It’s officially the Christmas public holiday, but Covid has struck again, daughter number 1 was bored and the decs are therefore down. The only vestige of the festive season is that my diet continues to be primarily mince pie based.
With cream.
For balance
Very hungry caterpillars
The other part of life that has resumed is the ongoing war with caterpillars in the fruit bushes.
The fruit bushes had sort of survived life in the dry north. Battling the lack of moisture was struggle enough. Who needed pests to further highlight my lack of a green finger or thumb?
But the Big Smoke produces moisture: we get fairly regular rain. And when your whole acreage amounts to 2 balconies, it’s not too hard to remember to pop out with a watering can on other days.
So I became quite alarmed when the bushes seemed to shrink from one day to the next. Not height wise. Just one day there would be ample leafage, the next, a denuded tangle of stems.
It was only then, when I was bemoaning the phenomenon, that the girls casually mentioned the balconies are infested with leaf munchers. Bastards! (The caterpillars, I mean…)
Can’t get no satisfaction
Initially I gave them a spray with a solution containing dipel. Which had the satisfying effect of making all the caterpillars pop out of their hidey-holes and start marching along stems and looking like they were about to produce abseiling moves worthy of Mission Impossible.
I picked those bad boys off and taught them to abseil over the balcony. No ropes provided.
Job done I thought.
Only to come back a couple of days later to suspiciously fewer leaves again.
GRRRR.
It has turned into a daily chore. Spray – pick – chuck. Spray – pick – chuck.
Yesterday, I only encountered 2 tiny tyrants. Today only one.
Tell Mick Jagger I have found some SATISFACTION!!!
Escape to the country
So now the Grumpster has performed his biennial attempt to escape and moved again with work, he is intent on buying property in his new location.
I’ve found the perfect farm, and the good news is we’re only a million dollars short of the asking price.
We’ve asked the furs to turn out their piggy banks, but the puppies can’t remember if they buried theirs or spent it all on carob and peanut butter treats. And Garfield’s grumpy brother had to spend all his replacing his human sister’s computer screen when he accidentally (*cough*) nudged it off the kitchen counter…
But I’ve come up with a genius business venture.
Cat wool
Yes, move over sheep and alpaca wool. The next big thing is cat wool.
Much easier to sheer – in fact no sheering required. Simply stand still, preferably in dark trousers. And the next thing you know is the cat wool will have attached itself to you. Simply open a sack and brush the cat wool in.
Daughter number 2 is a marketing guru, so I feel she owes it to the family to support the venture by creating the marketing campaign to drive this exciting departure into new territory.
Quilts across the country could be filled with this soft, floofy, environmentally friendly product!
Let’s just put those thoughts of allergies that immediately popped into your head to one side.
And focus on the delightfully soft and floofy comfort that could be coming to your home. With no annoying wailing at one o’clock in the morning because there is a door, somewhere in this world, that needs to be opened RIGHT NOW!!!
Elon Musk will be kicking himself!
So as this idea is more ingenious than anything Elon has come up with, and recognising that he never made any money with Tesla for years, I’m sure there must a nice bank manager or mortgage lender that is willing to finance my move to the country.
And bonus – I get to become a super crazy cat lady entrepreneur. I might even find one amongst the herd that likes me!!
2022 is looking bright already!