Wednesday 10 March 2010

Some animal encounters!

Firstly, the Puppy!  Susie from I just love that Fabric put a lovely post on her blog saying how much she liked the puppy - I have to say I was pretty pleased with it myself, but it's always nice when somebody else likes your work...


Second, we had a small insect incursion in the Golightly household - we bought a couple of pavlova bases at Christmas, for those of you who might think I'm talking about stands for ballerinas, you can buy 12"/30cm 'undressed' pavlovas from the supermarket, in a box.  You can then 'dress' them with whatever takes your fancy - usually strawberries, passionfruit pulp and masses of cream - and they are a traditional summer dessert... yummy.


Anyway, we forgot about one of them, and it sat in a box in the top of the pantry until very early in the New Year, when we noticed a few ants winding and wending their way into the cupboard... and upon investigation, rediscovered the errant pavlova, which promptly made its way into the food recycling in our garden (aka Mr Golightly's children, all 5000 of them [it's a worm farm, ok?]).


So, over the last couple of days I've noticed a few ants winding and wending their way back into our pantry, but haven't done anything about it - until this morning, when I opened the cupboard next to the pantry,where the ironing board lives, only to discover the entire ceiling and walls of the top of the cupboard covered in ants... very busily carrying food in from outside...


So when I dragged Mr Golightly out of bed to look at 5.30AM, he didn't exactly react how I thought*.  He went apesh*t, dragging out the cloudy ammonia, throwing the entire contents of the cupboard outside, and proceeding to commit genocide (ant-ocide?), all in the nude.  Oh, for the camera!  Anyway, luckily for us the neighbours didn't appear to be too perturbed by this racket, and tonight when I got home, and after I finished cleaning up all the ant corpses, I started to look at what they were so interested in.


Many many years ago, gentle reader, Mr Golightly was a partner in a software company.  It's a very long story, but when the company was wound up, we got the coffee maker.  Yep, along with a lot of [now] obsolete hardware and software, manuals, a couple of nice office chairs and a 12 seater boardroom table, some mis-matched glasses and a black plastic tray with a crack right across it... takers for the boardroom table, apply here.


It's one of those with a heated base, where you put coffee in a paper filter, pour in cold water and wait for the water to flow down through the machine, into the filter full of coffee, and down into your waiting glass pot.  So, guess where the ants were?  Right in the lid:




You know, we've owned this coffeemaker for more longer than we've been married, and I never knew the lid even came off.  What kind of housekeeping slob does that make me?  The best kind, I think.


Anyway, I've cleaned it all out, run a pot of water through it, and hopefully it'll give us another 18 years service.


Other news:


Even though it looks like a spotty turd, it isn't. It's a leopard slug & it's sitting outside our back door, waiting to work its way into Mr Golightly's shower - they love to sit in your shower & eat the mould - weird, huh?  But in a good way:



What else?  Well, I've started taking public transport to work, because the large company for which I work has seen fit to stop paying for our parking.  To be fair, we knew it was coming, and we can still pay for the parking ourselves, it's only $3.50 per day, salary sacrificed, which is only the same as a large flat white with two, so it's not the end of the world, but I hate driving to work every day.  I'm trying to work out ways to reduce my carbon footprint, not increase it!  

So, the large corporation for which I work also runs a number of subsidised buses all over parts of Sydney.  This is essentially because they chose to move 5,000 of their staff into three brand-spanking new buildings in a location which is, geographically speaking, the arse-end of nowhere, and which is chronically badly served by public transport.  One of those buses goes through a Slightly Further Away Suburb (17km) from me, at 7.15am, and it connects with the bus from the Slightly Larger Suburb next to me, which leaves at 6.35am.  Yesterday, I arrived at work at 8.50am.  That's two hours and fifteen minutes to go 40 kilometres.  Is it worth it to save $3.50?  Time will tell.

*I thought he'd go back to bed, leaving it for me to clean up!

2 comments:

  1. You do lead an 'interesting' life! We've had ants in the kitchen most summers, but nothing like that. Shudder. And I'm sure mould eating slugs are useful, but again, ew.

    As far as wildlife goes, I prefer your puppy!

    That bus of yours sounds a bit like hospital transport over here - all round the houses. I'd say it was great to use public transport, but surely they can speed it up a little bit!

    Cheers,
    AJ

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  2. Wow quite a dissertation there . .you don't work at Norwest do you! Woollies HQ is there but I dont' think they 'bus' their 5000 employees in! After the rain we've had exploring bull ants! At least they're visible, about as visible as the huntsman above my fridge . .his days are numbered!

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