The Ponce Chronicles 2022, Part 3

Cutting off the Ho Chi Cat Trail. That was yesterday’s project. Just me an’ my rat wire.

A frequent complaint from visitors in the last year was that stray cats would get into the kitchen and steal their food. True! There is a multitude of stray cats (and dogs) on the hill, which is sad for many reasons. They stroll through the property at times, though I tried last year to close the Ho Chi Dog Trail for good. (Unsuccessfully, as it turned out.) But the cats manage to get into the kitchen—a separate structure from the rest of the house—even when the door is locked. If you ever watched the series Leverage, they were like Parker, dropping in by wire, from who-knew-where.

Actually, we did know where. Part of the idiosyncratic construction here includes skylights over the back part of the kitchen, which were added, or replaced at various times, using whatever materials were at hand, in true local style, with odd gaps and overlaps. The supporting structure looks like something out of an M.C. Escher drawing, mostly out of steel. Sturdy, but challenging to work with, after the fact.

Enter me and the rat wire, known less colloquially as hardware cloth. (Some guys who worked on our own house many years ago referred to the stuff as rat wire. Just for fun, I entered rat wire in the search box on the Home Depot website. To my surprise, it took me straight to hardware cloth. Anyway, armed with that stuff and some aviation shears and a bag of zip ties, I attacked the problem yesterday. I think I’ve managed to close all but one of the openings for the clever kitties. I saved the hardest one for last. That’s tomorrow’s problem.