…last week Maddy woke me up early in the morning.
“Daddy,” she said, “There’s a bat on the kitchen window.”
“Grumphle,” I said and went back to sleep.
Soon, she woke me up again. “I did a drawing of the bat on the kitchen window,” she said, and showed me her drawing. For a five year old she’s a very good artist. It was a schematic of the kitchen windows, showing a bat on one of the windows.
“Very nice dear,” I said. Then I went back to sleep.
When I went downstairs…
We have, instead of dangling fly papers, transparent strips of gluey clear plastic, about six inches long and an inch high, stuck to the windows on the ground floor. When they accumulate enough flies, you peel them off the window and throw them away.
There was a bat stuck to one. He was facing out into the room. “I think he’s dead,” said my assistant Lorraine.
I peeled the plastic off the window. The bat hissed at me.
“Nope,” I said. “He’s fine. Just stuck.”
The question then became, how does one get a bat (skin and fur) off a fly-strip. Luckily, I bethought me of the Bram Stoker award. After the door had fallen off (see earler in this topic) I had bought some citrus solvent to take the old glue to reglue the door on.
So I dripped citrus solvent onto the grumpy bat, edging him off the plastic with a twig, until a lemon-scented sticky bat crawled onto a newspaper. Which I put on the top of a high woodpile, and watched the bat crawl into the logs. With any luck he was as right as rain the following night…
Sticky-sweet iced lemon sugar!
janel.kisner –
A few months ago, I got an imp of Snake Oil. I felt it was too strong for me; from what I could remember, it had a strong patchouli smell which I like but was way too strong for me,, so I gave it to a friend. Since then, I’ve been more aware of the BPAL following, and how people feel about their beloved SO. I decided to take a chance and get this, and boy am I glad I did. It smells so different than the imp (maybe I had a mislabeled one?). In the bottle, it smells almost like sweet codeine syrup. Applied wet, it was more of a light powdery smell with a touch of vanilla and amber. Over the day, the scent has changed so many times. At first, I thought it dispersed, but when I got caught in wind, I was enveloped in what reminded me of African Musk- a scent I used to wear in college. But it was more like African Musk’s more sophisticated and lighter sister. As the day winds down, it smells lightly like brown sugared amber. A new favorite for sure, and I’m glad I snagged a bottle of this vintage edition.