With one final roster to go, I can report that we now have two brand new air conditioners (thank you landlord and lovely property manager) and, while we won’t get the benefit, they’ll definitely be appreciated by the new cop!
And before you ask how the final roster has been going, let’s just avoid any complaints and use the term ‘eventful’.
First, there were the mice…… sorry, they were second – as in this is our second mouse plague.
This time it wasn’t so much a ‘jump up on a chair’ reaction but more, “Great, now I have to empty the pantry again!”
To be honest, the little blighters were rather clever in their attempts to “break in” to a locked house while I, on the other hand, wasn’t quite so clever and took 3 or 4 days to figure out that the tiny black specks at the foot of the door jamb were actually chewed rubber from the weather strip.
Day after day, while I kept sweeping up these tell-tale signs and wondering whether we had a termite problem, Micky and Minnie were actually chewing their way under the door and into our pantry! Seven dispatched mice later and, just in time for our trip to sort furniture on the coast (I imagined coming home to a house full of mice), the mystery was solved! We simply had to ensure that the fly screen door was never left ajar – try eating through a metal door frame Hah Hah! – and they can no longer get to the mouse-sized hole in the weather strip.
The mice were closely followed by a brown snake that was thin enough to blend into the long grass – until I almost trod on it…. and then called Nigel, who was luckily in town for lunch. However, the ensuing debate regarding what to do with our scaly visitor apparently became rather boring and he managed to quietly disappear.
Now colour me yellow but I’m a lot more calm and collected around anything with less than 5 legs so pests numbers three and four were much more unnerving, especially when I realised they’d been living in the drain pipes under our bathroom. Big (well, biggish) creepy, shiny, leggy spiders had set up house – one in the bath drain and one in the shower drain- in the unused bathroom (yes we do actually wash but we use the ensuite). In contrast to Sylvester snake, no such discussion was necessary – a can of Mortein sufficed.
One might surmise that leaving town for a few days would solve these encounters of the creepy kind but one would be wrong.
On our arrival in Paradise we were immediately overrun with a few thousand Plague Soldier Beetles (Yes, a very apt name) that unashamedly proceeded to copulate on any available surface – from the outdoor table and chairs to the BBQ to the plants, nothing was spared…… not to mention their predilection for drowning in our pool.
To top off a cracker of a fortnight, last Tuesday, as we were packing to return to the land of no soldier beetles, the heavens opened up and within a couple of hours, we were inundated to the point where we had water views in the sub-floor plus a very uninviting plunge pool, complete with dead beetles, leaf matter and quite a lot of mud…….
And this became the scene at our Cellarbrations store – one street away!
On a more pleasant note, Nigel was in Broken Hill for a strike force a couple of weeks ago and succumbed to my pleading to take photos of the interior of the Palace Hotel……. in police uniform. I’ll leave you with the photos but encourage you to check out more images here.
Married to a Country Cop 