GOPHER GNAWING UP THE WRONG VEGETABLES.Byline: Dennis McCarthy Dennis McCarthy may refer to:
My wife, the former pacifist, is in the market for an experienced hit man. No questions asked. She wants to terminate this gopher that moved into our back yard a few weeks ago. He's been showing all the signs of a visiting in-law planning to stay awhile. She didn't mind it so much when the gopher was only pushing up holes in my lawn, but when he decided to take up residence under her beloved vegetable garden, she turned from Jane Goodall Noun 1. Jane Goodall - English zoologist noted for her studies of chimpanzees in the wild (born in 1934) Goodall to Idi Amin. Messing with my wife's vegetable garden is tantamount tan·ta·mount adj. Equivalent in effect or value: a request tantamount to a demand. [From obsolete tantamount, an equivalent, from Anglo-Norman to defiling a church or synagogue. It's spousal abuse, elder abuse Elder Abuse Definition Elder abuse is a general term used to describe harmful acts toward an elderly adult, such as physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional or psychological abuse, financial exploitation, and neglect, including self-neglect. and child abuse all rolled into one Adj. 1. rolled into one - made up of several components combined into a single entity combined - made or joined or united into one . You don't serve jail time in my wife's court. There is no appeals process. You go straight to the chair. The gopher doesn't know it, but he's doomed. The woman will not rest until she has him tracked down and screaming for mercy for eating her tomatoes and eggplant eggplant, name for Solanum melongena, a large-leaved woody perennial shrub (often grown as an annual herb) of the family Solanaceae (nightshade family), and also cultivated for its ovoid fruit. . Therein, though, lies the problem. Exactly how do you doom a gopher when your hands are tied in using the obvious tools of his destruction? Guns are out, of course, because anyone who knows me knows if I ever got my hands on one, I'd wind up shooting myself. Poison's out because my wife read, while researching gopher annihilation annihilation In physics, a reaction in which a particle and its antiparticle (see antimatter) collide and disappear. The annihilation releases energy equal to the original mass m multiplied by the square of the speed of light c, or E = m on the information highway, that the dirt in her vegetable garden would be radioactive or worse for three centuries if a poisoned gopher cashed in his chips under her garden. Everyone in our family would wind up growing a third ear and second nose eating her homegrown home·grown adj. 1. Raised or grown at home. 2. Originating in or characteristic of a locality: "Rock is homegrown music in the United States, evolved from blues and country and Tin Pan Alley" vegetables. No, poison is definitely out. Besides, she's worried I'd wind up poisoning the dog, which is a distinct possibility because I'm prone to screw-ups. My wife would then have to put out a hit on me, because life without the dog would be unbearable for her. Life without me, she could handle. Camping out in front of one of the gopher's holes and grabbing his scrawny little neck or bashing him over the head with the shovel when he sticks his head outside is a long shot. Too many holes to cover. Besides, I don't like confrontational violence. I'm strictly into vicarious vicarious /vi·car·i·ous/ (vi-kar´e-us) 1. acting in the place of another or of something else. 2. occurring at an abnormal site. vi·car·i·ous adj. 1. violence. The gopher might fight back. I tried sticking the garden hose down Verb 1. hose down - water with a hose; "hose the lawn" hose irrigate, water - supply with water, as with channels or ditches or streams; "Water the fields" one of the holes and flooding him out, but that didn't work. All I got was a back yard that looked like it was filled with muddy oil wells. No, the only recourse I have is to use a gopher trap, and I hate traps. Any kind of trap. I have lost fingernails to traps. I have scars because of traps. I have run around my back yard swearing pretty nastily and screaming in pain because of traps going off when they weren't supposed to. No, traps and I are not friends. My wife knows this. Which is why she put in a call to Trap Man this week. Trap Man runs one of those environmentally-approved death camps for critters. He gets rid of things you don't want crawling around in your back yard, and he charges you an arm and a leg to do it. He gets to charge more than Orkin and all those other pest control pest control n → control m de plagas pest control n → lutte f contre les nuisibles pest control pest n guys because Trap Man's weapons of extinction are billed as environmentally sensitive. You pay through the nose, but you sleep better at night knowing you just wiped out everything crawling around your back yard with environmental sensitivity. Trap Man said he wanted $150 to kill my wife's gopher environmentally. I said to heck with the environment. Actually, I said something a bit stronger, but it'd never fly in a family newspaper. For that kind of money, I told Trap Man, I could throw the gopher a full-blown funeral and fly in a few of his friends. My gardener says he'll bury the traps for me if I buy them, which is probably what I'll do. They run about $10 a piece, but I don't think they're environmentally approved or sensitive. My wife doesn't care anymore. She just wants the gopher gone from her garden. If the traps don't work, I'm going straight for a hit man. No questions asked. |
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