Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Monday, Jul. 19, 2004 - 12:39 a.m.

Not content merely to use lizards for the practice of catch-and-release, Roo has taken to using mice. At 11:15 at night.

I'm sittin' here at the computer, wrappin' up a long day, when I hear all this banging around over by the trashcan and recycling. It keeps going for a while, so I think "huh," and ask TB "is that you?" He answers me from the garage.

Clearly not him.

I go and look, just in time to see Roo drop a little mouse out of her evil jaws-o-death, and just as it starts to take off, raise her paw back and smack the livin' crap outta the poor thing, sending it flying down the hallway, almost all the way to the front door. And then she leaps after it like lightning, so that she's on it again almost before it even stops sliding. At which point, TB becomes aware of the situation and comes inside to get the mouse from her.

Right about the time she lets go of it and bats it under the bedroom door.

And then looks at the door like "Huh. How the hell did that get closed?"

::sigh::

TB goes into the bedroom, and I - wisely, I think, since I have little tolerance for that sort of thing - come back here and play a game of Free Cell. Coz, there's nothing like an addictive computer game when one's bedroom is being destroyed in a literal game of cat and mouse. And I do mean destroyed. There are things hitting the walls, falling over, slamming onto the floor, so that at last I get up and call thru the closed door to ask what's happening, and TB opens the door, announces in a disgusted tone of voice he is entirely unimpressed with the cat's hunting skills, and steps back from the door, so that I can see that yes, my bedroom is indeed in a shambles. As in ransacked. As in it looks like a giant mouse broke and entered. TB is all "let's just leave everything as it is for a while and maybe the mouse will go, but I look at the clock, and see it's 11:45, and I'm like, "yeah...that's not gonna work - I have to be in bed in 15 minutes. So he's all disgusted, because all the crap lying everywhere and piled on the bed is just not conducive to sleep time, and he knows it.

Now, I need to digress here a bit, because there are those among you who will remember the last time a mouse got into my bedroom, and that I have since tried to mouse-proof the room. Which helped, but still most of that stuff was all over the place. But it was easier to move most of our stuff out of the bedroom, this time around. So we did that, with TB grumbling it was a waste of time, because the mouse was gone, he knew it was gone, there was no place for it to hide in there. And I'm like, "are you high? Just for starters alone, there's a whole world of hiding in the 7' high cabinet we put in the corner as an armoir/closet thingie." Which he insisted was absolutely mouseproof, prompting me to lecture him on the ability of mice to compress their bodies enough that they can actually squeeze thru a hole the size of a dime, and gee, see this door held open by the towel that you insist hanging on it every day so that it doesn't shut properly? There, for starters, is the perfect opening for a mouse to slip in and find purchase. Which led to more arguing, because he apparently thinks that mice somehow blow up to 10 times their normal size when they actually try to hide in a place - but only when they are trying to hide, I guess, because I don't know how else he explains their tiny size at all other times of the day. So he decides to turn the topic back to the cat, and how it's all her fault she's a crummy huntress, because when he opened the door for her to get in, all she did was go and look around the comforter, which was hanging from the foot of the bed.

The same comforter we have since piled on the bed, which he irritatedly told me a mouse would not climb up. It's all sealed, he said, so he doesn't know why she'd mess with that. And I'm like, "sealed as in that open end right there that only buttons every 16" or so, with the comforter inside showing right now? That kind of sealed?" So we take the thing out to the garage and unbutton it and pull the comforter out of the cover, and voila, the mouse comes tumbling out of it, plops onto the floor, and dives under the sofa.

Frickin' tell *me* I don't know anything about mice, I grew up on a farm - we be havin' words.

But I am a bigger person than that. So I merely say "I told you so." And he apologizes to both me and the cat. And now, it's way past my bedtime.

Peace out,
Katie

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