His/her antennae go down another 3 or 4 inches beyond this picture!

So look who was hanging out on my computer this morning….

I think this is a leaf bug. When these bugs are out in their natural milieu, they look totally camouflaged, like a leaf. In fact, they sometimes nibble on each other by mistake. Whatever this bug is, it makes super-loud, prehistoric-sounding noises. For an entertaining look at leaf bugs—including how popular they apparently are to keep as pets—see the Interesting Animals site.

I lightly tossed a kitchen towel over this guy/gal, who stuck to it like sandpaper—I’ll bet they have little suction cups on their legs—and I took him/her out to the bug rescue launching station in the yard for a successful re-start to both of our mornings.

I am starting to purposely step on some bugs in my house, though. The fast little spiders, for instance. I squished one that bit me inside my pant leg today. (I’ve probably got a liter of bug venom in me instead of blood.) Ruthlessness is necessary for survival here in the Tennessee jungle.

Did you know, the word “ruthless” really does mean “without ruth”? In medieval days, “ruth” meant “a feeling of pity, distress, or grief.” There’s a lot of ruth going around these days; maybe we should bring the word back. “How are you feeling?” “Lot of ruth, man, lot of ruth.” Probably comes from “rue,” as in “bitterly regret.”

As for work on the house—I painted the floor and part of the walls in the front bedroom a couple of days ago, to freshen it up (it still smelled like my housesitter’s legacy after the first coat of paint last month, but now with this second coat is much improved). I don’t know if it’s related, probably not, but I got super-sick last night. Today I pledged to take it easy for my health’s sake, so have mostly done so, including a nice nap, Siamesie and Cairo atop me. Awoke feeling much better. I read somewhere that putting a purring cat on your head can cure a migraine…?

Presto!

The fairy on our wall has pointed her wand and manifested a cookstove. I had gotten rid of my stove last fall, because I didn’t have room for both a cookstove and a woodstove—and I chose to attempt to be warm, and just use a toaster oven and hotplate for cooking. But I ended up getting rid of the woodstove too this spring, since I couldn’t get satisfactory heat with it. And now a free cookstove I had called about months ago, and given up on, actually manifested today.

My neighbor suggested he could move the counter that’s currently under my stairs, to be next to the stove. That would be superb! Having a counter under an open stairway makes it too dirty to use for food preparation. We’ll see if the change happens. Meanwhile, I’m not sure the tub of potential plants, which I started in order to deal with the roof leak, wants to live next to a hot stove. I’m thinking what to do.

My bug excitement du jour: I was getting ready to wash dishes, clearing out the sink drainplug, when I felt something weird against my hand. Ah, it’s a centipede. A blue one! (We have blue crawdads here, too.) Here’s a video of the little guy/girl. I eventually got him/her to crawl onto a towel and took him/her outside. (Like I don’t have anything better to do.)

For example, I have a couple of walls covered with walnut boards milled locally by the Amish. But they were put up green, and shrank as they dried, and now you can see right through the cracks between them to the four-inch poplar logs that make up the outside of my cabin (also green and shrunk)—and I can watch the bugs crawl right through both sets of cracks, right out of the forest and into my house. And in the winter, no matter how much I pay the electric company, I freeze. The problem is bigger than caulk and putty can fix.

The manly solution: “You need to take all those walnut boards off—although it’d be hard to do since they’ve been hammered up using nails with no heads, that have rusted in there. And then you’ll have to plane the boards on all sides so they’re nice and even, and then nail them all back up. Or, you could cover the walls with plywood, although that would mean you’d have to move the kitchen sink or cut around it. Plywood costs $40 for a 4 x 8 sheet….”

These are non-solutions for me. Who are they kidding? Do they know who they’re talking to? But I’m tired of being bug-bitten and freezing, usually alternately, often concurrently.

So I decided to forget that I live in the United States and become a citizen of the Earth. Rural Tennessee is more like a Third World country than like anything else, anyway. So what does a woman living in poverty do, anywhere in the world, if she has holes in her house? She plugs them with whatever’s at hand that bugs won’t eat. So, I’ll let you know how that goes as soon as I get a minute to do some experiments.

Meanwhile,  yesterday I made progress towards fixing another house problem: When the woodstove was removed, the leftover hole in the roof leaked. Manly solution: “Yeah, someone needs to go up on the roof and fix that.” My roof is really really tall and it’s not strong enough to be leaning ladders up against perhaps, and probably scaffolding would be involved, and anyway the upshot is it’s never going to happen. So I decided to make lemonade.

Here’s the set-up. See the leftover stovepipe at the top? It would be  leaking water in front of Jessica Simpson, and  onto the pink square, if it was raining outside. I know it doesn’t look like Jessica Simpson. I am just starting to learn to paint, and she was on the cover of Vanity Fair, so she was easy to look at and try to copy. I hadn’t gotten very far when this was taken, so please don’t hold it against me. I know her arms look like T-Rex arms in this picture, but that’s just the way art happens. It looks like sh*t until sometimes the very last minute when it all falls together and becomes brilliant, maybe transcendent. And then after the glow, the artist starts wondering if it’s really sh*t after all. Like a religious experience, perhaps.

The pink square on the floor is where the woodstove used to sit. It’s just painted-pink tarpaper, or whatever the stuff is that goes over the bottom rafters or whatever the things are the house sits on. My daughter Molly painted a sort of lovely hearth rug around it the other day.

But it can’t disguise the fact that there’s no floor there. I figured that couldn’t be good, to have water dripping right onto the floor supports. (Or onto the particle board floor, for that matter, should I manage to patch it—a longshot project sure to leave new icky cracks in my house.) So I decided if I was going to have water coming into my house, I was going to put it into a sensible environment. One of those simple Japanese fountains would be nice, but I can’t afford it, and I don’t have the time to mainfest one from scratch—some other time perhaps—so right now, if rain is coming into my house, it needs to water some plants.

I looked around my yard, which has a couple of piles of junk left over from manly-man exploits of past residents, and found just what I needed. Or, as my first ex-husband used to say, “Good enough for the girls we go with.” I found a little piece of sheet metal, and a leaky plastic tub. I also got some rocks from the creek….

The rocks hold the sheet metal down, and keep the sharp edges covered. (I still need more rocks.) And I very simply laid the foundations so that our, let’s say, atrium (open-roofed central room) can have plants one of these days, when I figure out how to get enough dirt to fill the tub. I’m not keen on digging, since the ground here is cherty and hard. I got a book from the library today on container gardening. Perhaps it will give me some ideas. I can always make compost if I have to! (I once heard a wise teacher say, “If you don’t know what to do, make dirt.”)

So our container garden is taking off, let’s say. But at the moment it looks like a Jessica Simpson wannabe is rising out of a plastic tub, which I find disturbing. But now I have to leave; I’m out of time. I leave Molly a scrawled note on the wall: “Molly, we need flowers.” Flowers rising up out of the tub would de-weird things, somewhat.

When I got back to the cabin this morning, I found that Molly, sweet girl that she is, had painted us a lovely nekkid (as we say in the south) angel silhouette. Either she’s rising out of the tub, or about to stub her toe on it, or blessing it, or all three; interpretation varies by angle and inclination. Anyway, the project is far from finished, but it’s definitely an improvement (as measured by my ability to stand my environment), and it’s going to solve my hole in the roof problem, assuming all the water can be taught to go in the tub. Well, it’ll solve that particular hole in the roof problem. There are others, for another day.

A nekkid angel.