Monday: half day, sick kid home one more day, book group

It was a half day for both kids, so I didn’t even try to send A. to school. I did get her to work on some schoolwork, tho. I didn’t supervise, and left to her own devices, she went to google classroom and basically looked for easy things to do. Solid strategy.

In book group today, we discussed _Fuzz_ by Mary Roach. I love Roach’s style, altho not every subject that she tackles appeals to me. This one felt like what I loved so much about _Stiff_: just asking the questions without worry at all about the reactions, _documenting_ the reactions, and also documenting The Weird. In this case, she was pretty weirded out by all the taxidermy; this descriptions were really amazing. She also was pretty weirded out by how the people hired to do all this enforcement on animals really loved them. Given that she also struggled with how can you hunt something and also love it, I’m going to chalk this one up to idiosyncratic confusion on her part, because, duh. Love is about knowing everything about someone or something (that’s not the ONLY definition, I know, but come on — what do you think Love Maps is all about, anyway? And if you “love” someone or something and know nothing at all about them or it, you’re just describing an irrelevant to everyone else internal state anyway that’s probably more accurately captured bvy the psychological concept of “projection”); so is hunting. There’s bound to be hella overlap there.

But the book did have some very real effects on how I think about things. R. and I have always been about mechanical / exclusion / environmental change methods of controlling … things we don’t want bothering us. I’d rather eliminate a food from my diet than take a pill to moderate the effects that food has on me. I’d rather make sure all the food is locked up than poison “pests”. Etc. I’ve become less doctrinaire about this with age; during wet periods in the spring, for example, I may have to put out an ant trap or possibly two while they are swarming. I’m deeply unhappy about the wasp situation. In general, I tend to believe that if you go to war with something — traps and poison and shooting and what have you — you’ll wind up with an increase in the problem. I don’t mean, now your life is full of the trapping and poisoning and shooting and what have you, altho of course, that is a whole lot of cost, risks, and other negatives like psycho-spiritual damage to yourself, others, relationships of all sorts, etc. I mean, literally, when you go to war against something, it makes more of itself. It’s a Thing. I don’t know why people are surprised by this when it happens. It is one of the most reliable Things ever. And yet, people go to war to get less of a Things. Seems weird! Whatever! This book definitely reinforced this belief for me, and I get a lot of entertainment out of watching people step on rakes and get hit on the head by them (in Plants vs Zombies on the iPad — not in real life. I’m not _that_ kind of monster). I mean, you left the rake out! What did you expect! But _even with all that_, I’d never actually _thought_ of entire categories of unwanted beings as being “cavity nesters” and the implications of that for industrial design.

Why the hell do we make spacious metal enclosures around things and then surprised when things get in there and nibble? I’m looking at you, AC housing. And you, generator housing. And you, every single car on the planet, not to mention lawn tractors. I get that there needs to be some weatherizing, but we might want to rethink how we do that!

So I’ll be thinking about that for a while.

Also! As long as we’re discussing cavities. I wondered if maybe wasps are worse with vinyl siding, since with wood siding, you might have a woodpecker take an interest and deal with the wasp nest. However, people with wood siding appear to be dealing with wasps as well, so, you know. Probably not the solution I am looking for. In any event, that space between the vinyl siding and the house wrap is very attractive to wasps.