ur condo's back patio is on the second floor, faces many tall trees, and tends to grow very wet when it's windy and rainy.  It also houses the two rats and one snake, though we took pity on the snake and moved him inside in November, once the temperatures at night were routinely down under 40.  The rats have a lot of paper, a nice box to snuggle up in, and are covered in fur, so they're on their own. Plus they smell.

When I first moved in with Malaya in July of 2003, she'd only been in her condo for a couple of months, and hadn't done too much decoration on the back patio.  It had some spare furniture, but was mostly being used for light storage and stood empty, a testament to the potential decorations it might one day house.

And decorated it was, over the months, with no clear rhyme or reason.  We've added bookshelves to house the small animals, a table and chairs, numerous plants, and a few other small items of furniture that straddle the fine line between storage and decor; occasionally slipping over the line in one direct or the other.  (Usually in the storage direction, to be honest.)

The following photos are in rough chronological order, and the captions describe what the new back patio addition is, and why it came to be on the back patio. New photos will be added at the bottom of this page, and will mostly feature plants and plant hangers, since that's mostly what we've added in recent weeks, but have not yet photographed.

The photo on the left shows the initial bookshelf appearance, with rat and snake aquariums in place.  The photo on the right is the current near-final design, with much decorative greenery in place.

The back patio has become quite the decorative place, almost entirely due to Malaya's influence.  She had this large ugly metal bookshelf hidden away in her closet, with a bunch of boxes of papers on it, and since I was bringing up a small snake and a couple of rodents, along with their constituent aquariums, she figured it would be a nice place to perch them. Plus it would keep them, their smells, their creepy scaly bodies, and assorted appurtenances out of the house.

The problem, as Malaya saw it, was that this would expose the singularly hideous bookshelf to our naked eyes, and while my naked eyes really didn't give a damn how it looked, hers found the blue metal and particle board shelves quite traumatic.  Since I also had several large plants with me, some of which regularly produce dangling thingies, project "conceal the bookshelf with greenery" was launched.

Initially we had a large dangling plant on top of it, the primarily-green tendrils of which descended nearly four feet, despite some not-inconsiderable damage suffered during the move.  (I was frankly expecting all of my plants to wilt and wither, after sitting in the oven-like back of an airless U-Haul truck for a full day.) However we soon realized that we had nowhere to put my giant leafy fern, since the overhead hanging hooks from the back patio are insufficiently load-bearing to support its verdant weight.  Therefore the dangling one was moved to a lower location, while the fern was plunked down atop the bookshelf, sending its afro-like vegetation in every direction, and largely hiding the wall and upper shelf.  As you can see in illustration three.

Supplementing the actual growing greenery are several yards of silk plants, both ones Malaya had handy from a friend's wedding leftovers, as well as a bunch more we got at Michael's on clearance sale.  They look preternaturally verdant, and when invisible-taped into place do a very nice job of hiding the ugly bookshelf, not to mention the ugly wall behind it.  We've also added a colorful background to the snake's tank, and will get one for the rats as well in the immediate future, as soon as we locate a pet store with a better selection of them than PetCo boasted.

One inadvertent change is that the back patio light is almost entirely blocked off by the mega-fern. At first this seemed like a bad thing, since when it's, you know, like dark... light comes in handy.  However after a few trial runs out there we realized that less light was pretty cool, and that we could see plenty for anything less than brain surgery from the big of porch light, any living room light, and the light from the street.

And anyway, it's really not sanitary enough out there for open skull surgery.  That's what the storage shed is for, after all. 

 

Dusty doesn't do as much obsessing over the rodents as we thought he might.  Oh he's interested in them at times, and he spends a lot of time sprawling on the back patio near the rodent aquarium, but he's never actually pawed at them, and he's never figured to hop up on top of the cage to sniff at them through the top metal mesh.

As for the rodents, they were initially really freaked out by everything, being outdoors (sort of) with the strange smells and wind and car noise and such.  While admittedly it was hard to tell what specifically was making them nervous at any given time, they did dive under their little metal mesh furniture when Dusty came close and looked in at them.  So they could see him through the glass, and the sight of a fat black kitty registered in their pea-brains in the latter portion of the "fight or flight" region.

However they've either learned over the course of a week, or they are just too lazy or stupid now, since they no longer run or hide when he comes close, but instead keep on doing whatever it was that they were already doing.  Of course half the time what they were already doing can pretty well be described as "running or hiding", but see, they are doing that for a different reason!

We're not quite sure how things would go without the glass and metal between them, but it would definitely involve rats running and kitty sniffing in confusion.  Whether there would be more conflict than that is as of yet unknown.  We are curious to see if we get another kitty, or have baby rats, if they can be raised from younger ages in contact with each other.  It would be an interesting experiment.

Since these first two photos were taken the aquarium and bookshelf has been greatly spruced up, as pictured above.  And since the spruced pictures were taken, I've completed a cool stovepipe-like metal mesh tube that extends six feet (2 meters) from the top left of the rat aquarium, up beside the bookshelf, to another, smaller rat carrying cube atop the bookshelf.  Photos to come.

As with most things in life, the joy of the rat stovepipe is not in the destination, but in the journey.  I.E. it goes from a cage they are bored with to a much smaller cage they are already bored with.  But on the way it's all climby and crooked and breezy and there are fun things to sniff.

In other rodent news, this afternoon there was a great squawking and chirping from a tree outside the back patio.  I looked through some leaves and saw the source of the noise, and you can see it here.  Or perhaps not.

See it?

A few minutes later he scampered off, as squirrels are wont to do, but about 20 minutes later there was a loud scratching and scrambling, and I saw two squirrels racing in circles around and up a tree, while screeching at each other.  I do not know if "my squirrel," was the chaser or the chasee, nor quite why I think of it as "mine" just because I saw it first.  But anyway, I'm willing to bet that my squirrel was busy kicking ass, goddamnit.

The snake was brought inside for the winter, since he was in potential danger of dying of cold, but the rats have fur, so they should be pretty okay.  At least we're hoping so.

 

 

However this bar-style table is great, with the high tavern-style chairs.  The problem was where to get ones that were affordable. These sorts of chairs with a nice stone-top table are pretty expensive, and the reasonable facsimiles of this design that we saw at Ikea and other furniture places were way out of our budget; usually around $80 per chair and over $100 for the table.  And if you wanted ones from an upscale furniture store, I'm sure you'd easily be able to pay $500 per item.

We did not feel that need, and kept looking at other places.  Malaya happened to be in an Albertson's (expensive supermarket) for some reason one day, and saw them selling a 2-chair and table set for absurdly cheap.  It was sort of an odd find, since Albertson's doesn't sell furniture, and they don't sell anything cheaply.  She didn't get them since she wanted me to see the design first, but the next day when we went to the Albertson's nearest our condo, they had no furniture at all, of any kind.

However, since that was a pretty small Albertson's, we held out hope that the larger one up in Davis might have them, and since we had a trip planned to Davis already, we just bided our time.  And as you can probably guess from the photos, the Davis one did have 3 sets of the chairs and table, for the same $88 price.  It was an amazing buy; we hadn't seen even a single item of the 3-piece set for less than $80, and here was the whole set for about that much.

The mystery to me is how Albertson's came to be selling them at all, since as I said, they don't sell furniture.  Perhaps they figured this sort of outdoor table/chairs set would be a good summer sales item, and ordered up a few hundred of them, and sent 2 or 3 sets to all of their larger stores.  But then spring passed, and by the time we got them in late summer, they'd been forced to slash the prices? Neither Malaya or I shop there usually, so we have no idea if the table/chairs sets have been sitting in Albertson's across California (and the US?) for months, with the price gradually dropping from like $350 to $89, as their perceived window of opportunity to sell them shrunk.

I sort of hope so, since I hate Albertson's for their monopolistic sin of buying up Lucky, the only low-price supermarket in Southern California, and turning all of their stores into Albertson's, with an associated 50% price increase.  I had to move my shopping to Ralph's, which was far cheaper than Albertson's, but cost a lot more than Lucky.  I think that I easily spent $500 more on groceries over the last 4 or 5 years since Lucky was killed, solely due to Albertson's removing their low prices, and the other grocery stores consequently having no incentive to keep their prices down, without all of the "14% cheaper than Ralph's or Vons" Lucky commercials.

Yes, it's been like 5 years.  Yes, I'm still bitter.

 

Remember to feed your Nanoball at the table, like a proper guest of the house.  It will thank you for it later. Nanoball is not a life-saving flotation device.

 

More back patio photos to come once our current greenery redecoration scheme is completed.  We decided that the bedroom window was far too naked, and that shrouding it with numerous hanging green plants was definitely the way to go.  So that's the way we're going.  We just need to do some more repotting and install another overhead hanging metal scroll post.

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