A Suburban Murder Mystery

The Front Yard Bunny

So last week I caught a rabbit red-handed eating my beans. So I went out and bought a gate for the garden and sprayed everything with my homemade garlic-hot-pepper-Ivory-Soap spray. 

A few days later, I found a dead rabbit in the back yard. I don't know if someone poisoned it - some of the neighbors use chemicals in their gardens - or maybe a predator hurt it - maybe it got hit by a car and dragged itself into the yard to die. I'm not even sure it's the same rabbit I've seen in the yard every day. 

All I know is that it was dead. Dead as a doornail. 

I disposed of the corpse but I was concerned that now I'd have baby bunnies starving to death in the yard. I considered leaving food around the deck but feared I'd attract every deer, fox and coyote for miles.  Who would probably eat the baby bunnies. Bad idea. 

The next morning as I was leaving for work, I saw an adult bunny hopping across the front yard. 

Now we have a mystery. 

Who was the victim? Was it the Dad Bunny?  I didn't get close enough to check, but it looked bigger than the one I normally see in the front yard. 


Do I have more than one Bunny Family?

Perhaps this was not a sad happenstance of natural selection. Perhaps the late Bunny was a casualty of an on-going vicious turf war between the front yard Bunnies and the back yard Bunnies. 

Some scary shit goin' down here in Suburbia. 

There she is...

Linda Hamilton

Injected, rubbed and restrained... and spent.

The slut.

There is a body in my trunk...

Well, I drive a Jeep Cherokee so I don't actually have a trunk. But there is a space behind the back seat - and there is currently a body in it.

A dead body.

Dead, dismembered and drained.

Her feet are in a separate bag...

I didn't know her before her untimely demise, but I suspect she is a Hamilton.

 Note the strong family resemblance

Sparky and his BFF (My Sister-Wife, Geno) used to roast pigs in a huge oil drum in Geno's backyard.   Everyone else loved to watch the pig spin while drinking copious amounts of beer and tequila but since I don't drink all that much, the sight of a corpse rotisserie-ing all day in a rusty oil drum was less than appetizing.

Then, I discovered La Caja China!

I saw Roberto kick Bobby Flay's butt in a Pork Shoulder Throwdown and I was sold. I had found THE PERFECT CHRISTMAS GIFT for my husband.  (We've been married 27 years - I ran out of great gift ideas around 15 years ago, so this was a true Christmas miracle.)

I knew it was a hit when Sparky assembled the box in the middle of my living room on Christmas Eve. Since then, there's been no stopping him. Several times a year, Sparky whips out his Caja China and cooks up a pig.

It's a big production, mind you. He restrains the pig spread-eagled on a rack, injects the pig with secret juice, then he rubs the pig all over with coarse salt and spices...

'Scuse me... had a little "50 Shades of Pork" moment there...'

Anyhow, a friend of Son O'Mine is having a party tomorrow and he asked Sparky to roast a pig. So,  at this very moment, he's out there restraining and injecting and rubbbbbbing...

I'm going to watch.

Hey, I'm old... I take my thrills wherever I can.

Bear Nekkid Bird Rescuer



 Funny thing about being unemployed, you lose track of days. I remember to water and weed and fertilize, but ask me what day of the week it is or even what month, and the brain freezes. So imagine my surprise when I realized that this post was only ONE month ago!

My garden has grown a bit ;-)

photo taken today, 06/23

I know I said no chatchkes, and there are no flamingos.... but I read that birds like blueberries so to discourage them, we built a nifty cage. I found this old owl way in the back of the yard from the garden we had 20 years ago.  His eyes are gone, he had wasps living up his kazoo and his head was covered in bird poop - it was like the other birds were mocking him.  I HAD to save him. So we cleaned him up, gave him a Raid colonoscopy and brought him out of retirement. He may be old, but he gets the job done.  I call him Stevie Wonder. 


Whoooooooooooo Goes There?

And then, I found a bird at Home Depot. I left him there the first time I saw him but he was with a bunch of others so I figured someone else would adopt him. A week later, we went back and he was still there... alone with two broken birds. I took it as a sign. Now he hovers over the herb pot, up to his ass in Sweet Basil. I call him Marty Feldman.


Fly this way...


On the Subterranean Python front, Sparky found the best trap ever invented! This thing is fucking brilliant! It's not actually a trap, it's more like a guillotine for underground pests.

Our Weapon of Choice

It whacks them, but you don't have to dispose of the bodies - they're already buried. This is serial killer criminal genius. If they ever make these things people size, we're all screwed.



A Mystery in Connecticut

Over the years, our family pets (cats & dogs)  have been pretty impressive hunters so it wasn't unusual to occasionally discover tiny corpses in various states of dismemberment. However, we do not currently have a predator in residence. So imagine my surprise last week, when I came across the body of a field mouse in my laundry room.  

 

There was something odd about this little cadaver. He wasn't on his side or his back with his little feet in the air, in fact there were no visible signs of injury. It was as if he just conked mid-stride. Couldn't be Vampires, there was no blood and his head was in one piece, so I'm pretty sure it's not the Zombie Apocalypse.  

 

With no further evidence, we wrote it off as unsolved, zipped the vic into his body bag and cleaned up the crime scene. 

 

The vic in his body bag

A few days later, when I was watering the tomatoes, I found another body. This one was a bird – the deceased was largely intact, but headless. Again, there were no signs of a struggle, the feathers were unruffled – the only thing missing was the skull.  

We have a serial killer on the loose here in Connecticut. 

Son O'Mine thinks it was natural causes. Gazillions spent on his education at the Art school nurturing his creative spirit and he votes “natural causes.” 

Sparky says it’s either a mountain lion or a chupacabra.

And THAT is why I adore Sparky.