hogging the ground

one of these days, i'm going to publish the story of when i first moved out of Toronto, and into the wilderness of the Haliburton bush. oh, what a thrill!!!
you know how naive and idealistic all the city-dwellers can be. how they hold such romantic notions about living in the country and eating their own home-made bread, and loving, just loving!! - everything possible about nature.
yeah.
that's before they experience living with black flies, and the joy of covering oneself from head to toe before you can even step outside the door (so much for the great outdoors). and the story i refer to above, which is the ground hogs. yes, very funny creatures in a movie, or charming when they're on a newscast telling you spring is coming. but monsters from HELL when they invade your car, via underneath the hood, and they eat all your car wires: spark plugs, brake linings, and whatever else whets their stupid little appetites.
whoops. went all mentally unpolitically correct there. supposed to love them all, right? sure. you try having to park your car a mile away from your home, at a corner gas station, and then riding home in the pitch black, which you have to (not) see in the country, away from all artificial light, to believe, and all that on your rickety bike, because otherwise they'll eat the new wires you just replaced, and thank god when you drove you didn't fly over the highway ledge with no brakes, and into one of the numerous lakes we are blessed with in Northern Ontario, or worse, smack dab, at high speed (oh not too high because your car is running on the only one out of four cylinders that they didn't eat completely), but still, any speed is dangerous when you run head on into the Canadian Shield - that's rock, cold, hard, granite-type, face-smashing and unforgiving.
so actually, i hate the critters, truth be told, and if the damn thing poked its head out in my vicinity on a february day, or any day, i'd just as soon shoot it, if i had a gun.
i'll tell you another time about the mice.