Category: Life with Pratts

Rats ‘n’ Bats

Here’s something very scary to see. A rat catching and biting into a bat! Mr. Rat carries it off, presumably to have Mr. Bat for dinner.

YIKES! What are the implications of that nightmare?

https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/11/08/g-s1-96931/rat-bat-virus-video

Last night, sitting at my drawing table, I heard something I’ve come to expect this time of year, when the weather gets cold. What I heard was the sound of a mouse crawling around in the wall between my office and what I’ll call the media room.

I set a non-lethal mouse trap that has worked for me in the past. This morning it hadn’t been disturbed. I decided to finally take more decisive action and go under the porch to see if I could find a likely point of entry, where the inside wall is located along the foundation. This gap looked like it. There’s even a crack there.

I’d heard that steel wool works as a mouse block. I have a supply on hand that’s used to polish the rim of my Thorens turntable platter. I stretched out half a dozen wads of it then packed it good and tight into the run of that gap.

Either the mouse is still in the wall and has been napping all day, or he left to take advantage of today’s 62 degree weather. If the former, is he stuck inside and will he find his way to the trap? If the latter, will he be prevented from getting back inside?

As I Used to Say at Work…

… “let’s swap all the tires until we find the flat one.” With “tires” being an expression for whatever the not obvious cause was of a technical problem.

That’s the situation I’m in right now. The power company sent a notice yesterday, warning of possible outages, due to high wind. So, I wasn’t surprised this morning to see there had been two of them. But then I saw that the router was offline.

Power was off, not only in the office, but throughout the finished half of the basement. Checking the power panels in the unfinished half, it was easy to see that one of the circuit breakers had popped. Resetting it once, twice, three times, didn’t work. So, something must have shorted out due to a power surge.

The first thing to do was see if Internet service could be restored. With a very long extension cord, I connected the office gear to a test outlet next to the panel. Success! That put me back online. Would the circuit breaker still refuse to reset?

Yes, it did. So, where’s the problem? I disconnected everything else, and tested the breaker again. It held! Yay!

Now the question is, what shorted out? I’ll test each outlet and, assuming they’re all good, reconnect everything one by one, to see what pops the breaker. But not right now, because I have a dentist appointment to fix this damn broken tooth.

Side Door Man

A couple of years ago there was this little project on the side door of the garage.

A Fool and His Tools

Today, I was hoping to get by with painting the casing on the other side of that door. But in the process of scraping, I saw the wood on the lower half was getting spongy. Having a section of pre-primed casing on hand from the previous job, I decided to replace, rather than paint.

The Care and Feeding of Pop-Up Drainage Emitters

Winter preparations are underway. Water from the gutters on my house goes underground and exits through pop-up drainage emitters. When I checked on them today, two of the three emitters had disappeared into the ground. When I uncovered them, they were completely clogged.

I pulled them off the pipes then cleared everything out. Then I raised the emitters using a couple of pieces left over from when the drainage systems were installed.

The third emitter was also clogged, but it hadn’t gone into hiding. The tube on the right is visible from the street. I’m thinking of making it shorter with a hacksaw.