Woodchuck

or groundhog... depends on where you were raised, I guess.

This is a brief post about an ear-worm.  Backstory:  I am building a community garden in an open field; and yesterday I saw a woodchuck - a teenager (yes, they are called that when the pups are about the size of a pug and begin to seek out their own spots to build burrows).  The pup was no more than twenty feet from where I was working, laying in paths and mulching beds.  The garden won't be open for business until about mid-June, but seeing a juvenile woodchuck - while charming (little, furry things are charming) - is not a good sign for a garden.  These little charmers eat like pigs (ergo, the term ground-HOG), and they love the same things we like to grow in vegetable gardens.



So, I am now obliged to develop some sort of tactical plan to deal with these cute, ravenous mammals.  My first plan involves a two-pronged approach.  I will surround the garden with plastic milk jugs that contain a mixture of blood meal and raw eggs, mixed with water and a little urine.  This is a homemade repellent.  Not having tried this before, I have another tactic I will employ simultaneously: live trapping them, and transporting them to places at least ten miles distant (stand-by Tecumseh, you will soon have a slight increase in your woodchuck population).

So this morning, as I was doing an interview with WBAI about my book (my next post), I was also doing net searches for best practices in the art of live-trapping woodchucks.  Then the interview was over, so I ate some breakfast and went to work.

For the rest of the morning, I was plagued with an ear-worm - that tongue-twisting thing we learned as kids that goes, "How much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?"  Over and over and over it played in my head.  Annoyance rose to some other level ... whatever that level is between being annoyed and feeling one is about to lose one's mind.

"How much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?"

Having heard that when you suffer, the suffering is lessened by sharing it with others, I decided to write this post.

"How much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?"

"How much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?"

"How much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?"