beauty sleep

Did you know gophers hibernate? I didn’t either. Apparently they do, and (depending on who you ask) Gill is no exception. By ‘who you ask’ I really mean: Melissa or me. If you ask me, Gill is sleeping peacefully in his cozy little hole somewhere in the now deceased flower garden. If you ask Melissa, Gill has begun construction on weapons of mass destruction, ran a bus full of pregnant ladies off a cliff, and makes obscene gestures at nuns.

This is a problem because I am the one who is being sent to take care of the problem. By ‘take care of the problem’ I really mean: follow Melissa's directions to dig holes randomly until you happen to find the one in which Gill has decided to fall asleep. This is not a good solution. This is ‘less effective’. This creates lots more work because all of those holes have to be refilled and made to look pretty again. By me. This is not high on my list of priorities.

My plan is to open diplomatic negotiations with Gill. Then shoot him in the face.

//kill gill

int main() {

int x, y, gophers, dead;

cout << “How many gophers are in your yard?”; cin >> gophers;

dead = 0;

while (dead <= gophers) {

for (x = 0; x <= 10; x++) {

for (y = 0; y <= 10; y++) {
dig_hole (x, y);
check_gopher (aha);

if (aha= true){
shoot_gopher_in_face_with_pellet_gun (dead);
dead++; }
}
}
}

cout << “gill is gone.”;

return(0);
}

great panic

“JUSTIN, COME HERE RIGHT NOW! COME HERE RIGHT NOW! I NEED YOU HERE NOW!”

These are the sounds of a desperate woman in serious trouble; a woman whose home is being invaded by mutant, blood-sucking aliens, or who just cut her hand off in a blender and is picking her fingers off the floor one at a time, or who has been out of toilet paper for 46 minutes while I was trying to figure out what the horrible screeching sound interrupting my Mario Kart Wii game was. As it just so happens, they are also the sounds of a woman who sees a gopher.

We got a new pet. His name is Gill and he’s a gopher. He’s not a pet that we want and is apparently waterproof (after shoving a hose down his hole for approximately infinity minutes, he’s still alive). Gill has actually been around for awhile. The plants in our front garden started mysteriously disappearing over a month ago. Really, the whole thing was sort of creepy. It was as though we were living in some sort of time warp: one day a pretty little flower would be blooming in the sunshine, the next it would be gone without a trace. Like cookies or celery when Ian and Christen are around.

We thought it was the neighbor’s dog. Melissa even wanted me to set up the camera to time-lapse videotape so we could catch it in the act. Good thing I put that off for as long as I did. Finding out it was really a gopher saved me a lot of work. Actually, it just saved me the work of setting up the camera. I still have to get rid of the gopher. Maybe this means I’ll post again before December just to keep you posted on Gill’s status. Maybe.