My home is a mess

Cat501

((((hugs))) FW, sorry to hear you're having a tough time with your DS - teenagers, huh??!!:o How thoughtful of your OH! I was thinking too how hard it must be for farmers to get away so you have a lovely relaxing time! x

Isis - thanks hun Really hope the uni will accommodate you, glad the disability people are helpful!x

soworried I bet you did even more than you think yesterday - remember on the bad days, even making a cup of tea counts! x

alec well done on your tidying, these programmes can make you feel like that!

Hmm was just about to say it's a nice-ish day here but in the last five minutes it's clouded over - need to type faster next time :rotfl:

DS took the bin bag out the bin and last night and put a new one in, without me even having to ask:j I said thank you and he said "For what?? Putting a new bag in???" Of course, I said. He looked really chuffed although he tried not to bless him .

This morning I got up, tidied rubbish out the living room and did the dishes before switching on the pc :j Quite a lot of glasses and plates seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, I think DD2 must have been clearing her room as she has a couple of friends coming over tonight.

Later I have to phone Child Benefit to tell them DD2 is continuing in education, and phone up and pay for my op. Hate making phone calls! Emailed dad last night to get his credit card details, he emailed back to say you can get them from your mum. Errrr..........:o

Have a good day everyone xx

jpscloud

Hi messies, I have been MIA for a couple of weeks but now I'm one week into the summer holidays and just about recovered enough to start feeling human again!

I haven't had time to read back yet so please accept my apologies for not mentioning anyone's posts - I will try to catch up between gardening shifts today! I hope everyone is really well and happy.

I've really enjoyed the weather over the last week, what a treat to have sunshine and warmth. I can't go on holiday as I'm too poor, but I might fit in a budget weekend somewhere on the coast before the summer's out.

Thanks to the decent weather I've made a start on frog- and snail-bothering (aka gardening) and it looks less abandoned already! My cat is a bit disgusted that I have mown away her favourite basking patch of elephant's-eye-high grass but we all have to make sacrifices.

I'm studiously ignoring most of the house mess (that is my natural MO, after all) but I have made serious inroads into the tip which I call the boxroom as the washing machine is on constantly. I can almost see floor now!

As I can't go on holiday I thought I'd bring a little of the exotic to my own place (I haven't confessed this to many people, as it would just confirm their suspicions that I am completely bats) by purchasing a fine box of feeder crickets to keep as pets.

My thinking was that I would not only get to fall asleep to the gentle chirrup of crickets, but I would also be saving a number of innocent insects from a grisly death at the hands of a pampered pet reptile. And as pets go, they're totally moneysaving as their setup was less than £15 and they live on tiny bits of cucumber and fish food.

I researched cricket keeping (almost all geared towards raising the poor little blighters to be lovely healthy food for something else, but at least I learned how you go about keeping them alive). I bought a pretty (and cheap) plastic faunarium thing, put some gardeners vermiculite in the bottom, with a few stones, twigs, a huge piece of gnarly root thing and a tiny stone feeding bowl with said cucumber and pond sticks.

So far so good. Now for the crickets! Well - I skipped off to a large pet store, but they didn't have adult crickets - instead I bought a box of 200 half inch big crickets. Now that sounds a lot, but I was assured by all my research that they almost all die straight away because they have been so stressed by the transport and storage necessary to get them to the pet store. Still, the lucky few who made it would get to live in my very own version of cricket heaven, with their only obligation being to chirrup me to sleep.

First mistake I made was to open the box, whereupon dozens of the little !!!!!!s sprang out and made off for the undergrowth with amazing speed. Fortunately this was in the garden, as I'd had the foresight to attempt the transfer outside just in case. As they sprang out, I screamed and threw the box across the garden. I am a girl, after all!! Only a handful of them actually landed in the faunarium as intended.

I am assured these crickets don't survive british winters, and only have a life span of a few weeks, so while they wouldn't get to live in my cricket heaven, a few days or weeks scuttling round the garden and ending up as lunch for the resident blackbird is probably better than having your legs pulled off and being fed to a reptile (and I won't be responsible for a new resident species in the UK). Meanwhile I am just hoping none of them get into neighbours' gardens and freak them out, as many of them (the neighbours) are elderly and they probably couldn't stand the shock.

Well, after all this I was still sadly chirrup-less as they have to be adult males with wings to do that - these half inch ones have a couple more moults to do before they are adult, which means a good few more weeks.

So, I hie me off to an even bigger pet store and find, yes, oh happy day, a box of 35 adult black crickets. They look astonishingly horrible and scary, but at this point I am just on a mission to get my chirrups.

Well, now for the transfer. If the little ones were scary, these huge bruisers were the stuff of nightmares, so no way was I going to touch them. I had the great idea of opening the box into a large plastic storage tub, one with high sides so they couldn't hop out, then I could just pick up the crickets one by one with a paper cup and piece of paper, and drop them in the faunarium.

This post has gone on long enough, so suffice it to say that half the adult crickets are now resident in my garden as well. It had to do with the fact that they can jump and cling to clothing, which I hadn't expected... cue lots of shrieking and whipping off of t-shirt (thankfully that part of my garden isn't overlooked) and shaking off of huge scary insects. They now chirrup merrily from the pile of beach stones in the middle of my garden which sounds lovely but I do feel a bit guilty about their imminent demise at the hands of birds and hedgehogs. Or the neighbours' demise when a particularly huge one makes its way over the hedge.

Ok, so the garden crickets are a kind of bonus, and I now have some crickets living in my faunarium and I finally got to fall asleep to the sound of crickets. I am now wondering how the heck I am going to clean out the faunarium but that can wait as the density of crickets (thanks to all the escapees) is very low and they don't make much mess.

Whew. I just had to get that off my chest, so to speak - I can't really tell the "real life" nice normal people I know about it because they would likely smile politely and ring the local mental hospital to come and pick me up. You guys might be nice and normal, but you don't know where I live (unless you can hear the distant sound of the rainforest from a nearby garden, of course!!)

Anyhow, today is a lovely day and a lot cooler which means I will be more comfortable getting to grips with the garden... when I get off my holiday-mode bottom and get started, that is!

Anyone else watching the opening ceremony later? I don't usually, sport on telly normally leaves me cold but I've been infected with Olympic fever this time.

Soworried

I really enjoyed reading that post JPS. I couldn't help but laugh imagining you screaming and trying to get them off you.:rotfl:

I hope you enjoy them x

jpscloud

Thanks Soworried... it just goes to show you don't have to spend a fortune and travel for hours to have fun on holiday, eh?

Emm-in-a-pickle

Morning all!
JPS - welcome back, and thanks for that lovely long post. I couldn`t help laughing too, brilliant!
Nothing done here yet except washing up after last night - the pie went well, there was a bit left so put it in the oven, DS demolished it at some late hour, left his usual `trail` in the kitchen...
Have to do a Mr T`s today, voucher to use up so just staples...
Cloudy here & much cooler.
Latersxx

tatabubbly

Hey guys,

Nout to do today really before work, I'm off to meet a girlfriend in town for lunch! Need some advice on boyfriend, he's taken an internship which pushes our travel plans to next summer :O

I'm not sure how I feel about it all and need some advice....

Far as I know there is stuff there for dinners but I'm working 5-9 tonight so the boy is going to have to fend for himself!

Cat501

:rotfl::rotfl:jps good to see you again, that was hilarious! Wouldn't something like this have been easier?

http://nature-cd-store.naturesounds.ca/crickets_calming_cd.htm

tata enjoy your lunch

jpscloud

Thanks Emm! Actually I have come to see the crickets in the faunarium as quite cute now, and they sometimes have little squabbles over who's the biggest male, (remind you of another species?!) which results in one of them having a humiliating fall off a twig. If only humans sorted things out like that.

The most rewarding thing is how they react when you put something like a sprig of watercress in with them... they love it and munch away very happily. They truly are a moneysaving pet, as you can just chuck them a bit of (raw) whatever veggie or salad you're having.

I'm not obsessed at all, am I? Anything to avoid housework eh? :cool:

jpscloud

Cat501 wrote: »

:rotfl::rotfl:jps good to see you again, that was hilarious! Wouldn't something like this have been easier?

http://nature-cd-store.naturesounds.ca/crickets_calming_cd.htm

tata enjoy your lunch

OMG I never even thought of that Cat!! I suppose I'm just enjoying the curiously goddess-like feeling of saving crickets from being fed to reptiles and giving them a lovely home for their few weeks of life It does mean I have to buy in a new batch every couple of months, but that's just a quid or two and it is a nice feeling and they are rather addictive...

Cat501

jpscloud wrote: »

OMG I never even thought of that Cat!! I suppose I'm just enjoying the curiously goddess-like feeling of saving crickets from being fed to reptiles and giving them a lovely home for their few weeks of life It does mean I have to buy in a new batch every couple of months, but that's just a quid or two and it is a nice feeling and they are rather addictive...

Quite right too, it was just that at first I thought you really didn't like them, now I can see you do!