Last week was pretty mild. It was the anniversary of my mother’s passing (four years now), observed merely with reflection. I finished a Christmas stocking I’d been working on since October. (I also got the Xmas stuff down out of the way of the cleaning lady on Wednesday, then got it down to the basement later, so that’s done.) I cooked some things. Note to myself: use a better cut of beef for the Mongolian sheet pan dish, and go with green beans rather than snow peas. The chicken enchilada soup turned out nice, might add veggies next time (as I will to the leftovers tonight.)

Friday, my upstairs neighbor and dear friend Mariah - whose new book, The Wharton Plot, is out and you should totally buy it – had a book reading event where she was interviewed by none other than Anna Quindlen. Susan and I went together, had a great time and bought copies. Back to JH and a nice dinner together. Then on Saturday, Susan and I got together again to drop off electronic recycling and watch figure skating (I DVR’d it) and (using her union screeners) American Fiction, which is amazing and wonderful. I’ll make a reasonable attempt to see the other Oscar movies before the Oscars, but I’m not going to sweat it particularly. Quite a few of them are available on streaming already.

While Susan was there, we noticed quite a bit of scrabbling on the (outside of) the dining room air conditioner, which cools the whole front of the apartment when required. It was squirrels trying to build a nest. I didn’t think a lot of it until Sunday, when I realized they were successfully building a nest in the window sill on the side of the air conditioner, inside the outer layer that should have kept them out. First, the top storm window had dropped down, allowing them to enter from above (also, I think, from underneath the air conditioner), and then they had also gnawed a hole in the wood panel between the air conditioner and the sill. I did my best to chase them out, and kind of opened that whole thing up to see what I could do. I removed the chewed wood, replaced it with a plexiglass pane from the other side, and shut that top window.

(and then Mariah and Josh came over that night to watch TV and we watched more figure skating)

Monday morning, I checked, and sure enough, the squirrels were still getting past the defenses and were in the same spot - meaning the only thing keeping them from getting inside the apartment was one lonely ducted-tape plexiglass pane. Argh. So I crossed my fingers, went to work and hoped they wouldn’t break through before I came home again. 

I had to go to the office because I had a sleep doctor appointment at lunchtime, except it turned out I didn’t. Have an appointment, that is – according to them. It had gone *poof*. So I rescheduled, no biggie. And then after work met up with G&S buddies Marisa and Carol for a really great dinner and catch-up.

When I got home, was relieved to see that the plexiglass pane was still up. Until I could fix it better, I stacked a bunch of books against it. And now I am in the process of acquiring:

• Peppermint essential oil (they hate the smell) – done
• More duct tape – done
• More plexiglass panes – that’s going to be the biggest issue, as I’ll have to not only buy them, but probably cut them down to size
• Steel wool, or maybe ‘hardware cloth’
• A couple of bricks

If I can get the squirrels to vacate (maybe I’ll turn on the air conditioner to chase them out), I can then redo that whole ‘block off the space’ thing, with two plexiglass panes on each side (one inside, one outside), some socks filled with steel wool and doused with peppermint oil to stuff under the air conditioner, and either more steel-wool socks or just a brick in a sock to put on either side (the spaces where they like to try to nest). 

Boy, homeownership is really proving to throw me interesting challenges. This is when I have to remind myself, “what makes you think you can’t handle this”? I’m sure C is watching and laughing his angelic head off.

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Fun fact – quite a few years ago now, C made homemade chocolate-covered nuts to hand out to our neighbors as Christmas gifts. He had a tray of them cooling by the kitchen window, open, but with the screen down. And all of the sudden, I heard this enormous OHMYGOD from the kitchen. Squirrels had chewed through the screen to get to the chocolate nuts. Which they then couldn’t eat, because chocolate – but they could ruin the batch and also make us get a new screen window. 

So squirrels are not our friends.