Rats!

I have no bike stories for this weekend, as I spent most of my time here at Baja Arizona Headquarters, with occasional trips outside to walk the dogs or lift weights.

Actually, I spent a whole lot more time in the backyard than I'd intended to. I wanted to bar-b-que some chicken so I uncovered the gas grill. As I suspected, woodrats had started to take it over, caching it with leaves and cholla joints and leaving their little feces all over. BeanSS started cleaning it with a disinfectant before I decided I needed to hose it out completely. I pulled the grill parts out and blasted away at the nascent woodrat midden along with more than a few years of scorched food drippings. I was doing all of this in a low spot in the yard, and so I suppose should have foreseen what was about to happen.

I found myself standing in 2 inches of water, rodent shit, sand, burned fat, and reconstituted oil. The whole yard smelled like the inside of the grill. Verging on a heat stroke as I was, I just wheeled the grill out of the fetid puddle, cleaned it the rest of the way up, took a shower, came back outside, and made the chicken.

After dinner, I went back out to find the puddle had settled into three fairly disgusting strata - a rainbow of an oil slick sat atop a layer of muddy water, both overlaying a substrate of charred food remnants. And shit. Bees had already found it and keeping the dogs away was a challenge. I scrubbed the whole area with a citrus degreaser and blasted it off with the garden hose, and I think I got it as clean as it was going to get. Of course, I overheated again and had to retreat to the house. Another shower, and then I was in bed by 8:00pm.

This is all just a roundabout way to bring up my excuse for not riding today - I am just plain exhausted.

Ironically, the whole reason I returned to lifting weights in the first place was that I noticed how fatigued I would get doing manual labor in the yard. I distinctly remember how sore I was after swinging a pick and levering a shovel to plant an ironwood tree in the fall of 2004. I decided right then and there to do something to gain some upper body strength and to date, it's been been reasonably successful. Nevertheless, having done the yard-type work (in the heat, no less) on a day where I'd already hiked around with the dogs and worked out left me completely trashed. I'll eventually learn to better schedule these things in terms of how much I try to do in a single day. I'll also take heed of the thermometer reading before I start.

And for the time being, what I really need to do is set my live traps (owning such things is one of the benefits of being a zoologist) and relocate these woodrats once and for all. If only the great-horned owls I heard hooting earlier this year had nested near our house...