Squirrel Wars, etc.

Bleah, it's hot. Going to be hot the rest of the week. I hope this is not a glimpse of the rest of the summer. I liked last summer!

I read about a girl who read that squirrels don't like peppermint oil. She didn't have peppermint oil, but she did have candy canes (it being around Christmas), so she taped candy canes to the outsides of her bird feeders and voila, no squirrels. I don't have peppermint oil, either, but I decided to give peppermint Life Savers a try. Yesterday I sprayed the pole with vegetable oil, and then slid a Life Saver onto each of the perches on the sunflower seed feeder (the one the squirrel *really*) liked. He showed up later and sort of sat in the grass and foraged a bit, but didn't try to climb the pole, and I haven't seen him at all today.

I doubt this is a permanent solution, but I thought I'd pass it along. The birds don't seem to mind it--I've seen cardinals and purple finches at the feeders. No goldfinch, though, but maybe the one I saw will come back.

I think I need to get a hanging platform feeder for the cardinals, though.

Speaking of getting things, my less-than-3-year-old microwave died last night. I was annoyed, to put it mildly. It was a Galanz. I went out to K-Mart tonight and got a Kenmore; hope it will last a little longer. Being a single person, I use my microwave nearly every day, far more often than I use my stove.

I also ordered a new hard drive for my laptop. Sure hope that (a) I can put it in and (b) that fixes the laptop. It turned out I had to find an exact replacement--it uses an older technology (IDE instead of SATA or PATA). Well, it's not like I do a lot of high-tech stuff with that laptop; as long as I can surf the web and read e-mail, I guess it's fine. So I hope the new hard drive does the trick.