Mouse in the Frickin' House



Mousy



I have a mouse, er, mice, problem.

When I visualize it, I see the scene in "Ratatouille" when the old lady shoots through the ceiling and reveals hundreds of the critters in the rafters.

I, too, can imagine hundreds of them, huddled in my sweater drawer, though I've only eyeballed a dozen or so.
And they are ballsy! Brave! Elephantitis of their tiny genitalia! Running here and there in broad fluorescent light across the kitchen floor, down the hall, into the living room.
Where am I during these brave forays into my sanity? Screaming like a girl, of course, and wiggling and dancing like a Native American, except without their grace and deliberateness.
My four-year-old just comes around the corner and says, "Another mouse, mama?"
He's so calm and cool and I want that peace, that surety that "Mama will fix it, I'm good, I'm watching Yo Gabba Gabba and all is well. Where's my juice box?"
I brought in the cat to kill while I was at the store. I came home to a blood bath, a veritable crime scene worthy of CSI, whichever city you choose, and I smiled as I cleaned up the vestiges of mouse blood. I felt creepy, but the cat gloated, I whistled, we were both happy.
Alas, of course, the mouse situation escalated as they gravitated toward my bed in the middle of the night. I kept vigil three nights in a row, and each of those nights the little sucker ran across my BED!!!
EEEK!
I called in reinforcements, who brought poison pellets larger than my fist and inserted them into feline-friendly areas of the domicile while I watched holding a plunger in case a rat scooted out in search of whatever.
Poison in place, I thought I would never see another whiskered rodent again.
Until one staggered into the bedroom at seven in the evening.
He was drunk on poison, moving slowly and without focus. I found a jar, scooped him up (without squealing, I was quite proud of my containment, pardon the pun), and proceeded to question why I was jarring him with glass and not a shoe.
Honestly, though, my killer instincts are non-existent, especially since my should-be victim was so dang adorable. Oh! those little paws!!!
My son inspected the mouse, determined him to be "so cute! I want to keep him forever!" and that was when the crisis entered in.
Soon I was going to have one dead-mouse-in-a-jar and one morose miniature pet owner.
Fifteen minutes later, mouse was a given, and a reprieve arrived: my son asked about the mouse's family. Yes! His family! They would miss him right?
I suggested release into the wild so Mousy could find his folks. (The Wild was the backyard, where the cat and dogs were not currently present.)
And my baby boy was sad sad sad for about a minute and a half, and now he's forgotten the whole deal.
I, however, have a cell phone containing a picture of a mouse in a jar and a lasting compulsion to carry a boot with me at all times, y'know, just in case...

Fun with Alcoholic Octogenarians

Auntie is a drunk, she has been for most of her 86 uneventful years on this planet. Perhaps that's why she drinks, because she has no imagination or gumptive powers to find a better hobby.
She drinks Wild Turkey, 101 Proof. By my estimation between my fingers, toes, and an abacus, 101 proof equals more than fifty percent alcohol. And she buys it by the barrel, that ginormous jug reserved for lower liquor store shelves because sheer weight alone will bring the inventory down. One a week.
I am not a big drinker so I don't know that a vat of liquor per week is considered "a lot," especially to a run-of-the-mill alcoholic, but in my own personal brain, it seems to be quite a quantity of spirits. And, ironically, it is giving no lift to Auntie's spirit; she's still dour and puckered.
The drinking of 8-10 ounces of turkey juice is not enabling proper balance and walking skill, though she has a cane. Wobbling around is a fully mental challenge for her anyway, much less when she's sauced, and so I took it upon myself to remedy the situation with a bit of tap water each evening to top off the bottle.
Did I mention she has dementia? No? That's probably a crucial detail, because otherwise I would not get away with the dilution portion of my story. She would stagger over to me and smack me with the cane for taking the sweet out of her candy instead of just opening the bottle each day and drinking a lesser portion of her beloved liquor.
At first, the liquid looks like bourbon, it's a dark amber. After the first day, it's more Long Island Tea than straight barrel-aged sauce. Second day, she's looking a bit peaked, shall we say, kind of brewed tea, turning to a weaker brewed version the next day. Day four, it looks like a bottle of urine. It's not pretty. And by day five, Auntie is downing a glass or twelve of sunshine tinted water. At least I can be certain she is getting her recommended daily allotment of water each day.
Does she notice a substantial taste change? No, she does not.
But of course, when I watch her practically licking the inside of her tumbler to get to the last drops and I realize I am marvelling that any mammal other than a giraffe has a tongue that long, it's time to get a new bottle.
Here's the fun part: you can't water down a fresh bottle. There is no room in the inn, shall we say, and the bottle would of course overflow.
So you wait, just watch.
She pours that first drink, sits at the table, eagerly lifts that glass to her mouth, and takes that first sip.
Bam!
The lips purse, the throat constricts, the eyes squeeze tightly and then bug out like a thyroid patient and here come the sound effects! Starts with a gasp, ends with a whimper.
Visualize a water buffalo submerged too long. She shakes her cranium back and forth ferociously to get that junk down her gullet. Droplets of booze fly from her lips and snot from her nose and I think, "I'm gonna need Windex."
After the initial breathing returns, she looks at me and whispers from her abraded throat: "Good."
And I go to the cleaning cabinet for supplies.

My Butt Fell Off

In the interest of journalistic truth, perhaps "fell away" is the better descriptive phrase.
Upon leaving the shower last night, I happened to catch a rear view of my rear view.
Startling conclusion: my ass is not where I left it.
When last I saw my butt, and granted, that was some time ago, it was locked and loaded in the upright position, I'm sure of it. Now...not so much.
I need scaffolding and a pulley system to get that thing back to it's bird's eye view.
So -- I have ordered from my friendly e-Bay account the latest thing in workout torture, "The Brazilian Butt Lift" DVD set, complete with First Aid Kit and a local connection to the Fallen-and-Can't-Get-Up folks.
I've been wary of anything that said Brazil in the title since I heard of the wax treatment one can purchase for one's ... nether region. Even Brazil Nuts sounded unappealing after visualizing a denuded girly part, but, hey, that was before I felt my butt rubbing the backs of my knees when I walk.
Viva Brazil!
I'll try to update you once I get this workout going, assuming I can manage to crawl to the keyboard after God-knows-how-many lunges and squats I'm committing myself to.
(P.S. I'm afraid.)

Things 80-Somethings Say

I know a gentleman in Auntie's harmonica band -- different story, different day -- who was once a volunteer firefighter in the Bethany, Oklahoma area. Ah, sweet, sweet octogenarian, preacher man.
I asked if he had any distinct memories of fires he fought and he named a few, in buildings long defunct and forgotten by most everyone around nowadays.
Casually, I asked if he had ever saved someone from a burning building. I thought I was speaking facetiously.
He spoke softly, "No, I never had the privilege."
I almost cried.

Ahhhhh...

I've been off-line far, far too long, and now -- huge breath of congested internet air -- I'm back!
And Yahoo Music playing in the background. Coffeehouse mix, thank you.
Whew. Can't beat it.
I've been out of pocket for innumberable reasons, all dramatic and long-winded and inconsequential to this writing, so suffice it to say I am pleased to have rejoined the ethereal community of fellow people!
To catch up: the aunt is still in the mix. Auntie is her own brand of weirdness undercover, a covert, stealthy brand of evil armed with an old wooden cane and an acrid tongue, but only on lucid days, and fortunately those are few and far between. The "betweens" are boring, rote, low-hum. Then, ZING! Godzilla wakes up in increasingly-rare form and I'm off and running, keeping between her toes when her feet fall so as to not be crushed between those quarter-inch thick, yellowed talons of hers. Ew. But personal habits are an entire chapter all its own.
And look at that, we're all caught up.
So check back, the adventures continue, and now I can vent via keyboard and give Prozac a break now and then!

O Pioneer: My Brush with Greatness, Before the 'Ness Set In

In the third grade I acquainted myself with a little lady who wore a Dorothy Hamill haircut (it was the late seventies, her 'do was hot, we all wanted it, that's all I'm sayin') and sang all of the words to "You Light Up My Life," a highly popular song at the time. (Google it if you don't believe me.)
She was red-headed, cute as a button, friendly, outgoing, and smiled with dimples as deep as ditches. She was my eight-year-old real-life-girl idol. Shaun Cassidy who??
I wanted to be Betty to her Wilma. (Another retro reference. Yeah, yeah, I'm aged.)
In gym one day I made her laugh, my First Stand-Up Routine. The subject: popcorn. I made her snort. That was my First Atta Girl in my "Atta Girl, a Permanent Record of Personal Achievement and Yay Me Stuff."
Also a First, I discovered the joy of making other people, those who weren't my mother, laugh. (My mother's laugh has always been an auditory drug to me. To make her laugh I will do most anything, and the elation I get from her joy is a high that's impossible to deny.)
One sunny rainbow-strewn day this lovely classmate invited me to her home for my First Outside-the-Neighborhood After School Play Date, a term that I believe did not come into fashion until recently. (Yes, yes, we were ahead of our time. Insert falsely modest downturned eyes, and applaud if you wish.).
Agog, I went to her home on my First Ever School Bus Ride, another blog entirely, one focusing mostly on odor.
In her enormous home, her room was actually two rooms: an enormous bedroom and a playroom as large as my entire home, garage included. I was in My First Mansion.
When I got home that evening, after a fantastic day of dining on the First Kid Cuisine ever invented (I'm sure it was, trust me) and floating in lovely glittery illusions only an eight-year-old with her First Heterosexual Girl Crush can invent, I wanted to move to her neighborhood.
Instead, only a few short months later, we did move. To a new school district.
Aaargh.
Crushed. Downtrodden. With hair much too thin to support my own anemic version of the Hamill bob, I moved.
The name of this eight-year-old young lady I emulated at will: Ann Marie Smith. 
When I saw her again in high school, she was Ree, and she was lithe and graceful and oh-so-popular and I had reached critical point-of-no-return geekiness, so of course I never spoke to her.
She was my brush with greatness. I thought she was great then, but now the world has been put on notice that this chick is to be heard.
Now she is Ree Drummond, http://www.thepioneerwoman.com/, an entrepreneur, a chef, a teacher, a performer, a photographer, and soon to be a fifty-foot-tall star of the big screen of moviedom
I suggest you check her website and peruse it a while.
I wish she would post pictures of her childhood bedroom. Sigh. I'm sure it's as glorious as I remember, 'cause little girls never exaggerate in their memories...right?

In Sickness and Crap Like That

Yesterday it was 74 degrees outside, a delightfully balmy, need-sunscreen kind of day.
Today -- the high has been 31 and the snow "fall" is horizontal.
I have not been feeling well for days now and I can assure you that it hasn't helped that flowers and trees are budding prettily, only to be crushed under drifts of snow, They are now rethinking the bloom to torture me with at a later date.
I have always considered my voice to sound mannish. I normally like to pretend it's more Demi Moore than Wilford Brimley, but this week I know I'm channeling Abe Vigoda. Not pretty.
A friend wants to call and chat today. Chat. With Abe Vigoda. And he's stubborn, not "listening" when I e-mail him that chatting today is a mistake, as it would inspire visions of transvestites on Lesbian Night. (That just came to me, I don't believe it to be a real entity, so no inquiry e-mails as to where this show may be seen, please.)
I don't like the phone anyway, though it's far better than texting, a much different and more vigorously argued topic than I care to handle today.  But speaking into a receiver while trying to keep breathing shallow so as to dissuade coughing fits is not a seemly thing to do today.
Long story short: I feel like crap. Please let me wallow in my self pity.
More soon.