trog blog

Man drinking coffee in cave

(one of many wonderful images on show at dirty beloved)


Ok - so the forecast for New Year's eve turns out to be ridiculous:

Fine, although cloud increasing. Fresh, gusty northwest wind shifting milder
southerly late afternoon. Min 19 Max 42

37 and rising today. In lieu of swimming pool or air conditioner, it's time to head down to the cellar here and turn troglodyte until the weather behaves. Who knows I may see in the new year staring at a string of onions hanging from a six foot ceiling drinking commemorative bottles of trivia red or whatever's over in the wine rack.

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Comments: trog blog

Lacking a cellar, I'd have to resort to hiding under the house. Trouble is there's something living down there already; it's either a gutter possum, a wombat or a street person and I'm not too keen to find out which.
Posted by Gummo Trotsky at December 30, 2005 03:12 PM

You need a Simpson and Day for the Cella-fauna as I imagine these creatures can be distinguished by their cries?
(Think we have all that and the odd rat who runs with the possums...)
Posted by boynton at December 30, 2005 03:26 PM

Duck!
Posted by Tony.T at December 30, 2005 03:36 PM

That sounds like the alarm cry of a flocking street person to me. Now they'll all scurry away like meerkats or praire dogs and it'll be impossible to winkle them out.
Posted by Gummo Trotsky at December 30, 2005 05:39 PM

In North America the cries of the homeless are easily distinguished from the defensive hissing of native oppossums. Sadly lacking in wombats we must make do for sub-floor pests with raccoons and a few other nocturnal mammalian generalists.
When the cowboys in the old cowboy movies call one another a "polecat" they mean not the civet, but that black-and-white catlike creature with the long bushy tail and the mincing walk.
Skunks - they get under houses too.
One time I had a little sort of studio space away from the main house and would spend too many hours at what it was I was doing then and retire suddenly and gratefully to a small couch that rested against a wall that was built against the hill the studio was on. So that actual ground level on the upper half-floor was right about where I was laying, just the other side of the uninsulated wood paneling.
I awoke there one night to an unmistakable and powerful musk, and heard the scrape and scratch of a small animal foraging close at hand. Thinking I should only be still and try not to alarm it I did just that and lay for a while sending urgent mental commands through the wall as best I could to please go, there were many wonderful things to find and eat all about the compound elsewhere, especially at the compost pile some hundred and two yards to the northwest; suddenly a visitor's small undisciplined ill-mannered high-strung city-bred terrier began yapping hysterically and frantically circling the side-yard edge of the studio, and then it dashed straight under a gap in the upper floor. With predictable but nonetheless exciting consequences for all three of us.
Posted by Juke Moran at December 30, 2005 07:24 PM