#black roman maximus brick

[cloudsofbluesmoke]

Example of a large minimalist multicolored two-story brick house exterior design An illustration of a large, minimalistic, two-story brick home's exterior design.

[fashiongifs74]

Modern Home Office - Home Office Mid-sized modern built-in desk design ideas with no fireplace, light wood floors, and beige walls in a home office and library.

[galaxias-ss]

On Killing A Rat

"By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may additionally drown a country." Edmund Burke  Custom Made Jewellery Few creatures in the Western global are as feared and reviled as the commonplace rat. Rats are related to tenement slums, sewers and garbage. They bring ailment, pollute food, and are notoriously difficult to get rid of after they establish a colony. In mob circles an informer is referred to as a rat. When I turned into a boy my playmates and I would yell, "You rat!" at every different when we desired to use an expletive that might now not get our mouths washed out with soap. Rats terrorized Winston Smith, the protagonist of 1984, and in Richard Wright's Native Son, Bigger Thomas kills a rat with an iron skillet as the novel starts. Albert Camus' The Plague opens with hundreds of rats lifeless on the streets of Oran, a precursor to the pestilence approximately to crush the city.

But I had little private revel in with rats. A few youngsters I knew saved rats as pets, and they appeared nothing extra than oversized mice, much like what the Romans called "Mus Maximus" (Big Mouse, a rat, in different phrases) in preference to "Mus Minimus" (Little Mouse). So when early one evening at the beginning of summer 2011 I noticed a hairy brown creature with a protracted tail scampering about the branches of my lemon tree, I turned into nonplused. This become no small kid's pet. This turned into a big, bloated, and quite repulsive animal that had made its way into my outdoor and turned into now gorging itself on the contents of one in every of my chicken feeders. With exceptional dexterity it crawled headfirst down the tubular aspect, planted itself at the circular perch wherein the birds are meant to sit, and ate as if there was no the next day, twitching its nose like a rabbit and the usage of its paws like an electric powered noticed. It ran when I approached, shifting with splendid pace, up the side of the chook feeder and again up into the branches, disappearing among the leaves.

The next night it was back again, eating ravenously. At dusk the day after that it added a accomplice. Now there had been two, and the subsequent night there were 4. These rats were multiplying exponentially. Going to my PC I typed the phrase "rats" on Google. I were given over 95,000,000 effects, and a short perusal of among the articles I observed informed me I had a trouble I had better do something positive about, and not using a time to lose.

I had to put off the rats, or soon I might be overrun with them. Rats are notorious for how rapid they reproduce. But I desired to do it as humanely as viable and in as environmentally pleasant a manner as I should. I made a go to to the nearest hardware save, and after a careful study what become on the cabinets below the conventional identify "Rodent Control," I came away with what I idea had been the pleasant choices: Two small plastic "rodent bins," with round holes on either facet for the rats to pass through, 4 locations inner to area the blocks of poison (that way simplest the rats and no longer some neighborhood cat might be able to get to them) and locations for a spring-loaded rat entice, two of which I bought. These had been, I determined, a quantum soar in pressure from the old skool Victor timber mousetraps I had visible formerly. The jaws of those got here down with a terrifying crash that in reality startled me the primary time I heard it, and could clearly bring immediately (and optimistically painless) loss of life to any rat that went after the peanut butter I used as bait. I set the traps, located the blocks of ugly inexperienced poison of their spots, and placed the bins beneath the timber a few toes apart from one another, sprinkled some chook seed round each, and waited. While I waited I spent extra time on Google, gaining knowledge of approximately rats.

Rats are maximum notorious for having added the Black Plague to Europe inside the 14th Century. Coming along the Silk Road from China, rats carrying plague-bearing fleas reached the Crimea in 1346, and from there were given on board ships bound for Europe. The resultant pandemic, perhaps the worst in records, killed an predicted one-1/2 of the population. Medieval medication could not find out the reason nor should it deal with the sick. People went to mattress apparently healthy and died of their sleep. The lifeless have been so numerous that in some locations there has been no person left to bury them. Europe could not recover for 150 years.

But there is plenty more to the human-rat dating than the plague, as I turned into soon to find out. Rats have doggedly observed inside the footsteps of human migration. Where there are humans, there might be rats. Rats now live on each continent on the planet except Antarctica, making them the most successful mammal on this planet after humans. It is expected there is one rat for every human on the planet. One story, perhaps apocryphal, states that in places where rats are specifically severa, a person at any given time is no extra than ten toes far from one.

Rats have an super present for survival. On Engebi, one of the Eniwetok Atolls wherein nuclear bombs had been tested inside the 1950s, scientists lower back to see what remained after the bombs were exploded. They determined radioactive soil, plants destroyed-and a thriving colony of rats. Rats can live to tell the tale a fall of 50 ft with out harm. Excellent swimmers, they can pass wide rivers (a massive mass migration of rats changed into recorded in Southern Russia in 1727 when thousands of them swam throughout the River Volga from Astrakhan). They can tread water for three days with out resting and dive to depths of 100 feet. They live an average of two to three years, and a girl rat typically has a clutter of 6 to 12 offspring six or seven times a yr. They stay in colonies (packs) with every rat's vicinity in the social order determined by using their combating capability, the dominant men at the pinnacle. They sleep collectively, groom every different, and have interaction in play and play-combating. When the colony gets too large, the more youthful adult males leave to start colonies of their own.

Rats are recognized for his or her sharp enamel and powerful jaws. Not most effective are their tooth sharp, they are extremely difficult: Measured on the Mohs hardness scale they arrive in at five.5, more difficult than iron or platinum, and greater than 1/2 as tough as diamond, which measures 10. These hard enamel allow rats to gnaw thru timber, bone, plastic pipe, even brick. Rats will consume almost anything, and have been known to eat soap, leather, and furs, however opt for grain, livestock feed, and meat of diverse kinds, such as human, although cases of which are rare. But with their sizeable appetites, they can and could consume one 0.33 in their frame weight every day.

Their eyesight is negative, restrained to only some feet. They hear extraordinarily nicely, and have extraordinarily evolved sense of contact and odor. A rat can run 24 miles an hour for a quick distance. They are considered clever, one of the reasons they're in demand for laboratory experiments, and a 2007 observe observed rats to possess metacognition, "understanding about knowing," an ability formerly documented handiest in people and primates.

In a few elements of the world, human beings pray to rats. In India rats are seen as a automobile for Lord Ganesha, and statues of rats take a seat in Ganesha temples. At the Temple of the Rats, in Rajasthan nation, worshippers take this a step further and permit 20,000 of the furry creatures to stay inside the temple, considering them holy creatures called kabbas. Killing one there, as you could have guessed, is taboo, and the rats are allowed to run loose even as the trustworthy attend to their prayers inside the temple. In the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, and components of Polynesia, rats are eaten as a part of the ordinary weight loss program. In China the rat is the primary animal of the Chinese Zodiac, and people born within the Year of the Rat are thought to own features of honesty, creativity, intelligence and ambition-attributes that rats are notion to have as well.

I nonetheless needed to do away with the rats in my outdoor. For a few days nothing regarded to occur. The rats nonetheless regarded every nighttime for their dinner party of bird seed, but I did word their numbers were no longer growing. Then past due one afternoon I heard a rustling sound from beneath the trees in which I had left the rodent packing containers. Something become moving within the fallen leaves. I went to take a better look and saw a small rodent head pop out of the hole at the side of the box. This became accompanied with the aid of about half of of the rat's body. It munched greedily at the bird seed that I had spread on the ground, the usage of its paws vigorously, similar to the manner a ground squirrel feeds, then pulled again within the box, best to emerge again a second later to eat more. As I came closer it gave me a sidelong glance, decided I changed into no considered one of any importance, ate more, after which disappeared once again.

Something became out of synch right here. Why failed to it run away? Why hadn't it tripped the lure internal? Tentatively I were given nearer, but I wasn't eager on getting too near-I had no want to get bitten by way of the rat. Meanwhile the rat persevered to eat. Then it made a lunging motion, and more of its body emerged from the hole and it attempted to walk away, pulling the entire box at the side of it.

I cautiously opened the field, and saw what I did no longer need to see: Somehow the rat had sprung the lure, but as opposed to crushing its head and killing it, the trap had stuck its hindquarters, proper on the spot wherein the tail joins the body. The rat become caught, however now not useless and now not about to die, and when I found out this I became trapped just as sincerely because the rat, trapped with the aid of the know-how of what I had achieved and no longer understanding what to do about it.

The rat twitched its nose and checked out me reproachfully, as if to say, "Why have you ever carried out this to me?" It not seemed a ferocious sewer residing provider of pestilence however a small hairy creature in problem and in pain. I become struck through its size, too: It was like a little rabbit or a guinea pig, something that a child might keep as pet in a cage with a going for walks wheel and a small field of water.

What to do? I should get a hammer and bash its head in, however that might now not be retaining with my dedication to be humane. I ought to leave it there, in which it'd die a sluggish, agonizing demise that might take who is aware of how long to accomplish. I ought to turn it loose, but that seemed counter-effective-I had desired to do away with the rats, and however there was the threat of being bitten.

The rat struggled a few greater, nevertheless seeking to get unfastened. But its efforts had been in useless. The jaws of the trap held it fast. Once once more it checked out me, as though I were its savior. I determined I did no longer need to look any extra. I closed the box quickly, then got a five gallon bucket and turning it the other way up, placed it over the box and the rat. If the rat have been capable of get unfastened the bucket would preserve it, and I would not need to take a look at it and be reminded of what I had finished. Out of sight, out of mind.

But no longer completely. I became haunted by way of that image of the rat attempting and then failing to get out of the lure. I stored taking into account it stuck in the ones horrible jaws, and the way it checked out me. I started to don't forget stories I had heard of animals stuck in traps that chewed their personal limbs off so that it will break out.

In a short time I knew what I had to do: I would have to set the rat unfastened. Putting on a pair of welding gloves I went returned into the backyard. I took away the bucket and another time opened the container. This time I took the trap, rat and all, and set it on the ground. The rat made no attempt to chunk me. It watched me carefully, with a affected person demeanor, as if ready to look what I had in thoughts. Reaching over carefully, I launched the jaws of the lure. The immediately the trap opened the rat ran- so rapid my eyes could slightly observe it-up the aspect of the closest tree and disappeared.

I placed each traps away. Rats and human beings ought to learn to co-exist with one another, it appears, and if rats are based upon people which will stay, human beings also want rats to preserve existence in angle. "Evermore inside the international is this marvelous stability of splendor and disgust, magnificence and rats," Ralph Waldo Emerson said. If people ever succeed in destroying themselves, perhaps the rats will inherit the earth. I don't really want to share my outdoor with rats, however I am not going to entice any more of them, and if one wanders into my yard from time to time to consume birdseed, so be it. So I may not lure any more of them, but I might not pray to them, nor will I eat one. Perhaps when all is said and executed, the rats might not devour me both.

[kandadiff]

Chapter 17 - Aftermath & New Beginnings

Sorry for making you wait

It had been a few days since meeting with my brothers and a week since your funeral and everyone was talking the fact that you were dead differently. Shawn completely immersed himself in any and all assignments he was given and Shawn who usually smiled 95% of the time rarely cracked on in the past week. Hes been acting more and more like Simon, snarky and sarcastic. I tried to ask him if he wanted to talk about it but he was still in denial that anything was wrong with him and he flipped at Roman for something and in the past week I saw Roman less and less. 

Edward had taken another dark turn. He decided not to go back to England and was in the middle of moving back to the city but until he bought a house or find an apartment his tiny family was moved in with his brother and Kitty. Everytime we spoke or I went over to his house to bring the twins for a playdate with they’re new bestfriend Jia, he always seemed in a daze and numb. Like shawn he rarely put on a smile unless Jia was in the room, If she wasn’t it was like he was barely there. 

The Joker had taken things almost exactly how you would have imagined. He bought Hayleys house from her for a ridiculous sum of money in order to keep searching for you. He bought a few boats and an entire scuba team too. He was also beginning at act out his frustration, while he would be more calmer around you he now flipped out at the slightest provocation. He killed 7 of his men in 5 days and now that you were gone he just started killing when he needed something done preferring that easier route instead of manipulation. Hayley also was hanging around him way to much which was an annoyance to me because he thought he could come over my house whenever he wanted too, and now she was there as well. As often as him. I hadn’t spent a quiet night in my house since instead taking the twins to practice there abilities in other parts of the compound but that didn’t stop Hayley from wanting to suddenly become my best friend. 

As for Michael it was radio silence from him and his gang. No word from the underground and no one has seen him leave ‘Castle KillMonger’ since your funeral. 

I however was feeling sick, I didn’t know if it was the fact that I thought the assisin crew that once went after us decided to resurface and finish there job on me or because I boarded up the room that once belonged to you in my house. Unable to even look at it without bursting into tears or maybe because the twins now hung up your picture next to Maxis’s. They broke my heart every time they spoke about it and wishing to see you again. 

Your fans were still devastated, people still walked around in Bunny costumes and had your names inked forever on there body which was a comforting reminder of you.

Except tonight. The criminal underground goes on and so must The Sanctuary. It was a half moon high in the sky as I waited with Negan my motorcycle. It felt so odd to be taking the ‘Hell Cat’ bike out without ‘Jinks’ accompanying me. We were supposed to meet with a fencer (a person who sells things on the black market for a small 10% of whatever we sell) for the large crown ruby that was crushing into my chest and a bubbling in my stomach. It would have been no big deal and something I could have done on my own save for the seemingly endless crowd of bunnies who recognized my Cat Helmet as one of Jinks friends and demanded my autograph. I had no idea what the hell to sign so I just wrote the letters HC with a bunch of scribbles between them. They wanted to know my name and why I didn’t brand myself more but I didn’t want to talk and they weren’t satisfied with my simple answer of “I’m not into being in the public eye.” While staring behind them at the foggy street waiting for either Negan, Simon or the fence to show up. This is what I get for leaving early.

A loud police siren rang through the fog and the bunnies scattered away from the approaching light. I laughed still leaning against the motorcycle and fixing the Ruby so it wasn’t as obvious that it was on my chest. A blue truck pulled up and I smiled. “Did those fuckers leave?” Simon asked after he parked the truck. I smiled and took off my helmet and nodded. “Good; those fucks are turning more and more annoying” He reached in his pocket and took out a slightly smaller then the ruby, Diamond. “Here ya go Kid.” 

“Thanks” I stuffed the diamond my the ruby and waited for Negan with Simon.

“Fair warning to you” He said leaning against the brick building. “Joker and Hayley is with him.”

“What? why?”

Simon shrugged “Those fucks are always trying to get involved in anything now. I think that girl likes the trill and who the fuck knows with The Joker.” I nodded in agreement. The clouds moved in the sky slowly blocking out the light from the moon dulling the streets even more. “You okay out here, kid?” he asked “No offense but you got a lot of people after you and with Michael throwing us the silent treatment I wouldn’t trust him either.”

“Eh” I shrugged “I’m not alone. I have you and you’ll have my back.” I smiled and he threw me a smirk. “So I heard your doing a fanstasic job with your own gang” He nodded proudly. “Good because I think Jay should keep the biggest gang given to Adi but you should take the second one. I’ve been talking to Negan about it. I think you can handle it.”

“you think so?” He laughed “You gotta come visit me sometimes. You can even bring the kids. I gotta nice house and the workers are pretty okay too.” I laughed and nodded. 

“Well I don’t know about the kids but I’ll visit Id love to see your new house but I do have to admit I miss you at the Sanctuary. Your house just sits there no ones in it. I guess I’m just holding it until you visit us!” I playfully scolded and he laughed loudly “What?” I hit his shoulder.

“It’s nice to know you miss me darlin’” He smiled “Negan pissing you off when i’m not there?”

“A little” I laughed and shook my head “but I think he misses you too. Shawn is his new right hand man at the sanctuary but no one could replace you.” I joked and Simon stared at me for a moment before another car pulled up and I sighed. “Great I see Hayley’s red hair now.”

“Red?” Simon asked standing up straight and walking with me over to the car.

“Yup she dyed it.”

- - - - - 

The drop off went better then I though considering we had to go with Hayley who wouldn’t shut the fuck up but split between me, Negan and Simon was $800 million dollars for three jewels. However directly after we dropped off Joker and Hayley at the playhouse lines of Bunnies by the gate and Simon complained and shouted at them causing me and Negan to laugh before we dropped him home. And after we got home we checked on the sleeping kids and went straight to bed ourselves. 

I woke up to the smell of toast and “pancakes?” I yawned and threw off my sleeping mask, Negan smiled as he set down the breakfast tray on the table by the couch. “What’s this?” I asked and he took my hands in his own leading me to the table. It had all of my favorite things on it, Blueberry pancakes with blueberry syrup, a fruit cup with sugar gently sprinkled on top and a banana/strawberry smoothie. I couldn’t help but smile then for a moment panicked. Was this an anniversary that I forgot? Oh shit, no, no our anniversary was in October. Something else? It wasn’’t his birthday...right? No, his birthday passed... was it mine? What the hell was the date?

“Sit Princess” he said pulling out my chair and I smiled at him as he sat across from me. “So I see how fucking confused you are and no it’s not a special holiday yet.”

“Yet?” I raised an eyebrow and he held up his hand. 

“The kids have eaten already and I told Thomas to take them to the river for the morning. Because I want to talk about something.” I nodded getting butterflies in my stomach; the words ‘talk about something’ always left butterflies in my stomach and my mind automatically went to horrible thoughts. No he wouldn’t do that, not with this breakfast. I’ll stab him.

“Shit, doll that look on your face is making me nervous. What happened to the smile? Bring that back.” He joked making me smile again and relax a little. 

“Sorry.” I said taking a bit of a strawberry. “I just didn’t expect this.”

“Don’t think I can be romantic?” He teased and I threw a blueberry at him. He took my hand in his. “I know things have been sad and fucking depressing around here lately with little purse dog gone missing and that fucking rocket mouth Hayley digging her way in with Joker and the joker himself so I wanted to do something nice.��

“This is nice.” I said smiling wide my heart swelling for the man in front of me “This is really sweet daddy thank you.”

He growled at the name but didn’t pounce on me like I thought he would. “I do want to remind you that it ain’t all bad. I love you, the kids love you, we are making this fucking city our bitch, I know things ain’t easy right now. Those fucking brothers of yours and the gangs against us. It’s a lot.” I nodded “But I want to ask you a question and I’m not a fucking dick so I figured I do it in private in case it ain’t the answer I want.” I raised an eyebrow confused and Negan stood up.

“Where are you going?” He then knelt down on one knee and my eyes widened, my heart beating faster and faster. “What’s going on? Negan?”

“Princess,” He said taking my hand in his again but I couldn’t move. I felt frozen just listening to him. “I know you grew up a long fucking time ago so I decided to do this the classic way.” He took out a small blue velvet box. “I know that you love Maximus with all you had and I loved my Lucille and I know that I wasn’t a good husband to her but I promise that if you want me. I’ll be the best motherfucking husband to you. I fucking love you, I loved you for a long time and I know you love me.” He paused thinking of his words carefully “I love those kids like they are my own and I am and will be a damn good ‘baba’ to them.” I chuckled a bit. “You don’t have to answer me now, but I ain’t changing my mind. I want to marry you, only you, forever.” He opened the box to reveal a beautiful ring but my mind was spinning.