Ka-squish!

I’m a slow blogger these days. I blame life. Having up to recently spent most of mine with my (very cute) nose stuck in a science book, I haven’t quite adjusted to this whole vacation-thing. In short; I’m somewhat unprepared for actually having a life and it now takes up a lot of time, because once classes start up again, I’m going to have to get rid of it again. Enjoy it while it’s there, as some old woman on TV said the other day.

One thing I have learned is that life has its ups and downs. Last week, for example, it had a definite down.

You see, I have a freezer in my storage room. Having a freezer isn’t a bad thing, in and by itself, it can actually be mighty handy, but in my case it turned into a nightmare. In a Freddie Krüger kinda way.

To the extent of my knowledge the content of my freezer limited itself to some old plums and a bunch of berries, neither of which held much interest to me. Therefore the freezer was pretty much ignored, poor thing. However, it turned out that my mum had been putting stuff in there. Stuff that had once been alive, such as hams and bits of an elk that had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Had I known that there was actual FOOD in there, I would have stopped by to visit it every once in a while and the whole, hideous disaster might have been avoided…

But I didn’t, so it wasn’t.

It started last week, when I noticed a faint, but strange odour when I walked by the big, red door that the storage room likes to hide behind. My mum, who had come to visit, noticed it to. We stuck our little heads into the room and sniffed some more. More smell. We inspected every nook and cranny, and eventually decided that the smell seemed to be coming from the freezer-area. And then we saw… the electrical outlet. It was empty, but it was supposed to be filled with the plug from the freezer. The very same plug which was now lying on the floor, stretched towards the door, as if it had been trying to get away.

We opened the freezer and became acquainted with the little odours big, fat Momma. The previously mentioned ham lay on top of a mountain of plums.

We touched it.

It exploded.

Ka-squish.

Clean-up was a bitch.

So that was my weekend. How was yours?

Day of the "eeek"

Yesterday started out fantastically boring. It was plain and simply dull. I was sitting by my computer, having an IM conversation with a friend, rolling in my own tedium, when I suddenly heard a strange sound from the corner of the kitchen where the oven and the refrigerator lives. It was sort of like tapping on metal. Every time I heard it, I got up from my chair to investigate, but all became quiet as soon as I did.

Thinking that it was probably nothing, I returned to my chair and my conversation. Just as I had almost stopped thinking about the whole thing, I saw, in the corner of my eye, something small, brown and roundish dart out from behind the refrigerator and disappear behind the dog’s feed barrel. “Mouse!” shouted The Voice that lives inside my head.

In a split second, my attention was ripped away from my computer screen and towards the barrel. Somewhere along the line, I let out a gasp. The dog, which up until that moment had been snoring away in the livingroom, immediately flew out of the couch and came running. Somewhere in her puppyhood, she made the connection between gasps and something happening. As far as gasps go, this was a good one, and she was determined no to miss the cause of it.

Now I was sitting on my kitchen chair, stiff as a board, my eyes darting back and forth between the dog and the barrel. The pooch stood in the middle of the kitchen, ears pricked upwards, looking around, wide-eyed. Her whole body was tense and her tail wagged, not just from side to side, but around in circles.

The mouse chose this moment to make a run for it. Around the side of the barrel it went, towards the door which leads into the hallway. To a rodent on the run, it probably seemed like a good place to hide. The mouse and the pooch spotted eachother at the same time. Immediately, the doggie rushed forwards towards what she perceived to be a nice, crunchy snack. The mouse was rightfully terrified as it aimed for the door, moving much slower now than it initially had. I managed to slam the door shut between it and the dog before something really gross happened.

There have always been mice here in winter, living inside the walls, and I’ve gotten used to that, but I don’t want them on MY side of the walls. Now there was one in the hallway. That’s just great.

A quick search online told me what mice like to eat and how to place the traps to make sure that they are killed immediately when they walk into it. I also have a new respect for the intelligence of rats, but that’s a whole different story. After a few moments of procrastinating and feeling sorry for the mouse, which was kinda cute, after all, and hadn’t really done anything wrong (that I knew of), I loaded up four traps with bread and placed them around the hallway. Then I took the dog for a walk.

“There’s no point in checking the traps this soon,” I thought when we got back. But I did it anyway. And sure enough, there it was. Apparently it liked bread more than I thought. At first I just mentally confirm that something shaped like a mouse’s butt was sticking out of it, went “eeek”, turned right around and ran into the kitchen where I called my mother. I’m not really sure what good I thought that would do.

Then I got a broom, swept it up, went “eeek” again and dumped it into the trashcan outside, trap and all.

And that was my day.

Return of the Über-Stink

"The following entry contains moments of scatological information, which might not be suitable to all readers. Reader discretion is adviced."*
Do you remember when I told you about the smell? The one in the bathroom that doesn’t seem to be coming from anywhere? For a while, I thought I knew where it lived, but I was wrong. Finding it is becoming vital. Up till now, it’s simply been irritating for periods of time. But On Tuesday it tried to murder me.

I came home early that day, far to exhausted from lack of sleep to go through any more classes. Luck, more than hand-eye coordination, helped me stick the key into the keyhole and turn it. As the door slowly opened, and the dog came bounding through (eager to pee on the bushes and sniff along the fence), I could sense that there was something wrong. A quick whiff of the hallway air confirmed my suspicions. It was back. And it was angry.

I stood motionless in the hallway, staring through the kitchen at the bathroom door, which now seemed to bulge out between the oven and the cupboard. Although I wanted to go in there almost as badly as I wanted to shove hot pokers up my nose, a perverse side of me needed to. As soon as I did, it attacked. It was like walking into a wall of indescribable stink. The kind of stink that forces you to make little whimpering sounds every time you inhale it.

Later that day, my mum wondered out loud if it could be a sewage leak in a pipe under the floor, and from that very moment, the smell took on a distinct poopy character, which I hope is all in my head. The plumbing-company didn’t have anyone to send over that day, but I’m supposed to call them back once The Mother Of All Stinks decides to attack again. Then they’ll send someone over to “sniff out the problem”, and act for which they will have earned a medal of honour. With the luck I’ve been having lately, it probably will be a sewage leak, and they’ll have to rip up the floorboards. That way, I’ll have a hole in the floor with sewage in it. A Bulgarian toilet, basically.

I once went to Bulgaria. It's a nice place. Their fried chicken is excellent. Their toilets I can do without.

* Warning included after a suggestion by Jazz

I'm off to see the wizard

Right now, as I’m writing this, there’s a power shortage, which makes owning a laptop very practical. I was minding my own business, when a storm came out of nowhere and blew all of my electricity and the phoneline away. By now, they’re probably in Oz, skipping up and down the yellow brick road.

Outside, it’s raining sideways and the trees, usually upright, are making brave efforts to lie along the ground.

Luckily, my stepmother is in the business of burying people. Once they’re dead, anyway. What's that? Can't see the connection? Well, you see, for this purpose, they use a whole bunch of white candles. Now, the thing is, that an average candle burns for… oh… let’s say somewhere between 10-24 hours. And you can’t very well use the same candle twice, now, can you? No, you can’t. Whoever is reclining in the coffin probably won’t mind, but their friends and relatives may not approve. Also, you can’t draw out a funeral to last for hours on end because at some point, the guest of honour will start to go stale. Therefore, they dropped off tons of candle stubs here a while back. When you light them all, it’s quite cosy. As long as you don’t think to hard about what they were really meant for, anyway.

I am also making my best efforts not to burn the house down in the process. I’m pretty sure that burning a house down is much easier than it sounds. Most things, especially accidents, are. Last week, for example, when I was going to step off the bus, I somehow misjudged the width of the bottom step (or perhaps it was the size of my foot) and landed on the concrete sidewalk with a loud thud. Easy. The driver and an old woman, who happened to be passing by, didn’t seem to realize just how completely straightforward and uncomplicated such an occurrence is. They were both very surprised. The little, old lady was even ready to accept the guilt for my unscheduled flight, thinking that she had startled me as she came wobbling down the sidewalk with her squeaky walker.

A side effect of such a power shortage, I’ve discovered, is sleepiness. Something about the candlelight makes me want to curl up in the foetal position and drift off into dreamland. Or maybe I’ll go to Oz and see what my electricity is getting up to.

Pic by Bialy-Fox for www.flickr.com

They're back...

This morning, like every other morning (or noon, depending on wether I have to get up early or not), I was standing in my bathroom, doing my morning stuff, thinking my morning thoughts and feeling the morning chill that came crawling in through the old bathroom windows.

That’s when I heard it…

It came from my right, from a cupboard in the corner. A small, kinda sliding sound. Since the bathroom cupboard is where I store all sorts off mess that doesn’t seem to have a natural place anywhere else in the house, I thought something had just fallen over in there, or something. But then it came again, with more scratching this time. And it wasn’t from inside the cupboard at all, but from the wall behind it. That’s when I realised that it had to be them. They’d returned. It was... The Mice.

Every autumn The Mice turn up. They come in through the basement, I think, and so far, there’s been no way of stopping them. As we speak, they’re probably eating through the new insulation as if it was a woolly snack. Why can’t mice just stick to their natural habitat (laboratories or Disney World) where they belong?

I’d get a cat if it wasn’t for the fact that the dog would eat it…

Pic by Za3toooih for www.yotophoto.com