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Friday, September 05, 2003 Today has been one of those days where I could easily bore you to desperate tears about how freakin' beautiful it is around here. Seriously -- I am bowled over to the point where it would be exceedingly easy to go off about it. And we both know how tiresome that would get, so I'll spare you. (You owe me for that bit of restraint.) Instead, I'll inflict this bit of hard-core rustickness on you: The last two mornings, I've gotten up to find that sometime during the night one of the hungry local bears has ripped the top off my composting bin, hoovering down whatever hooverable food (or ex-food) was in there. Two things have set this off: first, it's that pre-hibernation time when bears are trying to pack on enough weight to get them through the winter. Second, two days ago I rooted out a bunch of old frozen bread from the freezer, well past its shelf life, and gave it what passes for a proper burial around here. Which is to say, heaved it into the bin. That was Wednesday. Yesterday morning, the cover had been pulled off and tossed aside, most of the old bread had disappeared, and the rest of the bin's contents had been well tamped down by bear paws, mid feeding frenzy. Can you believe this is my life? Compost. Bears. Kinda scary. I haven't been securing the bin lid this summer because, well, there hasn't been any need and the bin's a big goofy in that the lid and the two handle-type thingies that secure it don't do much in the way of securing anything. I may as well have hung out a big neon sign reading "Attention, passing bears -- chow here!" or "eat at runwithscissors'." Something pithy and inviting. I put the lid on, secured it, weighted it down with a couple of sizeable, heavy rocks. "Ha!" you say. I'm with you. Lid securing and big rocks did nothing. Pathetic. Laughable. I join you in your chortles of ridicule. On the way home from Montpelier earlier this afternoon, I stopped at the local farmstand where one of the employees mentioned that bear season had begun two days ago, that they'd had a big old bugger of a bear that had recently been eating a major swath through their cornfield, that someone had come across it last night -- in mid-gorge -- and shot it. Hmmmm. I have no manly firearm, I won't be whacking the compost sucker, but tonight I'm going to wire the compost lid on and see what happens. An experiment. The compost bin is just a few feet away from my bedroom window. Pretty interesting that I didn't hear a thing. Nothing. Tonight I'll keep the window open a little, see what happens. *************** You may or may not remember me picking up a roomba whenever the hell it was, the end of June, beginning of July, something like that. Turns out that since then those little buggers have not only been selling like hotcakes, they've become a seriously fetishized commodity. There's a Yahoogroups email list about 'em (you'll need to be registered with Yahoogroups to access it) -- and there's this: hack those babies! Ever find yourself wondering just how much time it would take zombies to infect the rest of us? Go here. rws 4:59 PM [+]
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