. I am close to people, I am one of the mass, but we do not need to communicate, just be.

I almost feel sorry for the suckers stuck in traffic on the other side of the glass.

PS: this post was written entirely on my phone while on the bus on the way to work this morning. Only this post script and some minor formatting was added aferwards. The wonders of modern technology!