Where O Where is Spring!

Ok, we've had the winter from hell and then we have had flirtatious teasers of Spring. June 8, I wore my coat and turned on my space heater. JUNE 8! This is supposed to be pretty much summer time. We should be swimming and water sliding and baking in the sun.

My Spring is filled with moments of critters – tiny ones and big ones. No sun – just lots of other "live" things.

First - it was the bees in my bathroom (kind of catchy huh). I have a bees nest in a wall in my bathroom. The bees aren't healthy either - they are mutated, kind of like space alien bees. They are sickly and have a terrible time flying, usually hovering for a little while above the bathtub and then slowly winding down to drop dead on the bathtub floor. Every now and then, one will muster enough strength to make it to the living room rug (which is bee colored). I have gathered up about a dozen corpses from the bathtub in the last three weeks. eeeuuuu.

Then my mother-in-law's house where I have moved to, has ants. On the kitchen counter. Dozens of them. Searching on the internet for methods of getting rid of ants only tells me that I must be a very poor housekeeper. I took everything off the counter and cleaned like crazy and then put everything back. I repeated this about six times - they are coming up behind the cabinets and out from a corner at the back of the counter. So I did some more research and discovered a home remedy: 40% water, 40% alcohol, and 20% dish soap. Kills them on contact! That's fine - but they would still manage to straggle in sparingly. So - another home remedy was to sprinkle a trail of cinnamon along the little opening in the corner - and THAT stopped them. They hate cinnamon.

Then I came home a couple nights ago and my partner/Significant Other, said "I've had an adventurous day. I've got a marmot!" So he's spent the last two days trying to get the marmot to leave the area, short of pulling out his pistol. He has an airgun and has popped it at the marmot - but with each episode the marmot has gotten smarter. One morning the marmot was out between the house and the garden (a cyclone fence in the way). This little guy is about the size of a big house cat. Plump and fluffy - looks an awful lot like a rabbit (marmots are of the squirrel family - but they are also part of the rodent family (like, as in rat)). I prefer to think of him as a squirrel cousin. Anyway – my SO made one pump with the air gun and that little guy streaked through the cyclone fence so fast your head would spin. I don't know how he got his fat little body through the tiny opening in the gate. He ate all of our radishes that had JUST started sprouting. Little nibbler. He's kind of cute, though, and I am tempted to call "here, kitty, kitty." If only he wouldn't eat the garden.

So here's my Spring Song:

Bees, Ants, and Marmots, O My!
Bees, Ants, and Marmots, O My!
Bees, Ants, and Marmots, O My!

May summer just get here.