Posts Tagged ‘rats’

The Year of the Rat (In More Ways Than One)

By Chief Oddball on February 7th, 2008 at 9:03 pm

Filed under Journal ··· 1 Comment

Happy Chinese New Year to everyone — albeit slightly belated, particularly if you’re in the eastern hemisphere. Ironically, 2008 is the year of the rat. Well, we’ve certainly welcomed plenty of them into our attic already, so that’s apropos.

Fortunately, as of this week, there should no longer be any more rats up there. A complete exclusion was done on Tuesday, with every opening into our attic sealed up or screened over. The guy who did the work was even able to spot the places where the rodents were definitely coming in, and sealed them up good. Since the exclusion, nothing else has been caught in the traps, but we continue to check them. Another few days of this, though, and we can be pretty well assured that our own personal “year of the rat” has ended. Thankfully.

I also got my bike back from the repair shop today, with a new lower bracket bearing and full tune-up. I’d take it for a celebratory workout tomorrow morning, except that I have to get up early and take Apple’s car to the dealer for a tune-up of its own. At first I was stressing over whether to leave the car there or sit and wait for it, and how much work I’d miss during the whole process. In the end, though, I killed two birds with one stone — I bought a book about online advertising strategies to study while I wait for the car, so I can claim it as work time. Win/win.

For our Chinese New Year celebration today, Apple and I picked up a big meal from our favorite Chinese restaurant and giggled at the political commentators having meltdowns about the economy on CNN HD. I swear, CNN needs to put up a little graphic with a real-time readout of Lou Dobbs’ blood pressure and heart rate. The way that guy goes off on everything, it would be like a cage match.

With my work complete for the night, it’s back to Forza on the Xbox 360. After Reaper and I enjoyed some competitive online racing last weekend, I’ve gone back to that game with renewed interest and have been building up some more customized performance cars in my stable. One thing I’m finding out is that all-wheel drive really does rock, especially when you’re putting down a ridiculous 700 or 800 horsepower and you need grip, precious grip…

Also, I really need to pretty up the “tag cloud” on my sidebar. It’s all kinds of ugly.

More later!

Comments (1)

What a Week

By Chief Oddball on February 2nd, 2008 at 5:31 pm

Filed under Journal, Rants ··· 5 Comments

My mom recently remarked that this past week was one where anything that could go wrong, did go wrong. I definitely understand what that’s like. Ironically, I was having the same kind of a week myself. At least, now that the weekend is here, things no longer look so bad — although I’ll still be dealing with the fallout from this week for a while yet.

Since I’m in between projects at work, this week seemed like a good opportunity for me to try switching to Windows Vista again. I’ve been working with it a lot lately, mostly from setting up my mom’s new laptop, and I felt like it was time to give it another shot. I have to admit, a lot of the performance and reliability patches Microsoft has released since I last abandoned Vista have improved the experience markedly. There are still problems, but they’re starting to get ironed out.

Dealing with bugs, finding workarounds and discovering new ways of doing things are all part of the process when switching to a new OS version of Windows. It’s just that this is the first OS switch I’ve had to do on a machine I rely on for my day-to-day livelihood, now that I work from home. This can turn a minor annoyance into a showstopper in short order. Fortunately, things seem to be going very well so far, with a few minor exceptions I won’t detail here.

Those minor exceptions, however, did contribute just another element of zaniness to the whole week, which was otherwise stuffed with one crisis after another. On Monday morning, a fear I’d had brewing in the back of my mind for weeks was finally borne out when I discovered we had rats living in our attic. For a while now, I’ve occasionally thought I heard a strange noise from up there, but every time I’d listen for it, I wouldn’t hear anything else. On Monday, during a (somewhat abnormal) period of silence in my office room, I heard a very distinct skittering sound moving from one corner of my ceiling to the other. And upon opening the attic garage access, I was showered with rodent droppings. Yaaaay.

Continue Reading…

Comments (5)