How Many Ways Can a Single Day Go Wrong?

 

. . . Starting with bats.  Of course. 

            It hasn't rained again in about a week, I'm watering my plant pots again, and I've also started to twitch at small noises (again) because of the suspected possible link between drought and indoor bats.  I heard it the moment I turned my light out last night*:  little scritching noises, little whirring noises and little chittering noises.  Oh gods.   I've now got a corner of the windowscreen in the bedroom bent back so that any invisible-hole-emerging bats can take a direct exit without going to the trouble of finding the bathroom or the attic, but I don't care how many times my intellect tells me that my tiny pipistrelles** are harmless I find it VERY DIFFICULT to sleep with them zapping around the bedroom.***

            When I finally got up this morning . . . I could still frelling hear them.  Scritch scritch.  Cheep cheep.  Whirrrr.  Noooooo. . . .  Some of you may remember last year when I found out I had bats, that I stood in the corner of the attic next to the bat nursery on the other side of the ceiling and listened to them rustling and chirping.  The noise was one of the reasons it never occurred to me I had bats.  I assumed it was some kind of birds—I also assumed it was fewer, whatever it was.  I didn't know bats chatted.  All of them at once, and at the tops of their tiny human-hearing-range voices.  And what I realised this morning, staring in deepest dread and dismay at the ceiling in my bedroom, is that they've expanded the nursery.  They're now also colonizing the wall below and running forward from their original attic corner.  The Bat Lady said that bat nursery numbers tend to stay stable and that new generations of bats go off and found new nurseries.  I dunno.  Maybe they elected a new prime minister with new ideas.  It sure looks like population pressure to me—population pressure and drought. 

            I was thinking about the drought too.  We have a perfectly good river† at the bottom of Market Street—and it's had water in it right along.  Why don't they go start the biggest pipistrelle nursery in Hampshire in one of the houses on the frelling river?††  And since I found out I have bats  I've been keeping a big plastic plant-pot-saucer of water in the garden†††.  I was staring at it this afternoon and wondering why it was (apparently) not fulfilling its function. . . . maybe it's not clean enough?  The bat-prostration-prevention saucers of water indoors are, you know, dishes.  So I scrubbed the wretched thing out . . . and then tucked it under the honeysuckle, in case it's been too out in the open for their frelling highnesses.‡   I will have to remember to offload any future evacuees to the other side of the honeysuckle.

            I was driving Peter to the bus this morning and then going on to the farmers' market for olives.  I think I have never quite entered upon the epic that is our Olive Quest.  We are olive junkies, and it's a hard jones to maintain, especially when our chief dealer is a nightmare of unreliability and creative dysfunction.  The Wednesday farmers' market has begun to enable some regularity in our olive-dependent lives . . . and they were out of the little black olives that, with chocolate and tea, are the daily bastions of my food—er—stronghold.  I mean, there's so much I can't eat:  I cherish the things I can afford to be addicted to twofold, not merely for their inherent thrillingness but for the fact that they don't make me swell up or turn green or anything. 

            I came home and flung myself at my computer.  But I'm too brainblasted to do any work, so after a few really embarrassing paragraphs I gave it up as a bad job and decided to heed one of Nadia's pieces of advice this week:  To cut myself some slack and stop listening to fabulous, electrifying, soul-stirring solo sopranos for a while ‡‡ and to listen to more choral music . . . so I went on line to research choir CDs.  And ran so afoul of website surreality that it would make a blog post all by itself, except you'd never believe me.

            It was at some point when I had been so overwhelmed by eleven-dimensionality and parallel universes where black was white and Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote operas‡‡‡ that I was beginning to believe that choirs and choir music do not exist when I noticed that . . . neither hellhound had touched his lunch. 

            It was at about that point that Peter rang me to say that he'd missed his bus home, or his bus had missed him, or possibly the return bus wasn't running today.  He said he'd call me again from the train station.  Okay, I said, and applied myself to the hellhound problem. §

            Peter rang back from the station and told me what train to meet in Mauncester.

            About thirty seconds before I needed to bundle hellhounds into the car to go pick up Peter . . . Chaos started on his lunch.§§  You know how dogs (usually) eat?  Now you see it, now you don't?  Usually my guys, if they're going to eat at all, get on with it.  Not today.  And Peter had forgotten his mobile, so I couldn't ring him and tell him we'd be late.  And given what a fruit loop Chaos is I was not going to take his food away from him.  If he was going to eat it one crumb at a time Peter would have to get a taxi home. 

            It was also rush hour.  I got half a square knitted at a whole series of traffic jams and stoplights on our way to the train station.  Finally got to the train station, couldn't find Peter. . . .

            We were supposed to go see Simon Boccanegra tonight—a Met Opera Live rerun.  I forget when that got scrubbed.  But there was totally no way.

            We're all home.  We all ate dinner.  Is this day over yet?  I want to go to bed . . . oh.

            Whimper.

 * * *

* Note that it was still dark which was very exciting.  Although the truth is that less than a month after midsummer you can begin to see the days drawing in again.

** Susan in Melbourne posted a photo of a treeful of roosting fruit bats, and Angelia responded 'Golly—I'd hate to have those enormous critters invade my house!'  Me too.  When we were in Melbourne we saw a lot of them.  There are several different kinds but the ones we saw were all BIG.  And as they amble around their tree or their cage^ or whatever and, as bats do, occasionally stretch a wing out, the wing goes on for quite a while.^^  http://www.outbackwildliferescue.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=58:black-flying-fox-fruit-bat&catid=41:mammals&Itemid=66

Wingspan of more than a METRE!  Eeeeeek!  . . . Although something with a three-foot-plus wingspan probably couldn't get through invisible cracks in your ceiling either.

^ http://www.zoo.org.au/HealesvilleSanctuary

^^ Also those little furry fox or fawn-like faces are disconcerting on a bat.  Or I find them so.  Bat anatomy is odd, the way they walk or creep is odd because of their odd assortment of limbs—and those wings are naked skin stretched between very long finger-bones.  I'd rather they had faces like bats than like foxes or fawns.

*** And the mosquito-netting situation in the UK, as demonstrated on google, is decidedly shambolic.  I may have to go all retro and use the telephone.  I'm not looking forward to the conversation:  my bed is a four-poster with a frame.  All I need is the netting, please.  No, not mosquitoes.  Bats.  Yes.  Bats.

† Stream.  The British call any channel of diameter equal to or greater than your average chopstick and containing water at least two hours a year a river.  

†† Word has just suggested I change this to 'Frelling River'.  Snork.  

††† When it was just for the birds it was smaller.  

‡ I bet they'd feel peas at the bottom of a large heap of mattresses too. 

‡‡ It's a real head-kicker that I even know that I'm never going to be Joyce DiDonato or Deborah Voigt and I still can't quite shut the little voice in the back of my head up that says 'It's not that you're not professional quality it's that you're crap'.  Sigh. 

‡‡‡ shudder   

§ This was actually pretty interesting, and pretty much the one thing that has gone right today.  I'd already decided on the homeopathic remedy I was going to try the next time Darkness didn't eat.  They'd both been sitting there staring resentfully at their food for better than an hour at this point.  I gave Darkness his remedy and I had barely straightened up and turned away when he was wolfing his food down.  Oh.  Golly.  Chaos of course was harder;  while they both have genuine physical problems (!!!!!!!!) Chaos is also just nuts, whereas there's usually some physical contribution to Darkness' deciding not to eat.  So, Darkness had eaten and was looking smug, and Chaos was still glaring like a sulky teenager.  I eventually chose a remedy for him too, and I could see his face relax even though he still wasn't eating . . . 

§§ This was about ten minutes after he'd had his remedy.  Yes, I should have figured this out in advance too . . . but I didn't.  Chaos, as I say, is harder.  And there's no guarantee that either of these remedies will work the next time.  Homeopathy is brilliant.  It's also a ratbag.