September 8 – “The real motivation”

Yesterday was yard day.  Not leg day or arm day or abs day.  Yard day.  Don’t get me wrong.  All those other body parts got a workout in the process, but we attacked the unwieldy yard.  Again.

Why?  Well, sure it needed mowing.  That’s a never-ending task.  But it is September, and it is time to trim trees.  At least that was the publicly declared motivation.  The external one, if you will.  Internally?  Simple.  Chris saw another rat on our critter highway.  That was kind of exciting, actually.  After she saw it I raced out to spray the area with peppermint (obviously that isn’t working, but there was still some left in the bottle).  As I reached the satsuma tree, Freddy spotted the interloper and chased it back over to the highway and out of the yard.  Good ol’ Freddy.  She makes a good hunter.  Never barked once in her chase.  Maybe it was her that caught the other two we have found. 

Anyway, Chris went immediately to the internet and discovered that, sure enough, rats like satsumas.  Could have figured that one out by the number of fruit we found that here still on the tree, but half-eaten.  So rats like satsumas.  One answer?  “Trim your tree away from fences and the ground.”  That has now been done.  It is still just a few feet away from the critter highway, but it will now take a death-defying leap to get onto the tree.  And there is now no quick mode of exit should the Ninja Dog suddenly appear to challenge their presence.  Oh, and the tree looks pretty nice, too.

I forgot to mention that Cailyn came over and spent the day with us.  Apparently she told her Daddy that she needed some time with “just the two of us.”  No, not me.  That would be her and Nana.  I was just good enough to make the Whataburger for lunch run, along with half of the Texas A&M student body.  Well, her body was here.  She spent a lot of time FaceTiming with her friends.  But finally they did their just-the-two-of-us quality time.  They baked some made-from-scratch sugar cookies.  Well, snicker doodles would be a more accurate name, I guess.  They did have a lot of cinnamon among the sugar.  Good stuff.

Zephaniah 3:17 says, “The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves.  He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.”

Father, would you direct you little rat creatures to a different dinner location?  It will help Chris digestion a lot.  Amen.