Diary

I had hoped that by now I would have settled into my winter mode, in which I would be finding writings of interest and reflecting on various topics. However, after a series of visitors and a new domestic mouse invasion, we were hit by a strong wind storm, which snapped trees and damaged the shingles on our roof.

Since moving here, I have become a mouse psychologist and have taught myself to think like a deer mouse. They can enter a house from many places, and I had already blocked all of the holes at or below ground level. When we moved in, there were five holes through which they had been entering and leaving. After two years, they chewed a new hole in the basement doorjamb, and I blocked that with cement. Two years later a mouse got in through a small hole that it had enlarged on the roof, and I filled that with steel wool. Recently I heard a mouse gnawing in the basement and decided that it must have entered somewhere through the roof, so I climbed up there and blocked some possible entrances (you can't always be sure) with steel wool. The reason why I thought that they were entering through the roof was that I could hear them climbing up and down the electric and cable lines outside while I was lying in bed. There were no further signs of mice inside for several days, but as soon as the wind storm hit I caught two of them in the basement. My theory is that they were living in the attic and may have become trapped in the house when I blocked their passageway, and when the storm hit they were frightened by the noise and fled to the basement. They are very easy to catch in humane traps baited with peanut butter. I used to let them out in the woods a mile and a half away, but now I release them outside in the yard to see if they can still get back in. Mice leave trails of urine wherever they go, and they use them to find places that they or other mice have been to recently. At the moment there don't seem to be any more mice in the house, but only time will tell. William does his job reducing the local mouse population, but they are always going to be around because of their high reproductive rate.

Wind storms are an anomaly here and seem to be a result of global warming. Besides Hurricane Irene, we've had two major wind storms and two lesser ones since 2011. This time we were without electricity for nearly twelve hours. Wind gusts reached eighty miles per hour, equivalent to a weak hurricane. Vermont may not get the droughts that some other places will, but the climate will be more variable, with warmer winters and hotter summers. Because of the storms, some people here have been getting backup generators. Out in the country, without electricity not only is there no light at night, but your well pump can't work, meaning that you won't have well water to drink, bathe in or cook. We keep a supply of water in gallon jugs so that we can at least fill the toilets and flush them without power.

My project for today is the replacement of a fence post that broke during the storm.