Leap Day is a Day for Leaping!

Happy Leap Day, everybody! Remember to leap today. At least once. C'mon, it won't hurt... I didn't say you had to leap off of anything.

This is the last day of February, which means that the Three on the Third challenge begins in only three days. To participate in Three on the Third, all you have to do is draw three journal comics on the third day of the month. Not every month, unless you want to; just a month. They don't have to be well-drawn. They don't have to be funny. I'm not going to fact-check them to see if they're even true. They just have to be pictures and words about your life, as written and drawn/rendered by you. Making comics about other people who are part of your life is also okay, of course. And while the idea is to record what happens on that day, you can fudge on that too and no one will think less of you.

So, not very hard, right? You should give it a try. And yeah, you could put it off to do another month, but then you'd miss the auspiciousness of trying Three on the Third in the third month. Oooo....

Now that you've decided to participate (yay!), please keep in mind that it will be a lot harder if you try to do all the comics at once. So avoid putting them all off until the end of the day if you can possibly help it. Maybe try doing a morning comic, an afternoon comic, and an evening comic. That's what my plan is, anyway. Sharing your work online is appreciated, but optional; if you do, let me know if you want the URL to your comics included in future Three on the Third compendia or not.

In other news, the wire mesh on the heating vents is keeping the mice out quite effectively. Also, it turns out that a former roommate's husband works at a DIY ducting company, which is going to be extremely helpful when I venture into the Uncharted Realms beneath my house. I suspect he could probably even loan me a d20 if I needed it (which I, um, don't).

In This Case, My Enemy is a Varmint.

When I was a little kid, my favorite animal was the mouse. I identified with their shy and secret ways. Their tiny pink hands and soft furry bodies were the embodiment of Cute. I had a stack of children's fiction about mice, and a sizeable collection of mouse toys and figurines. I even had a file of cute mouse pictures that my mom and I had cut out of magazines and greeting cards.

I remember an exhibit at the Honolulu Zoo that made a big impression on me: it was a glass-walled mouse burrow, and you could see them running from chamber to chamber, this one full of food, that one full of sleepy mouse babies. I could have watched it all day. My parents' house, still fairly new at the time, was free of any kind of pest, so I didn't have a lot of contact with real-life mice.

All of which makes the following so excruciatingly ironic:

I was at least never going to resort to sticky mousetraps. A traditional snap-trap does the job quickly, and is also so incredibly cheap that there's no shame in throwing it away after one use. But when, night after night, you put out the snap-traps and find them unsprung but licked clean the next morning... well, you might start to wonder who's baiting whom. And when you find poop in your dish cupboard, you might even take it as a declaration of war.

Believe me, if negotiation was an option, I'd negotiate. But my enemy is a varmint, and a varmint will never quit. Ever. So I've spent a lot of time in the last several days studying their ways, thinking about their habits, trying to figure out what they can and can't, will and won't do. For example, they tend not to crawl up flat vertical surfaces, but they will readily climb any sort of cord or string. They got to the dish cupboard by way of a long phone cord, which I now realize was like a little mouse-sized ladder with a sign saying "Fun Times This Way!"

But much of mouse behavior remains a mystery to me. I mean, what's the deal with my roommate/renter's room? There's no food in there, but for some reason it's their favorite hangout. We were both horrified to discover the quantities of mouse poop between her bed and the wall. (Bad, bad landlady!) She has been surprisingly stoic about all of this, but she's sleeping on the spare mattress in my room (on the second floor, where there's still no sign of mice) until I can assure her that she will have no more rodent visitors.

And yes, I am now using sticky traps, which are awful and inhumane and leave you to finish the job yourself, and I will spare you the details of that horror. But until the problem of mouse access has been resolved, they seem to be my best option. Live traps are impractical; wild mammals can find their way home over ridiculously long distances, and I'm not driving across town every day to release the night's catch in someone else's yard. Poison's no good; then you've got tiny corpses all over, and you have to go find them to get rid of the smell.

I'm kind of surprised at the number of people who have suggested (or even offered) a cat as a solution. While I like most cats, they bring their own complications, and I have several very good reasons for not wanting to live with one. The bottom line, though, is that a cat is not a solution to the mouse problem, any more than traps are. It is a mouse mitigating device, an abatement factor, if you will. Even if the cat kills all the mice on my entire property, there will always be more mice. The world has an effectively infinite supply of mice. Cats are, in fact, probably the reason that this house is still so mouse-permeable: they've dealt with the symptoms and allowed their owners to ignore the root of the problem.

The root of the problem, of course, is that mice can get inside at all. I live in a modern house. I do not have a thatched roof or log walls. Therefore, the number of entry points into my house is finite. And while sealing up the outside of my house may not be possible without re-siding, the number of entry points to the interior of my house is actually quite limited. When these are effectively sealed, then the mouse problem will be solved.

Mice can theoretically pass into the interior of my house through: a) that hole in the laundry room drywall where the fusebox used to be; b) gaps in the construction of the closets; c) possibly the dryer vent; d) heating vents. All of these entry points can be mouseproofed. Unfortunately, last night I observed a mouse using option (d), which is by far the most daunting to fix. I am seriously daunted every time I think about it.

My heating ducts run through a crawlspace below the house which teems with rodent and arachnid life, and which for some reason is partly covered with that really jaggedy porous red lava rock that you see in cheap landscaping. I look at it and my knees twitch reflexively. I can't even see half of the crawlspace from my small cellar area because of how the ducts are placed; who knows what marvels await me in that sunless realm. The ducts themselves are sloppily installed and draped half-heartedly with random scraps of insulation, which is surely the ancestral home of generations of rodents. Oh, and did I mention the asbestos? Thanks, Previous Residents.

But the ducts have to be sealed. Even if I could keep the mice from entering the part of the house I live in through the vents, the ducts would still be supplied daily with mouse poop and pee, which is subsequently atomized and blown through the house by my fancy high-efficiency furnace. That's not okay. Besides, I dropped a large chunk of cash on that furnace several years ago, and here I am wasting it on a duct system that's full of holes and barely insulated. Once I set things to rights down there, I expect that the savings on my heating bill next winter will more than pay for my time, not to mention the money I'll save on medical bills by not getting a hantavirus.

Some of my readers are now asking, "Surely you're not going to take this project on yourself, Lindsey?" But here's the thing: even if I had money to throw at it, I wouldn't trust any contractor I could afford to do it right. And here's the other thing: this is not a job for a Big Strong Man(tm). This is a job for a person who is good at getting into very small places, and I happen to be a lot better at that than the average adult.

But it will be a convoluted, multi-day project, and I am not embarking on it today, or even this week. I am preparing a list of supplies and safety equipment that I'll need. I am collecting information on duct repair (which is surprisingly hard to come by; the internet mostly wants me to call a Qualified Professional). I am sketching diagrams and thinking through strategies, and I am soliciting advice. And in the meantime I'm covering my heating vents with wire mesh, so my roommate can sleep in her own bed again.

I really hope it works.

Be Mine, Internet!

I recently finished my latest submission to the CD Mix Swap, aka "The Mixchange," which is run by Ashley and which continues to be Awesome. I think it's up to like four swaps a year now? Crazy. Anyway, I always want to use the phrase "best mix yet" in describing whatever I've just finished, but really I should be more specific with my superlatives. In this case I could maybe use ones like "most unmitigatedly cheerful," "sappiest," "farthest out of character." It is a Valentine's Day mix. Not the romantic smoldery kind, but the incredulously giddy kind.

Thanks to the magic of The Internet, I can share it with all of you without burning a disc, slapping a label on it and standing in line for ages at the post office. Sure, I did all of that for my fellow swap participants, but are you sending me a mix CD? No? Well, you can just download it then.

BE MY VALENTINE please please please
1. Hello Saferide - The Quiz
2. Amit - You and Me and Love
3. Fruit Bats - When You Love Somebody
4. Herman Düne - I Wish That I Could See You Soon
5. The Weepies - Gotta Have You
6. The Silent Years - Someone to Keep Us Warm
7. Solomon Burke - Home in Your Heart
8. The Moldy Peaches - Anyone Else But You
9. Half-handed Cloud - To Love Like the Father & Son Love Each Other
10. Harvey Danger - Happiness Writes White
11. The Robot Ate Me - Apricot Tea
12. The Constantines - Soon Enough
13. Crooked Fingers - Call to Love
14. Luke Hawley - Not Me Babe
15. Victoria Williams - Love
16. Irma Thomas - Ruler of My Heart
17. Kite Flying Society - If I Could Split
18. North Atlantic Explorers - I Will Not Leave You Alone
19. Looper - Impossible Things
20. The Boy Least Likely To - Be Gentle With Me
21. José González - Heartbeats
22. Noah and the Whale - Five Years' Time
23. Daniel Johnston & Yo La Tengo - Speeding Motorcycle

PARENTS! This mix has no obscenity or profanity at all, although it does have a guy yelling "dang" really loud. Given the theme, it even has surprisingly few references to gettin' it on. However, if you would prefer the little ears around you to be sheltered from any incidental mention of the following issues, simply avoid the corresponding track numbers: sleeping/lying/sharing a bed with someone else (1, 5, 13, 17), drug/alcohol abuse (17, 22), automobile theft as courtship (18), being super excited about God (9), not really caring at all about God (10), poop jokes (8). I think most of this mix is music that kids would like a lot. They seem to know a thing or two about giddy incredulity.

For those of you who like video with your audio, here are all the ones I could find that weren't horribly filmed live performances:
1. The Quiz
4. I Wish That I Could See You Soon
6. Someone to Keep Us Warm
20. Be Gentle With Me
21. Heartbeats (that one commercial)
22. Five Years' Time

So there you go. All audio tracks are downloadable for one week. Feed them to your MP3 player, burn them to a shiny disc, ignore them. Just have a happy freakin' Valentine's Day, all right?

Left Brain/Right Brain.

So, about this job: I have a cousin here in town who makes gorgeous glass earrings for gauged ears. The demand for her products is growing so quickly that she has been too busy filling orders to set up the business end of things properly. That's where I come in: I research everything that's involved in setting up a small business, and then help her make it all happen. I'm a left brain for hire. What I love about this (besides getting to work with my cousin, who's really cool) is that I'm essentially getting paid to learn -- and to learn stuff that could be useful in any number of other situations.

It's very part-time, though, so I'm still in search of something that will put some life back into my sickly bank account.

Thanks for all the great feedback on my Hourly Comics. I love journal comics, and I really needed a kick in the pants like that (i.e, an artificially constructed challenge) to actually make some of my own. It was a little too much of a pants-kick to want to do that every day, or even more than once a year really. But I have been thinking about ways to incorporate comic-making into my schedule on a basis that is both more regular and doable, more of a nudge in the ankle than a kick in the pants.

The ankle-nudge I've settled on... well, I'm calling it Three on the Third. On the third day of each month, I'll make three journal comics about my day. That's it. That's the whole challenge. I think I can manage this no matter what kind of work I'm doing. I think you can manage it too, so you should definitely think about it.

Hourly Comics.

So the idea behind Hourly Comic Day is that once every hour, you write a journal comic. Journal comics chronicle your life pretty much as it happens.

It turns out that this is hard. It helps to be unemployed (like me) or work at home (like many comic artists). I bet it also helps to have comic artist skillz, not only because the outcome would be prettier, but (more important) it would be less time-consuming. Like, you'd have already figured out how to draw yourself quickly and consistently, so your hair length wouldn't change in every frame?

Anyway, my results are below. If you have trouble reading them, your browser is probably automatically resizing the image. Tell it not to.

Page 1 * Page 2 * Page 3 * Page 4 * Page 5 * Page 6 * Page 7 * Page 8 * Page 9

Or if you want to see them all on one screen, here is my post on the Hourly Comic Day forum. There are tons more hourly comics there to look at, mostly by people who have a better grasp of basic concepts like legibility and white space than I do.

NOTE: The times written in the comic are the time the drawing was made, not the time the event occurred.