My Life In Brooklyn

long time since last post because I have been really busy developing a corporate site. The site is for a hand-painted tile and mosaic company, so once completed – which it ought to be very soon – the link will be posted.

In the meantime I need to vent about vermin, both general and specific. Perhaps I am a little testy after being tethered to a computer for longer than expected. I just feel surrounded by vermin of all sorts lately.

So gripe number one is feral cats. The colony appears to have grown and they evidently are comfortable homesteading in the basement of the problem building across the street. Neighbors have spotted a couple of entrances/exits and made an attempt at blocking one of them, though not the other. Another neighbor leaves tins of cat food on his stoop, taking care of that aspect. My backyard is the litterbox. The colony is pretty much covered. Our motion detector/sprayer works well, but the hose needs replacing (it leaks) and so the cats are feeling comfortable in the back yard again. I’ve heard a couple neighbors talk about poison, and I do find that an extreme I would prefer not to entertain no matter what. I attempted to join the NYC Feral Cat group just to get a sense of how it works, but was denied membership unless I first take the training class. I am open to the training, but am severely allergic to the critters, so it is far from appealing. The glass half-full view inspires me to mention squirrels are not stealing my tomatoes this year. But it is a huge annoyance knowing you cannot step in your own back yard without a handful of plastic bags for poop clearing. A great use for the New York Times blue plastic bag packaging that comes with home delivery.

Despite the slow-dripping leak in the hose that feeds the sprayer, I am tempted to leave it on except that the moisture draws varieties of wasps, also unpleasant. Wasps are gripe number two, though I cannot find a nest source. And they are low ranking on the annoyance scale, at least for now.

Thirdly, the beautiful tree in my front yard died and I contacted the city to remove it. They did, it took perhaps 30 minutes tops, start to sweep up. We are waiting for the root subcontractors the city employs to remove that and then we can FINALLY get a tree guard and a new tree. Vermin complaint number three is, when the tree was cut down, there were millions of nasty black (large) ants all over. Several people stopped and told me they were carpenter ants and they knew it for sure because these ants live in (Haiti, Trinidad, South Carolina). A quick Google seemed to verify that and though carpenter ants, unlike termites, do not consume wood, they do live in it, and that was likely the demise of the tree. Honestly though I fed and took care of the tree and never saw these ants before.  But I have to be ready to deal with them when the roots are removed.

Last, but not least, is unleashed and unsupervised dogs. Though in reality the real vermin here is not the dogs but the entitled owners of said dogs who feel they are above the leash law. A woman who owns the beauty salon a few yards from my house, lets her Yorkie off leash constantly and it defecates everywhere.  And she never picks up because, well, she isn’t there to watch the dog.  Yeah, I go and talk to her about it – so do the neighbors – but she has told me little Tutu “needs the freedom to run” which is as weak an excuse for owner-laziness as I have ever heard. I’d call someone but I can’t imagine it would result in anything positive.

Okay this really is a bitchy post, sorry for that. To state something positive, the garden is doing really well and a variety of tomato, pepper, zucchini and eggplant is developing nicely. Despite initial blossom end rot on one tomato plant all is now progressing in a healthy manner – with all plants (in containers) protected from feral toiletry, of course.