UberMouse Meets His Nemesis

Brent and I woke up last night to incredibly loud crashing noises. First thought: break-in by someone unaware that there's not that much to steal? Second thought: crazed wild animal? Possum, maybe? Surely a chipmunk couldn't possibly make that much noise.

Second thought was half-right. Crazed animal, yes. But not wild. Well, only temporarily wild, I guess.

Tiamat caught her first mouse. Unfortunately, after bloodying it and leaving a grisly trail through the dining room and kitchen, she chased it under the radiator in the hall. This was an unsatisfactorily anticlimactic ending for our feline Mighty Hunter, so she swiped at it, and got her paws good and stuck on the glue trap Brent had set out months ago in our failed attempts to defeat the UberMouse.

That's when she started tearing around the place in a frenzy, knocking shit over and making a general ruckus.

4:09 a.m., to be precise.

She trusts me enough that when she saw me, she paused in her flight to let me size up the situation. Then she took off again, to take refuge under our bed.

With the glue trap.

And the mouse stuck on it.

When I tried to coax her out she panicked again, and this time, managed to knock the glue trap in squeezing out between the bedframe and the wall. So that was helpful. It's always good to catch a lucky break now and then.

So I took the glue trap with the mouse on it down to the kitchen, which is when I discovered that our kitchen floor looked like a Tom and Jerry murder scene, by stepping in the evidence with bare feet. Lucky break, over.

Then I looked at the trap, and saw the mouse was still breathing.

Argh. Not that it freaked me out. But now, on top of everything else, I can't help but recast the whole flight of terror from the mouse's point of view. How awful. I mean, you escape the terrifying cat (who, by the way, has no teeth, so what she would do with a mouse when she catches one?) and run right into a glue trap and are mysteriously immobilized. Then, you get pulled out of your hiding place by the monster chasing you, but your end isn't quick and clean. Instead, you get a Romp of Terror up and down stairs and under tables and beds. Finally, some looming shadow comes and puts you out of your misery (details unbeknownst to me, thankfully).

No more glue traps, that's for damn sure.

mice, non-Newtonian solids, and Time

Exterminator visit today; more poison traps in basement. Some of those in the kitchen cabinets had not been touched, others, the bait was entirely gone. But since Brent and Cimi sealed up most of the holes around the pipes a couple weeks back, we're hoping that that will make a difference.

Yesterday I tried out First Art's recipe for silly putty. (Here it is: 4 T liquid starch, 8 T Elmer's white school glue, food coloring. Mix together and let set 5 minutes, then knead into putty.) It totally worked, though I was initially highly doubtful and in fact was planning to throw the strange, stringy mass away but it felt so weird in my fingers I kept messing with it and eventually realized that it was getting kneaded into silly putty despite my doubts. Clare loves it. Last night it was "green goo" but that morphed this morning into "googly." So pleased with myself I had to call my mother, who, as a former chemistry teacher, appreciates that sort of thing more than normal people.

I can't believe it's August; I need to plan for Brent's birthday, and also pull out my notes for the ACU Lectureship class in September and start working on getting my mind back on it. (I probably also need to think about finding a place to stay during Lectureship...oh how I hate logistical details.) It's amazing how these summer days can seem almost frustratingly long and lazy and yet there's still not enough time to really get things done. I think this is probably the result of overindulgence in procrastination.

So I've decided to reform some of my counterproductive ways: eat breakfast, put in my contacts (glasses are a liability around Clare nowadays, plus, it makes me feel less sloppy--even though I'm still just as sloppy, it's just a mental trick), do yoga during naptime, and make sure that Clare and I do at least one major learning-type activity each day, whether it's music or art or whatever, and lots of outside self-directed play (she loves digging in the dirt nowadays; a couple days ago she made "mud soup" which then turned into "rice and beans" as it got thicker).

We also have some pics of the house which I'll put up in another post, and some of the backyard, which is still gorgeous even though the lilies and the hostas are no longer in bloom.

death count: 7

Two more this morning. We're thinking about borrowing the humane mouse traps again, just to have more traps out there. The spring traps have caught 3 so far, bigger than the others we'd seen. The tunnel traps seems to do well with smaller mice but not bigger ones. It doesn't seem like the stuff the exterminator put down is really slowing them down any. But maybe that takes awhile to have an appreciable effect...?

I reorganized the office a bit this morning while Clare was dancing around the living room downstairs to "Lazytown." (I really despise that particular show. All the puppet characters look like they were born with FAS and the main girl actor is all cutesy in pink and madeup with more mascara than I use for a night out. But Clare dances around to it so joyfully I can't bring myself to cut her off.) Anyhow, once I got all the boxes out, it was clear that the file cabinet really needed to be in the corner, and that meant moving not only it but also a bookcase full of books. That's what I get for poor visualization skills. (See, Em? I am helpless without you, kid.) Anyhow, I got it all switched around and like the result. There's a lot of usable space in here for crafty artsy stuff with Clare and also for yoga, whenever I manage to find some time to do some yoga. Generally there's so much else to do during naptime that it never happens, and the one morning I tried it while Clare was awake she kept running in here and grabbing at my legs while I was trying to do balancing poses. It's not easy to stay in "exalted warrior" with a 35-pound toddler hanging on you. So the only permanent result of that experiment is that every so often Clare will lie down on the floor and kind of wave her legs in the air and announce that she's doing yoga.

So now I am really ready to start working. And yesterday I added another item to my fall agenda (much to Brent's dismay). Leaven has an upcoming Theology & Science issue and I am just not passing that up--it's too cool. Luckily it sounds like I can work up a short article based on stuff I'm already doing anyway. Gotta love that. And I'm hopeful that this enforced break from research will provide me with a little bit of perspective on the transhumanist stuff I was sort of drowning in before; I really do want to provide as accurate and fair portrayal of the movement as possible, but I need to avoid getting too bogged down in the details.

Well. For some reason no one turned on the dishwasher all day long yesterday and so I have a dishwasher full of clean dishes to unload and a kitchen sink overflowing with the detritus of last night's dinner makings: homemade pita bread, hummus and babaganoush means quite a bit of kitchen wreckage, and with the mice and all, it's really a terrible idea to let things just sit around dirty. And that means Today's Naptime is dedicated to my very least favorite activity in the Whole World: Cleaning My Kitchen.

Don't know where the Emily Dickinson caps came from, just felt like a little emphasis was needed, I guess. So you all know How Much I Really Hate It.

Later today, perhaps a venture down to the park with Clare on the bicycle. We'll see. I still feel nervous about it; the bike slews around quite dramatically as soon as you stop moving, and I always feel like I've barely avoided a terrible fall. I suppose it wouldn't kill us but OH, the Guilt...