More apartment insects.

After the second round of caulking and intensive efforts to keep the sink area soaped and clean, the smaller ants disappeared...

But then like two or three times in the week after that, I saw like these giant black ants, one on the opposite counter where I keep my toaster and drying big pots and piles of coupons and then one on the wall behind the bookcase where my radio is and then maybe one other one once somewhere else.

Then, they too were gone.

I've also seen a couple of moths and one mosquito in my apartment since then, and I'm not quite sure how they got in there; all my windows have screens and there's like no obvious cracks in the place.

All in all, apart from some quirks, my back cottage really is a cute little place.

Apartment moisture.

So, when the warm weather hit this year, the moisture in my apartment was really something.

I had been keeping cool air in at night, and I had boughten thermal black-out window curtains to help with heating during the winter, so my apartment was staying nice and cool inside, but all of a sudden there was just major, major standing moisture everywhere, on like every exposed portion of the white tile that blankets all of the floor of my place everywhere.

For a while I mopped it up with rags and wrung them out in the bathroom sink, and then eventually when my apartment had lost its (dank) coolness, I flung open the windows at night for a cross breeze, and that took the rest of it away, apart from maybe a little bit back in the back edges of the closet, where I made sure to take out boxes and mop stuff up once, so nothing got stagnant and moldy.

Anyhow, I mentioned this to my parents, and my mother said that's what happens when a place is built on a concrete slab like my back cottage is.

I also mentioned this to my landlord when he was over in the yard building a new fence, and he said that he had actually ripped up the old laminated tile that was in the place since the moisture had made different squares of that peel up, and the solid white ceramic tile that's in there now was his solution to have something a little more durable in the place, that could withstand the moisture.

So, I ruined a book...

...or at least gave it enough damage that the local library made me pay for a replacement.

I was reading this new edition of a classic sci-fi novel while eating some (cherry or strawberry or raspberry) jello, and when I was bringing a spoonful of jello up to my mouth from the bowl, the jello slid off and bounced off the table and landed on the lower right corner of the book, where it stained the outside of the pages a bright red, and it even went inside a little bit at a few select spots and stuck the pages together, though I was easily able to open them up without damage as I went on to read and finish the book over the course of the next several weeks.

But, when I went to go return the book and showed them what happened, they sent me to the information desk, and the librarian there said that they don't accept stained books back, so I gave them like $16 for a replacement, and then they went and marked the book as discarded and gave it back to me.

So, I asked them for a black marker and marked off the library markings even more, and then I went and left it in one of those free little library boxes that was on the way home.

At least now someone else can enjoy it.

An exchange, about animals.

A few weeks ago I was chit-chatting with the one (slim) (vaguely hispanic-looking) (townie) bartender at the local brewery that I now patronize, and I told him about how I'd seen either a beaver or an otter swimming at dusk in the lake in this one city park just north of where we were.

And, he said that last year there was a woodchuck right by the brewery, where if you went and looked down from the edge of this sidewalk that goes across this small local creek right outside the brewery, you'd see it sometimes, kind of hanging out outside its burrow, or moseying around down there.

But, he's not sure if it's there this year.

Dreasms (2 of 2): Another dream.

After I woke up that same morning, I half-drowsed off, and then I dreamnt-

I'm looking at the newly-built fence in the backyard where my cottage is, and a section of it is blowing loose in the wind and dipping down, since the nails have pried loose from the top anchoring running board so that every time the wind blows, that section of the fence dips down in the wind, and it keeps doing that, over and over.

And then, I wake up.

. . .

(My landlord recently built a new fence, and a fence section in the back parking lot of the resthome where I used to work used to bend down in the wind like I saw in my dream.)

Dreasms (1 of 2): One dream.

The other week I dreamnt -

On a gray but not un-warm day I hop down from a sandy beach into knee-high water to go onto a small motor boat that's like eight or ten feet from shore, but after spending some time out there doing something, I go look back towards shore because I want to go back, and for some reason the water is suddenly much deeper and waves are coming in, so I realize that I'll have to hop in and get wet in order to get to shore, so I do that, but when I go to swim that little bit back to shore, I realize that the waves have hollowed out underneath what looks like the lip of the shore, so when I get there and go to pull myself up, what looks like the beach crumbles, and when I go in further to the solid wall that's farther back to lift myself up onto the shore, that doesn't work either because of the waves and the softness of the sand and how there's nowhere to stand, so a guy lying right there by the lip gives me a hand and I half-pull myself up, but I can't get any further, and then someone near him comes and stands and gives more leverage so that they can both pull me all the way up, and I get up on the beach, and then there I stand and tell them to be careful, that the water is more dangerous than they think.

And then, I wake up.

. . .

Philip Glass opera.

Sometimes on Saturdays I listen to the radio simulcast from the Metropolitan opera, and a few weeks ago it was the Philip Glass opera Akhenaten.

The music was quite good to do jigsaw puzzles to, it's so repetitive and absorbing, but I wonder what the neighbors think, to hear just hours of classical minimalism and high voices pouring out through my windows.