Mice and Tadpoles and Dogs Better Scurry...

Everyone breathe a collective sigh of relief...Snowflake has been found. Apparently in her small mouse mind, she was never lost in the first place. She was doing quite well living in the freedom of the open range of our home. Saturday morning as I sat quietly reading my bible and saying my prayers she scampered across the floor of the sun room. Within moments, everyone in our family was on high alert (even if that meant we were alert in various stages of dress-anywhere from underwear to nightgowns) with brooms and mops and buckets in hand. After a prolonged game of cat and mouse, we finally cornered her behind the refrigerator and as Lee pulled the fridge away from the wall, I trapped her underneath a tupperwear bowl. We got her back into the cage and within minutes she was back out again. Even after reenforcing the sides of her wire cage with plastic cable ties, she still pulled a Houdini and was running around the kitchen counter, but unable to find her way to the floor. Lee put her back into the tupperwear container and we called U-haul and relocated the Snowflake and her life partner, Piggy into the flat previously occupied by our tadpoles, Jupiter Flash 1 & 2.

I don't have time to go through their entire biographies, so I'll just provide a brief character sketch of the Jupiter Flash series. If my memory is correct, there were actually 3 of them (kind of like Lassie-we kept replacing them). The first 2 were mail order tadpoles and the last one was your run of the mill creek tadpole. After the first 2 died, Lee decided the reason the tadpoles were not living was due to inadequate housing and filtration/oxygenation systems. To house the pond tadpole Lee went and bought the Cadillac version of aquariums with the XL3000 filtration system. About 15 minutes after he put the tadpole in the water it could no longer fight the current that was sucking it into the filtration system and it died. The first two tadpoles had been given a very proper ceremony and aquatic burial (down the commode, of course). The 3rd tadpole was too big to flush, so I decided to bury it outside, but I didn't want to bury it in our yard. I thought it might bring us bad juju...so, I decided to bury it in our neighbors flower bed. It was about 10 pm and I was between our 2 houses, digging furiously before anyone walked outside and realized what I was doing. Well, fast forward about 2 weeks and I am getting out of the shower and I am standing in the middle of the bathroom wet and completely naked. We have a window in our bathroom, but the privacy fence prevents my neighbors (the neighbors with the dead tadpole in their zinnias) from being able to look in, so I never really worry about modesty. But this time, when I look out the window as I am completely naked, I see my neighbor on his roof staring into my bathroom...at me. The sight of me without clothes, while might have been something to stare at 20 years ago, could turn a grown man into stone now. Luckily, the poor old guy didn't fall off his roof and quickly averted his eyes and turned away. Later, I thought about it and decided that since I turned his flower bed into a tadpole burial ground, I was probably getting what I deserved (by making him an unwilling peeping tom)...bad juju.

It's a good thing that Star can't read. If she could she might decide that she'd be better off living somewhere else because most animals don't have a fighting chance in our house. But she's proving to be a pretty sturdy dog, so odds are, she'll survive us...

Life Lessons

Lesson 1: Have fun with your kids.
The boys and I were talking politics the other day. This was their take on the President Elect;

Oldest boy (age 8, 2nd grade): "Nathan Freeman (not real name) told me that if Obama is elected president (this was the day of the election) then he is going to make a law saying you can hunt animals all year round."

My reply: "Hhmmm! That is interesting. Is that good or bad?"

Younger son (age 6 1/2, 1st grade): "I heard Obama hates dogs and always says bad things about dogs."

I can see that this is turning into a witch hunt so I decide to have a little fun with it.

My reply: "I heard that Barack Obama eats live human babies every morning for breakfast."

Both boys, with a mixture of fascination and disbelief: "Really!?! Are you kidding mom? Where does he get the babies? Really?!?"

Me: "REALLY! I heard it. Someone told me. It must be true."

Both boys: "You're kidding mom, aren't you? Does he really eat human babies for breakfast?"

Me: "It's true. Someone told me, so it has to be true."

Boys: "We can see you smiling mom. We get it!"

This was our first lesson in 'don't believe everything that you hear'.

Lesson 2: What's mine is mine and it's not yours!
Our next lesson, on sharing, occured the next morning.

Oldest son (to younger brother): "Give that back to me! It's mine!" (He's normally not too surly, but he was having an especially difficult morning and he yanked a pencil with photos of all the American Presidents away from his little brother).

Younger brother sits there stunned, still too dazed from having just woken up to put up much of a fight.

Lee: "I let him look at it. Give it back to him so I can explain something to him."

Oldest boy: "But it's MINE!"

Lee: "I told you to let him look at it."

Oldest boy: "But, I got it. My teacher gave it to me. He might mess it up."

Lee: "I'm trying to explain something to him."

After about 5 minutes of this, I couldn't take it anymore and my award winning mothering skills took over. I decided that I needed to provide oldest boy with an illustrative lesson and I took away the plate, but left him his toast.

"Give me that plate. It's mine! You know what, give me that cereal bowl. It's mine too."

This is where I officially lost it. I dumped his cereal on the counter and took away the bowl. My son started laughing at me and bent over and started eating the cereal like a dog off the counter. So, at this point, I decided to use my hand to push the cereal off the counter into the sink saying, "You know what? Give me that cereal too because it is also mine."

Both boys and my husband stare at me like I've lost it. The lesson in sharing quickly devolved into yet another example of how suddenly and seemingly little provocation mom can go from normal person to stark raving lunatic in just moments.

Lesson 3: Don't ever have rodents as pets.

Snowflake escaped. She plotted and planned and she succeeded. When the mice moved from our daughter's room to the boys' room they started escaping from their cage. The boys claim that they had never assisted the mice in their flight to freedom, but I don't believe them. Lee moved the mice to our spare bedroom thinking that this might solve the problem, but when he went to check on them this morning, Snowflake was gone. Coincidentally, there is a stange odor in our backyard. It smells remarkably like a dead animal. But, I don't think Snowflake could decompose that quickly and after a pretty thorough search, we couldn't find any escaped mice, dead or alive. My solution to the problem was to let the other mouse (Piggy) go in the backyard and then in a couple of days tell the kids that both mice had escaped and we would be free of our mouse responsibilities (because I REFUSE to buy any more rodents), but Lee, suddenly getting all moral on me said he wouldn't participate in any mouse genocide. He told me that I could do it, but he wouldn't be a part of it and he didn't want to know about it. When I reminded him that my mom made my brother and I set our mice free in the back yard when we were little he said my mom had been a sad and sick woman and obviously I was still suffering the effects of my childhood. To make matters worse, when I went to check on Piggy, she looked lonely and depressed. When I told Lee that I thought Piggy was depressed he said, "Of course she's depressed." Then I thought he was just shitting me, but he assured me that mice can definitely experience feelings of loss and sorrow. Now I feel bad for the poor mouse that her girlfriend (I'm not sure if Piggy and Snowflake were lesbians. They might have just been girlfriends in the sense that they are/were both female and roommates) is gone and I'm feeling like I should go out and get a replacement mouse. So, now I'm depressed because I'm never going to stop having pet mice because they keep dying or running away. In the mean time, Snowflake is going to start stinking soon.

Mrs Bean the Crazy Meandering Machine

We have a elderly neighbor who likes to wander into everyone else's yard. It's kind of like "Where's Waldo", because no one knows who's yard she will be in next. Today she might be investigating our garbage, but tomorrow she might be peeping into your front window. Until recently, she was on the architectural review committee of our neighborhood association, but her term either finally expired (after 48 consecutive years) or her Sanford and Son landscaping and yard art didn't appeal to the committee. As frightening as it seems, she still drives and she is a firm believer in the "I'll take my half in the middle" school of automobile lane changing (as evidenced by witnessing her turn left from the right hand lane the other day). Most days she can be found cruising the streets in her white Ford Focus far, far from her own home. She has managed to vex just about everyone on the street with her intense scrutiny of all of our lives. Though she might be wearing yesterday's breakfast on her pajamas today, she isn't the least bit hesistant to knock on your door and tell you that your garbage cans are exceeding their capacity or your recycling is out too early.

Lee and I have created a story line with her as the lead character. Because she is so odd, it's only fair that she should have a fictional villian fashioned after her. By day, our protagonist, who we will call Mrs Bean, ambles up and down the street in her inside out pajama top with her long stringy grey hair in a pony tail off to the side. As she walks, stuporously, she runs her fingers through her pony tail over and over and over again. By night she lurks high in the trees in her leather cat suit, stroking her whiskers and listening to the details of other peoples' lives. As she jumps from tree to tree gathering information she purrs with satisfaction. She is a spy, really, and with this evidence, she will damn people. 2710 leaves the water on while they brush their teeth. 2738 has not converted to LED lighting. 2800 drinks organic milk, but they throw their aluminum cans in the garbage.

I've decided that I need to institute a "Mrs Bean Alert" for my neighbors. Whenever she is in one of their yards sifting through the shrubbery at 8:46 am or driving dangerously close to someone's grass (who remembers the term, "trenching your yard"), an APB must be sent out to all who are within earshot. Instead of an "Amber Alert" it is an "Old Woman Alert". My next step is to install lights in the trees so when she is perched up on a branch in her leather cat suit, the floodlights will shine on her directly.

So, if you see someone in your trees late at nite, remember Mrs Bean's Ford Focus can wander far from home!