Woke up at 7:30 to Cat Nonsense, among which was discovering Oz had found a muffin wrapper I'd forgotten to throw away and eaten more than half of it, so now I need to keep an eye on her for a couple days to make sure it doesn't create a blockage. There's high chance of it just passing through her system (fingers crossed and touch wood) but better safe
Waking up was also to melatonin nonsense -- sometimes when I take it I'll wake up after a couple-few hours feeling Alert and Rested but of course it's not actually enough sleep, so I was up for a few hours and then went back to sleep at about 10, woke up again a bit ago at about 3. So about 8 hours, probably, though all I know about falling asleep last night is that I finally managed it sometime after 4
It is. 104F outside right now. No wind at all, let alone a delta breeze, so it's going to be hot all night, likely. ash and I are putting off our walk until it's safer to be outside, possibly just going to skip it today which would be a bummer but we don't want to get heatstroke.
We've been dealing with a rodent problem out back -- I won't go into a lot of details on it, and this'll be the last thing I talk about in this post so if anyone is squeamish about the subject they're welcome to stop reading here.
But Erik set up a couple traps last night and caught 8-10 rats and mice in about a two hour period. ash has also been bringing in the birdseed that was attracting them, at night, so hopefully they catch wind that this environment is no longer friendly to them, and find a different yard to infest. Ideally we're not dealing with changing the traps a dozen times every night for very long.
Unfortunately we did also have to deal with the eventuality of a trap not killing what it's trapped, last night, and that went poorly. Also not going to go into details, but the design of the trap makes the usual ways of handling that situation impossible, and of course we want to handle all of this as humanely as we're able, so this morning we discussed it, and ash did some research, and apparently we've made a euthanasia box to suffocate any caught-but-living rats with CO2. I was a little sceptical, because I know CO2 is the chemical your body detects to know it's suffocating, but I also did research and found a paper that outlines different levels of exposure, and apparently at high enough concentrations it will render you unconscious "almost immediately" and then kill you in less than a minute. (ash also did further research, and says the internet is in consensus that this is the most humane way to euthanise a pest animal at home). So it seems like this is the best fit for what we have to do.
With all this happening, I'm having a lot of thoughts about rats, lately, and various studies (and anecdotes) about their sociality. It's a shame to have to get rid of them like this. It doesn't help that I recently found a song from the perspective of a mouse that's eaten poisoned bait
Anyway, like I said, that's going to be the last thing I talk about in this post, so I'll end it here.