Sunday, April 09, 2006

Uh-oh, Pecker Trouble!

I am embroiled in a deathmatch with some asshole woodpeckers who are slowly turning the side of our house into swiss fucking cheese. It's such an embarrassingly suburban thing on which to fixate, but I think I'm just channeling my work frustration into idiotic 'dilemmas' like this.

I wouldn't be so obsessed with it if these avian dickwads weren't pecking DIRECTLY behind the headboard of the old lady's and my bed. The pecking starts at around 5 AM (I'm talking about the birds, you pervs) and it lets up right when they realize I'm too alert to fall back to sleep. They're crafty little bastards. CRAFTAY!

I have been filling in their holes with that sprayable insulation shit. (The holes they make in the house, not their assholes. Thought that's not a bad idea.) I climb up the old extention ladder and shoot some of that crap in there and voila, seals it right up. The problem is, I always spray in too much of the stuff and it balloons out of the holes and then hardens, like some giant yellow house boil.

Today, however, I upped the ante a bit. I bought a couple of owls (one inflatable, one 'rigid') and hung them on the side of the house. Apparently, this is supposed to scare the birds silly and cause them to instantly burst into flames. I'm not buying it either, but I'm desperate here. Here's a shot of the battlefield, post inflatable owl-installation:



Who knew they made inflatable owls? Actually, there's probably members of some nasty usenet group (alt.binaries.erotica.owls.inflatable) out there who know inflatable owls intimately. Although the owl I bought is devoid of any love canals. Guess you've gotta pay extra for the lubed up pellet pathway. (Wow, I think I even grossed myself out with that thought.)

I know the owls aren't going to do shit and those little peckers will be rat-a-tat-tatting me awake in about five and a half hours. But what else can I do? If I give up, they win.

I can see how my dad has gotten to the point in his life where he now stalks bird-seed robbing squirrels in his backyard with a B.B. gun. Five bucks says he started out battling woodpeckers.

Wonder how much a B.B. gun runs, nowadays?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's pretty lame that I'm telling you this, but...
You can trim that stuff down once it hardens by cutting it with a razor. You can also "stuff" it back in while it's wet.
Be careful though, often spray insulation isn't water repellant - it sort of gets destroyed by it. So you'll want to put some sort of sealant over it, be it paint or whatever.
Honestly, I feel so dumb writing this, I'm not including my name.

crabbydad said...

Thanks, person who is certainly not named Chris. I did, actually, lance the insulation boils with my leatherman yesterday. Leatherman! I then painted over the smoothed patches with the house paint. You may indeed feel dumb for making the suggestion but I'm the moron who climbed up the ladder and did it. Oh, and I accidentally got a glob of the insulation on one of the owls. So it looks like an owl with a hemorrhoid.