The War at Home

There are moments in our youth that prepare us for the inevitable challenges we will face later in life. We may not realize it at the time but those skills we learned will be remembered and will give us the upperhand later on. Right now I'm waging a war in the backyard that I've been preparing for all my life. A war on bugs, pests, vermin and anything else I find particularly annoying. I remember as a young girl my father and I would go out to my mom's garden, pick those nasty tomato bugs off the plants and proceed to light them on fire. Oh the joy that came from watching them wiggle and squirm as they slowly melted into the ground. On another occasion, while visiting my uncle in Montana, I had the opportunity to participate in erradicating their gopher (maybe they were prairedogs....does it really matter) problem. My cousins and I would head out in the morning and set traps for them at the opening to their holes. Somedays we would get busy and forget to go back in the afternoon and when we realized it in the evenings we would go out to find them baked in the sun, one time we went back too early and had to finish one off by beating it with a stake.

At this point in my blog I should probably apologize to any pest lovers out there and remind them that clearly I'm telling this story in a "serious sounding but meant to be humorous" tone, so take that into consideration before sending me hate mail.

Anyways, these incidents in particular have prepared me for the battles I wage against creatures in my backyard on a daily basis. Right now I have moles in my backyard, I've yet to see one but I have the dirt mounds around the yard to prove it. Apparently you have to get a permit to kill them in Germany so I haven't done anything about them yet but we'll see where the battle goes from here. Though I have to admit I have a hard time hating them because apparently they eat the vermin that I do hate and every time I think of a mole I think of Mr. Mole from Mr. Toad's Wild Ride at Disneyland and who could hate him? I also have ants in the backyard, I have no issue killing them as quickly as I find them with my trusty can of Raid. I might have left some of them alone but when Reese was playing in the yard they decided to start crawling all over her and the price for doing that is death. Finally, we have the slugs that have become ever more apparent with our recent weather. Usually I just scoop them up with my trusy shovel and see how far I can fling them but when we went out this morning I saw so many of them that I had to teach them a lesson. I grabbed my salt and we went to town, in total I salted 32 slugs in the yard, 33 if you count the one I got this afternoon too. I'm hoping that the other slugs will see my pile of dead ones and take it as a warning to stay away.

Maybe someday I'll be able to take Reese out to salt slugs with me, it'll be a mother/daughter moment she'll cherish forever.