OMG The Mice Got Loose!

I was in the den watching a movie when Young'un came running down the stairs yelling, "MOOOOOOMMMMM! There's a mouse in my room!" I didn't get it right away; I thought he was talking about a stray mouse. I got out a few incoherent words as I followed him up to his room... but ultimately he said something that stopped me in my tracks: "--And the girls are gone!"

The girls! Lily and Squeakers. I didn't understand how they could have gotten out... but Young'un showed me that their petting zone lid was unhooked. Well, damn. Now what??? I went first to where he'd seen a mouse go, namely under his dresser. At first I didn't see anything, but then I moved a small box that was under there, and who did I see but Miss Lily. She just sat there looking at me, I picked her up -- and she bit the hell out of my hand, in two places. That kind of surprised me, because she'd never bitten before. I suppose the whole situation of being out of the cage for the first time in her life had her all fussed up. I put her back in the cage and she went directly to the food bowl and started eating as if she were famished.

"What about Squeakers?" asked Young'un. What, indeed. I first thought we might be able to attract her with food, so I prepared a food dish and set it underneath the table in the mouse room. But then we decided to search the bedrooms, just because. Young'un returned to his bedroom with the flashlight and started searching under the bed, while I turned on the light in the master bedroom. There beside the bed, right in front of the little chest of drawers that I use as a bedside table, sat our Miss Squeakers. She was cleaning her front paws! Pretty darn casual for a mouse who happened to be sitting mere inches away from Angel's "panic room" -- but of course she couldn't know that. I quietly alerted Young'un, then got down on my hands and knees and crawled slowly toward our mousie. Unlike her sister she didn't bite me or even struggle when I carried her back to her home. But like Lily she went straight for the food!

It's my guess these two wandered out and then realized that they didn't have a clue how to find food. Squeakers in particular seemed downright relieved to be back in the cage! And we were certainly relieved to have them back safe and sound.

I should probably tell the mice's story -- I haven't done that here. A few years ago Young'un asked for pet mice, so we bought him two (to keep each other company). They were supposed to be females. Despite this, Young'un named the white one Hermione and the brown one Harry... and it turned out he was right. One afternoon I came back from walking the dog and found Husband and Young'un waiting for me, looking like the proverbial cat that swallowed the canary. "You've got to see this," they told me, and there in the mouse cage with Hermione and Harry were eight naked pink baby mice.

Well, two of them didn't survive the night, and a third one failed to thrive and died after a week. The other five grew up sleek and lively. I went out on the Internet and found information on mouse breeding, so I would know what to expect, how to deal with this, and (most important) how to sex the mice. I knew we had to split the males and females up before they got old enough to breed, or we'd have a population explosion. When the pups were four weeks old we bought another cage and I divided them up. Hermione stayed in the original cage with Minerva and Lily. Harry, Hagrid, James, and Albus moved to the new cage. None of the babies were white like Hermione; they were all brown except Hagrid, who was glossy black and quite large.

So the day after I split up the mice, we learned that Harry had been too quick for us. Hermione's second litter gave us five more mice to love. We named the females Bella, Trixie, Lovely, and Squeakers, and the male Sirius. (He was a Black mouse.) When he was old enough, we moved him in with his three brothers and papa Harry. Well, that didn't work well at all. The guys' dorm had always been a boisterous place, and with the addition of another male it turned into Fight Club. After months of this we realized that male mice couldn't live together in close quarters with no females. "They need to be able to date," I explained to Young'un. So we sadly gave away all except Hagrid, his favorite.

Meanwhile, the girls' dorm was a perpetual slumber party. Hermione and her daughters got along wonderfully. Two and sometimes three of them would run in their wheel together, and they slept up in the "petting zone" all cuddled together like a furry patchwork quilt. (Squeakers and Lovely had dark fur like Hagrid's.) Minerva, the smallest, smartest, and most hand-tame, liked to sleep with her head across Hermione's shoulders. The girls have always played together with their toys, and run in and out of their castle together.

Over the years they've passed away, one by one. Bella went first, then mama Hermione; then Lovely, and then Minerva. Only Lily and Squeakers are left in the girls' dorm, and Hagrid is still the king of his world. We still enjoy watching them at play, and getting them out to walk around on us... and they can still surprise us occasionally!

Day One of Vacation

Another hot, hot day in the great American midwest. Temperatures rose above 100 again today. I got up at about the time I usually get to work, putzed around on the computer awhile, then got dressed and went into work. --Oh, but only for a few minutes! I had to drop off the charger from the on-call phone, and I also wanted to check in and make sure everything ran all right after our emergency fix on Saturday. As I hoped, all was well.

After lunch Husband, Youngun, and I went out shopping in the HEAT. We came home with a box of mousie litter, a portable DVD player which Young'un bought with his graduation money and saved allowance, and six plastic storage drawers for the furnace room. Before I had time to think much about it, I went in there and got all the cardboard drawers out and set them on the floor of Firstborn's old room. I spent the next couple of hours going through their contents.

This cardboard storage unit had been my mother's, and I hadn't really gone through it when she died -- I just brought it to my house and put it in the furnace room. I knew she kept her dollhouse miniature stuff in there, and also some other collectibles and small antiques. The top two drawers also contained some of Firstborn's old books, and some of Stepson's model-railroad equipment, and a plastic thing that I was not able to identify. I put those aside to deal with later.

All the rest of the drawers contained Mom's miniatures. I was truly amazed at how many tiny objects she had! There were sofas, beds, lamps, chests of drawers; wicker furniture; Chinese chests and bureaus. She had dollhouse-scale wallpaper and carpeting. I was touched to see that she had saved the tiny "broomstick lace" rainbow afghan I made for her dollhouse, using a pencil in place of the broomstick. She'd also saved the miniature karate gi and green belt I sewed for her when I was a green belt. She had a miniature piano, and a chaise longue, tiny vases and knicknacks, a slot machine and an old-fashioned Art Deco-style jukebox. I'd just about decided she had everything in there but the kitchen sink! --But then I saw...



By 5:30 this afternoon I'd been through all of the cardboard drawers, and had everything packed neatly in the plastic ones. They're not in the furnace room yet; I'll save that job for tomorrow. It will be a bit of a job, because I'll have to take out everything in that corner in order to get the cardboard structure out. But that's the easy part compared to what I did today. Go me!

Music takes me back in time

This afternoon I heard a song that took me right back to the first summer I worked as a programmer -- "That's All" by Phil Collins. One of my co-workers kept a radio on top of his flipper-door cabinets, where we all could hear it, and he kept it tuned to an AM rock station that played the hits in heavy rotation. The songs from that summer are entwined with the memory of my early days as an IT professional. Whenever I hear one I know again the pinch-myself feeling of suddenly not being poor anymore; of going from literally no income to sitting in a cushy burnt-orange executive chair at a massive desk, in a work space paneled with golden oak and trimmed with brass.

My group's ages ranged from mid-twenties to mid-thirties; at thirty I was in the middle. We worked hard but played hard too: I remember one day when we took the afternoon off and went over to our boss' house, where we played whiffle ball in the backyard and drank pitchers of margaritas until the sun went down. We were young and working for a young company, so young that some of the systems were still in their early stages. Two or three times a week our mainframe computer used to go down hard, and when it did we'd be unable to work for several hours. One of my favorite memories from that time occured during such an outage. I was leaning back in my cushy chair, with shoes off and nylon-stockinged feet up on my golden oak desk, and the radio started playing Donna Summer's "She Works Hard For The Money". And I said to myself, Self, you have got it made.

Time, time, time, look what's become of me

The 16th of July, another hot, sunny, humid day high on a hill above the beautiful Illinois. Right now I feel like a ball of energy at rest, kinetic, held in place by all the things I'm not doing. But when I decide what direction to go in, I'll start to move and I won't stop! It's a great way to feel on a Saturday morning in the season I love best.

I can just barely believe how fast the summer is going. I wish I could grab ahold with both hands and say, "SLOW DOWN!" I wouldn't even mind that that would mean spending more time at work; I love my job. (Even when it's kind of a meatgrinder, as it's been this week.) The older I get, the faster time goes by. I can't go fast enough to keep up! --Or am I looking at this backwards? Maybe that's the problem exactly: as I get older my natural pace is slowing down, and I have to work harder to keep up.

("It takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place. If you want to get somewhere, you'll have to run much faster than that!" All I need to know about life, I learned from Lewis Carroll.)


I got this from Pam:

Your Blogging Type is Artistic and Passionate

You see your blog as the ultimate personal expression - and work hard to make it great. One moment you may be working on a new dramatic design for your blog... And the next, you're passionately writing about your pet causes. Your blog is very important - and you're careful about who you share it with.

What's Your Blogging Personality?

Shock, sadness, and wishful thinking

Yesterday's terrorist attacks in London made for shocking news to wake up to. My heart goes out to the victims and their families. When the free people of the world face such a heartless, fanatical enemy bent on destroying our way of life, I can't understand how we can still let our relatively minor differences polarize us. I wish we would -- or could -- unite against that enemy instead of nitpicking each other to death.

Tom Cruise is crazier than a shithouse rat.

He went off on Matt Lauer in an interview on the Today Show. They were discussing Brooke Shields' book, in which she talks about how anti-depressants relieved her post-partum depression. Tom Cruise went into a rant about how psychiatry is a pseudo-science, Ritalin is a street drug -- it was just amazing.

Here's a link to an article about it: Tom and Matt

Now I have no problem with this high-school dropout believing he knows more about psychiatry than doctors with eight or more years of college education. I don't even have a problem with him believing he knows more about post-partum depression than someone who's actually experienced it (such as Brooke Shields or myself). However, he must realize that when he goes on television and says so, he's going to sound like a raving nutjob.

My guess is he saw what Michael Jackson can get away with, and asked himself "Why am I knocking myself out trying to appear normal?"