Where do I start today? In the last 24 hours we’ve dodged a bunch of bullets (not literally), washed half of the house, found a window behind a picture, been visited by a bat, a field mouse, and a dog, and hauled away a ton of trash.

our little friend

1. Our good friend Dave stopped by on Sunday as we were returning from the Home Depot with a rented power washer in the Scout. Catonsville, being a neighborhood full of old houses and even older trees, was pretty well blitzed by Isabel; every third or fourth house had a major tree down in its yard, and the area was loud with chainsaws this weekend. We were lucky there wasn’t more damage. Dave and I hooked up the power washer and attempted to clean the siding on the house, which was a futile gesture. Dirt and mildew is up under the paint on the siding and no amount of pressure is going to change that. So we contented ourselves with cleaning the gutters, moving debris, and pulling two of the mountain laurels from the side of the driveway with the trucks; Dave produced a heavy chain and pulled the first one out with his truck Clifford, and then we pulled the other with the Scout. (Making the appropriate Tim the Tool Man noise here: Arr arr arr!)

2. While I ran out to find food for dinner, Dave pulled the older AC unit from the Sticky room window (on the west side) and he found a camping bat under the drip pan. Thinking it was probably dead, he and Jen got close to take some pictures, until it woke up with a mouthful of teeth and flew off. Not content with braving vampire death, they pulled the bulletin board off the wall in the waiting room to find the original window frame intact behind the wall. Needless to say, we were excited.

3. This morning Dave came back to haul away the combined trash, mattresses, and brushpiles I’ve been collecting since we moved in. We started by removing the debris from the dining room (the mural is now, sadly, gone) and when I knelt to pick up the smaller chunks of wood, I found a field mouse huddling underneath the pile. After a ten-minute atempt to capture it (with no help from an indifferent Teller) we got it in a pint glass and set it free outside.

4. As I stood on the pair of mattresses in the back of Dave’s truck, looking out the driveway, I spied a tiny Jack Russel terrier running down Beechwood (the road directly across from our house), across Frederick Road—oblivious to the morning traffic—and past the truck behind us. He ran into the garage to explore, and I coaxed him into my hands where I could read his dog tag: Chico Pachico, 455-XXXX. We called his humans and a nice perfumed lady showed up about 10 minutes later, happy to see him in good hands (and full of Pounce cat treats.) He was moving too fast to take a picture.

5. Dave has made the huge piles of brush from the front, side, and back yards go bye-bye. Halleluejah, amen.

OK, This is pretty cool.

Also up for bids: UNKLE has released their second album, a follow-up to 1998’s Psyence Fiction, the album that blew me away completely. I found a link to some previews on a UK music site, and this will be an album I buy when it shows up on the Apple Music Store. (Hurry, Apple.)