For those of you who don’t know, I now live at a church. An old church. One with bats.
I’ve decided the best way to cope with this less-than-ideal aspect of my otherwise wonderful living situation is to have a little fun with it. Watch my Twitter feed (reproduced at right and on my Facebook status) for updates to the bat wrangling quotient (aka Graydon Number or simply batting average), which is calculated by dividing the number of bats I manage to wrangle out of the house (bat wrangled, BW) into the number I encounter (bats encountered, BE, aka at bats).
Some notes:
(1) I’ve already learned that bat wrangling is (often necessarily, and I suspect also to our mutual advantage) a team sport. BW and BE numbers will be split among all participants in the encounter/wrangle. Thus my current bat wrangling quotient is 1 / 2.5 = .400, because tonight I added two solo encounters and one successful wrangle (don’t know where the other one got off to) to my previous 0/0.5 record after Carl and I had an unsuccessful bat run-in last week. As you might expect, I’ll report my stats baseball-style, i.e. “Current bat wrangling quotient: .400 in 2.5 at bats.”
(2) Despite all the baseball language, I want to emphasize that all the blunt instruments (they’re badminton paddles actually) on our floor are for self-defense only, and I’m not actually taking swings at them (the bats). The goal is to guide them out of the house, not knock them into oblivion Dan Lin-style.
(Sorry for mixing metaphors here. I’ve so far avoided bat-transmitted rabies, but I do have Olympic fever.)
Stay tuned for bat wrangling advice and tales of heroics…and probably also anti-heroics, as in my second at bat this evening, wherein I just shut the door to the TV room and went on watching hurdles and gymnastics.