Chipmunk: 14, Church Staff: 0

Chipmunk: 14 - that's about how many days the furry little critter has been living in the Rectory.
Church Staff: 0 - that's how successful we've been at getting rid of the little bugger.

My theory is that as cute as the little thing is, once he's become a nuisance (and eaten all your cookies), it's time to use some force.  Specifically, the sort of force found within a rat trap.  However, others in the building think we should be gentle to God's little creature and let him be free outside where he belongs.  Honestly, I don't live there, so I don't really care what they do with him.  Not only that but he has definitely provided some entertainment as we chase him through the office and down the halls.

We've managed to scoot him out the door once, and I have almost trapped him under an empty garbage pail, but other than scare him a little, we're not on the winning side.  It's an old building with holes in it big enough for a house hippo to get through, and an abundant supply of Chippy's favorite food; aka: the bag of sunflower seeds in the closet.  He's not going anywhere.  Rodents are cheeky little buggers too, and once they've stared death in the eye and won, they have no qualms about perching upon the back of a couch in the morning sun to eat breakfast - in plain sight of the receptionist.

Personally, if it were my house, I'd have a $2 rat trap and a bit of peanut butter out so fast that he wouldn't even know what hit him.  And I made my feelings quite clear as I helped push the couch out the front door because 'the chipmunk might be in the cushions'.  I wish I was joking, but that seems to be Fr's solution to most of his problems around the rectory - shove it out the door.

I understand the desire to not kill him, but this thing has become a pest.  He knows where all the holes are; he knows how to get in and out of every room; he knows where all his favorite food is; and he has some great places staked out to sleep in (you can tell by the little piles of sunflower seed hulls).  If you were to live trap this little thing, you would have to release him 20 miles away just so he wouldn't come back again - he knows he's got it good!

I may have likened the situation to having a nuisance bear - there's only one way to really permanently deal with a nuisance bear, and that's to kill it.  I was laughed at because 'Amy, you silly girl, there isn't a bear in the house, just a little chipmunk'.  Laugh if you want, Fr, but I wasn't the one who suggested calling the exterminator now was I?  Do you have any idea what it would cost to get an exterminator in to deal with that little chipmunk?!

RAT TRAP.  Problem solved.

Gah, it's a good thing I don't have to work for the next four days.  And there'd better not be an exterminator bill waiting to be paid when I get back!

Church work.  Never a dull moment.

Enough's Enough already.

I have avoided blogging about BP for some 55 days or so.  Really, what's the point?  Just Google 'BP Oil Spill' and you'll get some 61 million results.  There is much information, and much opinion, already floating around out there - there isn't anything I can say about it that hasn't already been said.

But come on!  First they told us that it was leaking a mere 1000 barrels of oil a day.  Then it was 5000.  But then somehow within the last month or so, BP has magically started collecting 15,000 barrels of the mess every day.  Three times more than what they were letting on was leaking.  Huh.  Someone's math was wrong.  Today's Globe & Mail reports:

BP said it could increase the volume of oil it was capturing from around 15,000 barrels a day now to 40,000-53,000 barrels by the end of this month and 60,000-80,000 by mid-July – but it could still not guarantee collecting all the gushing crude.

'No guarantee of collecting all the gushing crude.'   I think it's pretty safe to assume that this thing is leaking at least 100,000 barrels of oil each and every day.   By comparison, the Exxon Valdez (seemingly, the most notorious oil disaster of the past century) was a total of 271,000 barrels.  Deepwater Horizon is leaking 1 Exxon Valdez every 2-3 days.  For the past 56 days.  Some 5 million barrels of oil.

And yet, that merely puts it in third place in the list of the world's worst oil spills!   According to Wikipedia, (I know, I know... an excellent source of valid information),  The spill during the Gulf war could have leaked as much as 11 million barrels, and a spill in California in 1911 leaked 9 million barrels.  Actually, I don't know why we compare spills to the Exxon Valdez, aside from the fact that it's just plain hard to compare the size of a spill to anything.  The Exxon Valdez ranks 17th on the list of worlds worst spills.  By the time this is over, I'm sure that BP's Deepwater Horizon will be #1.

As much as they say that this spill could have absolutely unheard of consequences to our environment - and I've even come across some 'the end is nigh' rhetoric - this is the beginning of the end!  This oil spill is going to kill us all!!  -  Obviously, it's a mess.  It's gross, it's sticky, it's suffocating, it's going to kill a lot of things.  But the world has already lasted through worse spills.  Not to take away from the significant disastrous effects of this particular spill, but over the past 100 years, humans have been responsible for dumping 45,600,000 barrels of crude oil on the surface of the earth - (a sum of the worst 17 spills only).   And we're still here.  We're messy idiots.

1 barrel = 42 US gallons
1 US gallon = 3.75 litres

46 million barrels = 1,932,000,000 gallons = 7,245,000,000 litres.

That's the stuff that was accidentally spilled (that we caught companies red-handed accidentally spilling).  And it doesn't include the disaster of the Alberta Tar Pits with their constantly open pools/lakes of useless waste gunk.  Nor does it include the unimaginable amounts of crude which have been pumped, captured, refined, and burned in our machinery.  It's disgusting to think about.  And yet, someone said it right when saying that even a disaster this large doesn't make us blink at the gas pump while filling our cars.


Seriously though, why are we ('we' as in the human race in general) even drilling that deep?  Setting aside the fact that Deepwater drilled 5000ft deeper than the equipment was designed to drill...  I'm no scientist, but I do recognize the effects of pressure and what can happen when a substance is under pressure with only one way to escape.  Ask a 5 year old to put his hand over a running water hose, and he'll quickly get the idea that a) he's going to get soaking wet, and b) it's not going to stop the flow.  If you'd like a really great pictorial example of the earth, and atmospheric pressure, and just how deep the ocean is compared to this oil well, check out this link to 'Our Amazing Planet.com'.  It's pretty cool.

I'm sure it comes down to greed and mismanagement and all those things that we've been hearing about for the past month.  The Rolling Stone magazine recently posted a very thorough investigative report piecing together all of the events to date concerning BP and the governing bodies controlling the oil wells.   It's an 8 page article, a bit of a read, but very informative.  Did you know that BP was responsible for bungling the initial cleanup of the Exxon Valdez?  It's ridiculous that this company is even still in business.

The final paragraph of the article:

...the disaster in the Gulf will serve as a lasting and ugly reminder of the price we paid for our addiction to oil. "It was a bargain with the devil," says Steiner, the marine scientist who helped lead the response to the Valdez disaster. "And now the devil is gloating."

along with my simplistic idea that putting an oil well into the earth is sort of like jamming a straw into a water balloon (unless you keep your thumb over the end of the straw, you're going to end up with no water left in your balloon!), led me to doodling.....

Take from it what you will.
a) Greed will destroy the earth
b) Natural disasters are the handiwork of the devil
c) BP is the devil
d) I have too much time on my hands...
e) etc, etc

In conclusion, I promise I won't blog about BP and their oil spill again

...unless it's really good

...and they don't kill us all first.

G8 Bomb Threat? Don't we all have better things to do with our time?

Bomb fear after mystery man missing fingers buys fertilizer

Seriously? Thank you Toronto Star for that fear mongering headline! I love that 'missing fingers' seems to imply a devious bomb-building mastermind. Like seriously.... I hope he 'turns himself in' and is just an average run of the mill farmer, or super crazy gardener, who happens to have a few fingers missing.

Don't we all know someone with missing fingers? Off the top of my head I can personally think of 5 or 6 people I know with missing appendages - I don't think any of them are evil because of it. Heck, my own father is missing the top of one of his fingers - and he regularly buys fertilizer! Oh no!! oh, wait. He farms. It sort of comes with the territory.

Anything for a good story though, right?

At the top of the hill

I'm 30 now.  To anyone under the age of 20, I'm old.  (to anyone over the age of 50, I'm still a kid though, so that's something I guess.)

For my 30th birthday, my bf got me a brand new ball glove!  Now, you're probably thinking, 'what in the world does someone that old want with a new ball glove??!'  Well, the truth is that never in my life have I had my very own brand new ball glove.  For the past 20 years I have been using my uncle's old (and small) ball glove, and previous to that, I was using my dad's old (and even smaller) ball glove.  These gloves are older than I am, and I'm old.  It was awesome to go to the store and try on all the gloves - ones that still have padding in them, and that actually fit, and are longer than my own fingers!  I'm pretty happy with the one I got; I've been carrying it around for days :)

Oh. I've joined a womens slo-pitch league.  That's why a new glove was a great birthday gift.

I just got home from my first practise with the new glove.  I missed a few balls I should have got, caught a few I would have missed with the old glove, and lost the ball more than once inside the new glove!  (It's so much bigger than my old one!)  All in all though, it's breaking in really nice and I'm ready to kick some butt for the rest of the season!  ...right after my shoulder stops hurting.

Maybe I should mention that our team has had somewhere around 40 runs scored against us this season.  In two games.  We're there to get out for a night or two a week, have a few drinks, and have some fun - not nearly as competitive as some of the other teams in the league, and therefore, we get trampled on.  Frequently.  It's pretty good fun!