The whole thing started when that damn rat made a little apartment for himself underneath my stove. To my surprise, it's actually quite roomy down there. After he suddenly moved out, I put on the plastics and moved in to clean. To my amazement, he had gathered a stockpile of food bits about 6 inches high and a foot wide. A pile of rat poop was just as enormous right next to it. I actually used a shovel to clean out the rat den that was hidden beneath my stove. As shoveled up the shit, I wished I had turned up the oven full blast and cooked the bastard.

Woody | February 2006

Then Woody showed up. Woody was as loud as a toy jackhammer on DoubleD batteries. Woody liked the shiny metal plate that sits on top of my roof. He'd arrive at dawn and start pecking his heart out. The plate he loved to peck is the flue, which is connected to the pipe that heats my home. The sound reverberated down the pipe into a numbing, piercing hum, like a broadcast TV emergency test. Those tests are around 10 seconds. Woody went on for hours. If you ever heard me scream, "I HAVE A HEADACHE WOODY!" during a conference call, I wasn't screaming at my boyfriend.

The Flies | March 2006

But the bottle flies were the worst. They are like chubby houseflies with metallic blue bellies. Out of nowhere, there was about 20 clinging to the kitchen windows. Bottle flies, I learned, are lazy and easy to kill. About 10 times a day, I killed a new group of 20 (that's 200 flies per day I killed). I figured out that the flies were coming up through the kitchen-heating vent. The same vent that the rat likely escaped down and then died, thus producing the disgusting bottle flies. Thankfully, I'm a fanatical spider hater, and I've got lethal spray to kill the hairy devils. I sprayed my 3 giant kitchen windows. Now, when the flies hover near the windows -- they cannot resist the windows -- they die within an hour.

The Crow | March 31, 2006

After I licked the flies though, something truly incredulous happened. Yesterday, I opened the balcony door to get some air. Like a freakish omen, a crow flew inside. Quickly, he got pissed off banging against the windows trying to get out. I dodged around the room like a cat on Crack hoping to stay out of his way. It was an awesome scene of chaos.

The real anarchy started when the crow flew into my alter table that I nabbed on a lucky day out behind a Catholic church. I was burning candles in all of the iron casts to honor signing my divorce papers exactly three years ago. So, not only were parts of the floor catching fire from falling candles, but the goddamn crow was on fire too. He continued flying around the room setting new things on fire! The drapes sizzled up faster than dry straw, my clothes, hanging in open racks, burnt like red charcoal, and my pointed ceiling is now the color of tar.

Folks, my computers are near the alter table. All three of my Macs melted down, as did many of my DVD archives. Between trying to kill the crow and stamping out random fires (to save the upstairs of my home!), the heat generated near the machines got too hot before I could put it out. I'm sending this email from a freakin' Internet cafe. Some how I feel that all four events are connected. They each have to do with heat and spastic animals. I'm going to sit here and drink quadruple espressos until I figure it out.

Happy April Fools Day!

From your almost always enjoyable friend and vendor,
Colleen Lynn