Sure Sign of Spring

There's one sure sign of spring in Chicago; street cleaning. Today the big sweepers came by one side of my street and will do the other side tomorrow. It's nice to have the dirt of winter swept away....or at least pushed around a bit and mostly picked up.

Update on Basra! While I was in Switzerland, the landlord next door, or the city, put out a big industrial sized rat bait trap. I'm not sure if they go in there and die, or eat the poison and die somewhere else or what, but the rat population is down to single digits. For a while, there was only one rat hole left! And one of them caught their foot in T-Rex, but flailed around all night until the string holding the trap down gave way and then T-Rex itself busted! Yowza, that was one pissed off rat.

So even though I killed about 30 rats over there, this city trap put the finishing touches on the extermination. The parallels to Iraq are compelling. They might not all be gone, but there is a significantly lower threat that they will come over to my yard now! Victory!!