Of mice and mythical beasties
Yesterday our pterodactyl proof bird table arrived. I’d bought this with two main criteria in mind. Firstly, did it look good. Secondly, would it be sturdy and survive gale force winds and giant wing-ed beasties with little or no external support.
After a quick Google I found the perfect match. Two tier, hook to hang the new hanging birdbath The Zozo had got, nice wide base, sturdy wooden construction. Being a man I didn’t read the full set of details (too much like instructions and we don’t need them), leapt straight to the headline figure of 1.6m height, visualised the item in the picture being 1.6m tall and decided it was perfect. Job done.
Yesterday our bird table arrived. It’s… well… big. You see I’d failed to realise the stand was 1.6m tall and with the bird mansion bit on the top (‘house’ doesn’t convey the scale of the thing) it’s about 2m tall. This means it’s all about 20% bigger than expected. One thing is for sure though, it’ll survive a whole flock of bloody pterodactyls 
Given the small miscalculation with size the outside area where it’s going needs to be prepared. It’s not our land and is a right of way so blocking it with oversized bird condos will be frowned upon. Chopping back the shrubs and putting it right up against the fence should be fine, it just needs some work one weekend. In the interim the whole thing is being stored out the back in our tiny yard there (and I mean tiny, it’s now full with just the bird table).
Getting the bird table in the house was easy enough. We have a good, wide front door and the table itself was in two bits. Getting the base into the kitchen was more problematic. I had to rotate the whole thing through to get the legs through the door. Getting it out the back door threw up a new problem.
Sitting there, pretending to be dead to sucker me into coming within killing distance, was Shelob. I did what any red blooded male would have done: I ran to The Zozo for help. The Zozo then scooped up Shelob and promptly declared that she wasn’t sure about feeding it to the mice because she’d “grown quite attached to it”. I certainly hadn’t, that’s for sure, so I simply resorted to good old emotional blackmail: save the spider and deny the mice their treat, or show the mice how much you love them and throw the vile thing in the mouse house. That worked. A few seconds later and our very cute mice had descended on the hapless spider and ripped it to pieces with me cheering them on in the background. A glorious moment, I can tell you.
With Shelob dispatched and our wyrmery (with added pterodactyl shelf) stored out back pending assembly and positioning it won’t be long until we’re safe from all mythical beasties for a while.