I found another delightful dead animal in my house yesterday after work. I was sliding my computer chair up to my computer desk when I noticed ’something’ in the darkness under my desk. I peered closer and swore when I realized there was a dead squirrel under the desk.
It was a big sucker, too. But what was doubly annoying was the fact that it had somehow gotten tangled ups in the cords under my desk. You know that cord pile, a big snaking mess where the computer and monitor and radio and tv and fish tank and all the other crud is attached too. Getting the critter out without actually touching anything proved to be a chore. I had to get a stick and do a lot of prodding and poking before it finally came loose. It was stuck fast in an almost cartoon-ish rigor mortis pose with its arms and legs sticking straight up in the air. I sighed and scooped it in a dustpan and tossed it into the leaf pile in my backyard along with the bat that I had found the day before.
Welcome to spring.
This weekend I am going through and throwing out a bunch of clothes. There is a shirt on my floor that I noticed this morning that I have probably washed around five times in a row without actually wearing. My clothes go into the wash and into the dryer and then into a laundry basket that I dump out on my bed in the morning when I am getting ready for work. When I get home at night, I look at the clean clothes on my bed, groan, and shove the pile back into the basket where this action gets repeated the next day. Once in a while I’ll come home to see a cat smugly sitting on the clean laundry and it goes back into the dirty pile (IE: my floor) until the next time I franticly realize that I have no clean clothes and I quickly gather up what ever may be laying on the floor and dump into the washer.
And so the cycle continues.
I have started to realize that I only actually wear a certain percentage of those clothes. And its not like its nice clothes, just t-shirts that probably need to be thrown away anyways. But this is just one of those things that piles up without me even noticing. Sometimes I miss my dorm-living days when I could go down to the basement and fill up half a dozen machines at once.
There is a cardinal that keeps smacking into the glass window of my office. Apparently its reflective and it thinks there is another bird out there. So it will fly up and peck at my window a few times until its own reflection sends it into a rage and it beats its head against the glass. After a while I guess it assumes it gave the other bird a good beating and flies away. But he has been around every day. Stupid bird.
http://dh123.k12.sd.us/images/Mean_cardinal.jpg
2026 Update
Eighteen years ago, Ed found a squirrel dead in his computer-cord nest and blamed spring.
Ah, 2008. The age of the Great Cord Pile: monitor, tower, radio, television, fish tank—all lashed together in a technological knot under a desk. Now we have wireless everything, and the only tangled mess is the one you pay for through subscriptions. We traded the dead-squirrel-in-the-cables surprise for a notification on a phone: "Motion detected in office: suspected infestation." Still no less annoying, but at least modern vermin respects a URL. The laundry cycle has survived intact—I salute you, oh king of never-worn clean shirts—but the shirts have changed; they're cheaper, thinner, and probably one delivery-app courier disaster away from becoming rags. The cardinal, meanwhile, is still catching its ghost in the glass, only now the windows are triple-glazed, reflective, and energy-efficient enough to make its tiny fury properly eco-friendly. You poked at a carcass with a stick; we get a murder notification from a smart outlet. I miss the simplicity. Your spring was corpses and clean laundry chaos; ours is corpses and clean laundry chaos, but with an app.
“2008 Ed, why did you keep a shirt you had washed five times without ever wearing? And in all that prodding with a stick, did it really not occur to you that your desk was a small chaotic ecosystem and you were just a landlord?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2008 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, you hit the nail on the head and made me feel like a slumlord, so thanks. The shirt? It's a free t-shirt from some 5K I never ran, with a faded pelican on it that looks slightly menacing. I keep telling myself I'll wear it around the house, but then I look at it and think, 'Nah, I'd rather wear the one with the hole in the armpit.' So it rides the laundry carousel, five times now, clean and unworn, like a textile ghost. Throwing it away feels like admitting defeat, and I already lost to a squirrel this week.
And no, it did not occur to me my desk was an ecosystem until you said it. Now I see it: the cord pile is the underbrush, the dust bunnies are the wildlife, the dead squirrel and bat were the apex predators. I'm just the landlord who shows up, finds a corpse, and tosses it into the leaf pile without raising the rent. At this rate I should charge the cats back rent for all their dead animal contributions.
