For those of you who don't know, I now live at a church. An old church. One with bats.
I've decided the best way to cope with this less-than-ideal aspect of my otherwise wonderful living situation is to have a little fun with it. Watch my Twitter feed (reproduced at right and on my Facebook status) for updates to the bat wrangling quotient (aka Graydon Number or simply batting average), which is calculated by dividing the number of bats I manage to wrangle out of the house (bat wrangled, BW) into the number I encounter (bats encountered, BE, aka at bats).
Some notes:
(1) I've already learned that bat wrangling is (often necessarily, and I suspect also to our mutual advantage) a team sport. BW and BE numbers will be split among all participants in the encounter/wrangle. Thus my current bat wrangling quotient is 1 / 2.5 = .400, because tonight I added two solo encounters and one successful wrangle (don't know where the other one got off to) to my previous 0/0.5 record after Carl and I had an unsuccessful bat run-in last week. As you might expect, I'll report my stats baseball-style, i.e. "Current bat wrangling quotient: .400 in 2.5 at bats."
(2) Despite all the baseball language, I want to emphasize that all the blunt instruments (they're badminton paddles actually) on our floor are for self-defense only, and I'm not actually taking swings at them (the bats). The goal is to guide them out of the house, not knock them into oblivion Dan Lin-style.
(Sorry for mixing metaphors here. I've so far avoided bat-transmitted rabies, but I do have Olympic fever.)
Stay tuned for bat wrangling advice and tales of heroics...and probably also anti-heroics, as in my second at bat this evening, wherein I just shut the door to the TV room and went on watching hurdles and gymnastics.
19 August 2008
Kyle Oliver: Bat Wrangler
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7 comments:
what a coincidence, i had my own bat adventure on monday. we went to this old building that has a colony of big brown bats living in the attic. it actually still has a functioning barber shop in it, but i bet if people knew what was living above them and how much guano was on the floor, a.k.a. ceiling, there would be far fewer customers. we were looking for bat ticks, but the post-doc who brought us along was catching bats for her research. she used a cloth net on a long pole to catch them while they were roosting in the ceiling. you can handle them as long as you wear leather gloves. it was really cool, even though i did get hit in the face by a bat (but it didn't bite me, so i think i am rabies free.
how long are you living at the church? just for the rest of the summer or for the school year too?
Oh God am I glad I wasn't home last night.
Evie--I'm here for the school year.
I for one can't wait to hear more bat adventures...
Hehe, thanks Ryan, I'll keep you posted. August 20 was, thankfully, bat-free.
Kyle, you're officially my hero. Let me know if you need a pinch hitter this weekend. ~Matt
thing number 1 i don't miss about the house: the goddamn bats. although i've got to say, you seem to have encountered as many in 2 weeks as i did in 2 years...perhaps they like you.
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