We have mice, too, Jon. Cute little brown critters, probably field mice since our surburban house is close to cropland. Watson, our tomcat, has slain at least six over the last year. I don't know how they're getting in, but I suspect our rickety basement windows might be implicated. That's our next capital project, for when we have more capital.

We have found mouse signs only in one kitchen drawer and in the cupboard under the sink, but the cats have killed mice in the bedroom upstairs and in the basement, as well as in the kitchen and dining room. One poor little soul had taken refuge at the top of the dining-room curtains, and Watson had him in a nanosecond after I shook him out of the folds.

No rats here, but we definitely have raccoons -- when we first moved in, Himself put a hunk of mouldy bread in our brand-new composter, and the very next morning it was uprooted and overturned, and bits of bread were all over the garden. Raccoons are very intelligent, for a small animal, and strongly attracted to high-calorie edibles such as bacon grease, bread, fish and meat trimmings, and bones with even a trace of meat on them. I'm sure they also monitor the composter, because they'll have the lid off if we put eggshells or gnawed corn cobs in there.

Our current unpleasaunce is a small triangular space between the toolshed and the seven-foot cedar hedge that encloses the east end of our property. It is full of deadfall branches from our four huge maple trees (sadly, none of them is a sugar maple), bits of old drainpipe, and a stack of cast-cement pavers left over from the last year's major capital project, the construction of our patio and front path. The pavers are too potentially valuable to dispose of -- sure enough, we needed some this year when we installed two rain barrels -- and there isn't enough drainpipe to justify a trip to the dump, so ... there it stays!