NaNo Day Two and Rat Eviction Part One

I tackled the problem of rat exclusion before the writing yesterday. I found the spot the little beastie had chewed a new hole where some flexible ductwork went through a hole in the floor and I stuffed a lot of coarse steel wool into and around that area, as well as checking and packing several other gaps and potential rodent entry points. While I don't actually have to crawl to do this, it's not a really fun job. The space is high enough to stand or crouch in and there's a couple of bare bulb light fixtures down there, but it's still a dirt basement and the fiberglass insulation is always so much fun to work with. I also closed off the basement entry point to an old, now unused, air return down there, where rats or mice had occasionally been running around. When I finished up the job, I believed that I'd taken care of the problem, at least for this year.

However, about three in the morning, I awoke to the familiar sound of little rodent teeth gnawing on something in the wall (hopefully not anything important, like, the wiring). The good news is that the critter was in a different place, meaning I had succesfully closed off the previous entry point, and also it didn't hang around there very long. The bad news is that I get to go back under the house again today and see if I can figure out what entry point it used this time. Sigh. It's an adventure every time I pull down the insulation and see what gaping holes the previous owners and renovation crews managed to leave wide open. It's a wonder the whole house hasn't been overrun already.

This is also the time of year I start thinking about getting a barn cat or two. Not that I have a barn or anything like that. Just a small, old house that sits maybe eighteen feet off a pretty busy two lane road. I'm just not comfortable trying to keep an outside cat that close to a busy road.

I was able to get some writing time in and the story is beginning to move, a bit. The challenge is to resist the temptation to go back and fix the early stuff, but to complete the 50,000 word challenge, you just can't do that. It's time to just turn off the internal editor, and just tell yourself, "you can fix it all later." The word count is slowly accumulating and I'm still running a bit ahead of quota, for the moment anyway.