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...