Long and mousey

This post. Not my hair. I mean, it's long, but not at all mousey.

Anyhoo.

Drove into work this morning on autopilot after a day at home yesterday feeling crap and another poor night's sleep. It's very very tiresome*, not sleeping properly. Makes everything else feel ten times more difficult and wearing than it really is, and every molehill turns into a huge mountain.

Still, the sun is out and I am wearing a very lovely pink sparkly scarf over my otherwise all-black work outfit and three different people have told me how (and I quote) glamorous I look. So hurrah for that, at least.

Off to the gym after work if I can summon up the enthusiasm, but to be honest I still feel pretty low so might leave it till tomorrow. I have a guitar lesson, so it will be a bit of a mad rush to do my stuff at the gym, get home, get showered and changed and be bright-eyed and all ready to play guitar and eat biscuits with my lovely teacher by 6pm. And we got cow biscuits in specially.

So it might be a session tomorrow and one on Thursday as planned instead.

Badgerdaddy's post about the mouse made me think about our own vermin slaying experiences. And we have lots. Our previous house in Salisbury had a bit of a mouse invasion one winter.

We didn't realise it for ages.

I was home alone for a week while Mr WithaY was away for work, and I was sitting on the floor in the sitting room, no music, no tv, all very quiet, reading an improving book**. After a while I realised I could hear odd scratching, tapping noises. I looked out of the windows, nobody about. Went into the kitchen, nothing going on in there. Sat and listened again, but the noise had stopped.

This happened several times over the next few nights. I'd be sat quietly, and would hear this odd noise, get up to go and try to find out what it was, and it would stop.

Many months later we were redecorating the sitting room. We moved a small shelf unit that the stereo*** lived on, and hey presto, behind it was a Tom and Jerry stylee mousehole. Some fucking mouse had been busily making his way into the fabric of the house! He'd eaten the wallpaper, channelled his way into the bricks and gnawed all the rubber insulation from the mains electric cables for good measure.

What I'd been hearing night after night was him doing his little mousey home improvements. Lucky he didn't eat right into the power cables and burn the bloody house down.

After that we kept an eye out for further evidence, and sure enough we started to find mouse poo in the kitchen. In the fruit and vegetable basket, to be exact. We binned all the fruit and veg, noting that the only thing the mouse had had a go at were the chillies. Not the apples, or potatoes, or carrots or even the onions. Just the chillies. Odd, eh?

We set a trap. The next day there he was, dead as the proverbial, his teeth buried in a fine lump of stilton (as a last meal, Mr WithaY thought it was appropriate that it be something a bit special).

I must admit I had a bit of a lump in my throat as we slung him in the bin. The mouse. Not Mr WithaY.

The intermittent rats in the current WithaY garden get no such sentimental treatment. We spot one stealing the birdfood, the sniper on the grassy knoll is deployed, we very soon afterwards dump the twitching carcase in the bin (the grey one, not the green one).

Mr WithaY sometimes makes me take photos of the really big ones. It's nice to share things, I think.




*heh, see what I did there?

**improving book: i.e: not porn

***are they still called stereos these days? Will the younger readers know what I mean?