Category: Iowa

Last night something removed our tile drain grate again! This time it wasn’t flipped. Something lifted the grate off the pipe and set it on the ground beside it. We were flabbergasted.

Recall that I thought I had secured the thing with a worm gear adjustable clamp on October 1, 2022. Up until that time, something (or someone) was flipping the grate upside down off the pipe every 2-3 days and lately every day.

I looked around and could not discern any animal tracks. The two crossed rods and thread over the grate were not disturbed. The worm gear clamp was still in place. I figured I had just not placed it close enough to the top of the grate and not screwed it down tightly enough.

So, I put the grate back on the pipe, pulled the clamp up so it covered the seam between the pipe and the grate better, and really cranked the screw tight enough so I could not move it at all.

Now we’re shopping for a critter cam. I favor the idea that a raccoon could be the culprit. Another outside possibility is a woodchuck. Both have fingers and are strong. This lid removal caper looks like it only happens at night. Sena checks it in the evening when she comes in from working out in the garden. That would tend to focus on the raccoon suspect since it’s nocturnal and the woodchuck is not.

Sena is going to get a brick or two to set on the grate and we will see what happens. Raccoons can lift 10-20 pounds, though. I’m thinking it’ll just move the bricks one at a time.

The other possibility is that the culprit might not be an animal. What if this is a kid playing games? There are not any kids in the neighborhood old enough to pull this off, though.

I’m pretty sure it’s not Bigfoot. The sod is loose and soft around the grate. Bigfoot would leave obvious tracks.

What about extraterrestrials? For example, some people think aliens are behind all the cattle mutilations. Others think it is some ultra-secret government agency running experiments (which have been going on for decades) to see how much nuclear radiation cows are absorbing from all the atomic fracking these bozos are doing to discover more fossil fuel energy resources underground all over the country. They cover their tracks to hide it from the public using the usual conspiracy tools—they just tell enough to investigators who get TV producers to make expose shows about it. They tend to air them in October to make you think this is just all about Halloween. I saw this show on TV last night.

Of course, if the government were doing that, there would be nobody living in the country by now because everybody would be dead from cancer from all the radiation.

But what if the extraterrestrials are trying to steal all the tile drain grates to use them as cooking grills to make barbecued chicken? The only problem is that aliens are so puny, they cannot do more than barely move them off the tile pipe. They get all out of breath and exhausted, which leads to them just giving up and going to a good BBQ joint like Jimmy Jack’s Rib Shack in Iowa City.

Where was I? Oh, I need to hire a new guard for the grate now. Obviously the first two bozos were incompetent. The zombie was too busy eating his own armpits and the wolfman started pooping on the grate and clogging up the slots, because even though they may be hundreds of years old, you still cannot potty train them.

And the sword the wolfman carried got stuck in the grate slots, leading to a hernia, the surgery for which veterinarians charge a lot. I could get them from passing zombies, but they are touchy about their stuff.

So, the tile drain grate saga continues. Aren’t you glad?

Update: Sena bought 3 big rocks, the total weight of which might exceed 20 pounds. We set them on top of the grate. And I called the Temp Agency and hired 3 new guards to make sure that grate stays on. Depending on what history you believe, either good things come in threes—or bad things come in threes. We’re going to go with good things.