I thought we'd seen off the rats, for now. The bait that I left by the chicken house, protected from passing birds and the cats by a broken flowerpot, had remained untouched for weeks and I was about to clear it away. Then this morning, going to let the chickens into their run, I discovered as I topped up their food that a rat had gnawed a hole in the top of the back wall of the nesting box. That must have happened within the past twenty-four to forty-eight hours, since it was fine the last time I filled their food hopper.
If you live in the country then rats are an undesirable fact of life. The gardener warned the boss only yesterday morning that he had seen a huge one near the boss's chicken house. The chickens at work live in a solid brick built outbuilding, not a mere wooden hen house, so the rat at work couldn't have got in, but was presumably on the lookout for spilled food. The boss said that he was setting traps, and would catch it in due course. It is a very unpleasant thought, but I'm afraid the rats are there, even at the best addresses.
The Systems Administrator had to go and buy a two by four sheet of heavy grade plywood specially, which was not cheap, and spend the afternoon cladding the nesting box in an extra layer of timber. At my suggestion tomorrow the SA will also get some metal strips, as used to cover the edges of carpets where they go across doorways, and run pieces of that round the top of the nesting box, to prevent any rats chewing another hole. (Metal edging is not a good look for carpets, and properly fitted ones don't have any. We have ended up with it in the past when cats have got accidentally shut in rooms, and scratched up the carpet by the door trying to get out). As rats need an edge to get a purchase on, and can't gnaw straight through a flat piece of wood, that should do the trick. As long as they don't think of chewing at the corners of the chicken house, in which case we will need an awful lot of metal edging.
I enjoy keeping chickens. They are entertaining creatures, and I like the eggs, when they are laying, which they mostly aren't by this stage of the year. I'm happy to take responsibility for where my food comes from, when it comes to eggs. However, they are not cheap pets, when you take the cost of housing and bedding into account as well as food. Anybody who suggests you can save money on food bills by keeping your own poultry is deluding themselves (or their unsuspecting audience).
In the afternoon I went for my Pilates lesson. This is nominally a monthly thing, but in practice happens about ten times a year, after taking holidays and illnesses (mine and the teacher's) into account. She is taking a break from teaching in December, so I won't see her again until the third week in January. My lower back was moving remarkably well, which is not always the case, and was the reason I started Pilates in the first place. She asked me how it was feeling, and I realised it wasn't really feeling anything in particular, or rather, it was feeling normal. It was moving when asked to, and the rest of the time it was quiet. No aches, no stiffness, no weird referred pains in legs or feet, no anything. Those of you who have suffered from a bad back at any point, which is a terribly large percentage of the population, will understand how pleasant that realisation was. Anyone who has not experienced a bad back, and maybe even believes that bad backs are excuses invented by other people who want to be a nuisance or gain attention, don't be too smug. Your time will come, probably. The human spine is not one of the world's best bits of design, in the unfortunate way that things invented for one purpose (four legged locomotion) and adapted for something else (bipedalism) so often aren't.
My teacher, seeing that for once it was all going well, taught me new variants on some of the exercises, intended to challenge my abdominal and inner thigh muscles, and at the end of the lesson wrote them down complete with stick man diagrams so that I wouldn't forget them. I don't find sequences of movements at all natural or easy to learn or remember. Poetry, or the names and preferred habitats of plants are fine, but not any kind of choreography. If I keep working at them then maybe by January I'll have a bum like Pippa's.
No comments:
Post a Comment