Rat poop

That isn't a very nice title for a blog post, is it? But that's what I dealt with this morning. Fortunately, I do not have a photo. Also fortunately, it wasn't at my house. But unfortunately, it was in the church nursery. If the size of the rodents was equal to the size of the traps they put out for them, then I'm glad the traps were empty! Besides the rat droppings, there were cockroach droppings too. It was church workday, and cleaning up after the vermin was my job.

A couple sweet Hispanic teens came in to help me, so I set them washing all the toys and highchairs with disinfectant. Is it eavesdropping when you don't tell someone you understand their language? I mean, I look about as gringo as anyone could look. But really, my Spanish isn't as good as it was earlier in my life, so I guess I didn't overhear all that much.

After the droppings were collected, I moved on to washing the window blinds. My teenage helpers moved to a different room and the silence was a good time to think about dirt. Some dirt is obvious and revolting, like rat poop. Other dirt is much more subtle, like the even-colored grime on the window blinds. And then there's the dirt on the windows, that doesn't show up at all until the sun shines. That made me think about sin, but I'll let you draw your own analogies.

Baseball and football

Sorry to say, the Texas Rangers are now out of the running for a spot in the playoffs. My rabid-fan son, who bought playoff tickets from Ethiopia, will have to try to get his money back. The tickets came in the mail just today:



I will certainly be following the playoffs and the World Series, but it won't be as fun without the home team there.

I suppose that means it is now time for football. But I don't like football very much. I came to the conclusion some years ago that I was just too stupid to like football (but when I look at some of the people who play it, I'm not so sure I'm the stupid one). I mean with baseball the action is pretty much linear. You just follow the action where the ball is. But football! Everybody is doing everything at once--how am I supposed to keep track of what is going on? It would also be easier if they color-coded the defense and the offense or something like that. There are just too many people doing too many things at once and WAY too many rules to learn about whether they did it right or not. No, baseball is a much more sensible game.

Sorry, Rangers. Better luck next year.

Top 10 places my cat likes to sleep

I suppose there comes a time in the life of every blogger when he (or in my case, she), writes a blog entry about his or her pets. With my nest being empty these days, my cat is getting more than her fair share of attention. Her reaction to all this fussing over by me: sleep.

1. Inside the dresser drawers - if you leave it open, she will come
2. On top of the dining room table - Bad cat!
3. On the telephone stand
   
4. In the car - one day I found the cat in the car when I returned from a meeting in the hot summer. We nearly had cooked cat for dinner.
5. On the bed
   
6. Inside the bathroom sink - this is when she's waiting for you to turn the water on so she can get a drink of fresh water
7. Inside the bathroom cupboard - snuggled behind the pile of clean towels
8. Inside the dryer
   
9. Inside a cardboard box
10. On top of one's laptop, near the polar bears
    

Fixing up my blog

I spent some time over the weekend remodeling my blog. I wanted to keep the images from the original site, but I didn't like the double commenting system and I wasn't clever enough to remove one of them. So I thought I'd try a new look. I don't know very much about HTML, but by slowly trying to figure it out, and getting a little help from G., I was able to add my images into the new template. Then today I decided to get even more clever and add a counter. This counter lets you customize it a little, so I chose for it NOT to count any of my own visits to my website. And I changed it from black to red. Whoo-hoo. Now to wait and see how long it takes to get to 2.