Five Things Make a Post

[pedanther]

1. The pigeons have largely moved on since the owner hired somebody to leave pigeon-scaring whatsits around the place. (At least, the owner told the real estate agent that they would handle the pigeons, and then somebody started leaving pigeon-scaring whatsits around the place while I wasn't home. I haven't been able to get the agent to give me a straight answer, but I have to assume that the two events are connected, because the alternative is that there's a serial prowler in the neighbourhood with a grudge against pigeons.)

The current wildlife topic is now the family of stray cats that have decided to include my yard in their territory. There's three or four of them, young gingers of a similar age that I assume are siblings; an older ginger that I assume is their mother never comes any closer than next door's yard, possibly because she's old enough to remember the previous tenants' dog. After it became clear they weren't going to move on by themselves, I have been trying with some success to convey to the youngers that this territory already belongs to a much larger mammal than them; the trouble is that I left it long enough that they've found themselves a safe nook under the front porch and they tend to flee for that instead of, as I would prefer, out of the yard entirely.


2. I'm still regularly attending and enjoying the gaming group, but blogging about it has become one of those procrastination lint balls where the longer I fail to get around to it the larger the task becomes and the more likely I am to keep putting it off.


3. At the Rep Club, we're in rehearsals for our annual season of short plays. I'm doing sound and lighting design again, and part of my motivation for writing this blog post is that I'm procrastinating on assembling a complicated final sound effect.

Tonight the club is holding a quiz night to raise funds for the theatre renovation drive. Some of the rounds will have theatrical twists; the one I know about because I'm involved is the movie quotes round, where instead of playing clips from movies they're getting club members to act out brief scenes or monologues for the contestants to identify.

Tomorrow there are auditions for the big production for 2019, which will be the musical My Fair Lady. I have expectations about who will be most likely to get the main roles out of the people I know will be auditioning, but it's a popular enough show that we're likely to get people auditioning who wouldn't usually, and I may yet have my expectations confounded.


4. I am still doing Parkrun regularly, and recently passed my first official milestone, 50 Parkruns.


5. I never got around to mentioning that I was growing the muttonchops again, and now I'm not any more. I pruned the facial forest back to stubble for the hot part of summer, and then let it grow out as regular beard for a little while, and within the first week several people indepently told me how much of an improvement they thought it was. I quite liked the muttonchops look myself, but the beard is also not bad when it's this short, so I think I'll stick with the beard at least until I find out what the hairstyle requirements are for My Fair Lady.

Comments

[igenlode]

You need to scent-mark your territory (especially under the porch).
And yes, the same way that the cats do it... fortunately their sense of smell is more acute than yours ;-)

[pedanther]

In the hope of avoiding that extremity, I have been doing ersatz scent-marking using a spray bottle and a plant-based scent that Google tells me cats don't like. Results are so far inconclusive, and I may yet have to resort to the real thing.

[igenlode]

I suspect 'don't like' doesn't trigger the same response as 'dominant male animal in the vicinity' (apparently it does need to be male in order to work) -- it's the difference between trying to make them uncomfortable and warning them off.