4/30/08

OF SHOES AND DEAD MICE

Wow! It's been quite a long time since I tapped out a new message, hasn't it? Many things going on these days.

I was going on an errand one day a while ago and had come to an intersection onto the main highway. Lying in the street was a white sneaker. A fairly new one, and small, perhaps a child about six or eight. I chuckled as I thought of the kid who liked to go barefoot nonchalantly tossing the sneaker out the car window as the car rolled to a stop and how the mom would probably tear up her house looking for it later that day or the next. Of course, if it had been my kid, it wouldn't have been so funny. Socks not returning from the washing machine were bad enough.

On my way home from my errand, coming to the intersection again from a completely different direction and on a different side road about a half mile south of the other side road, I saw another sneaker. White. Small. New. Now my writer's mind kicked into high gear. Possible scenarios: Mom put both sneakers on the roof of the car as she was hustling everybody off to soccer practice. Then forgot about them. Sneakers eventually fell off. Except--how did the second sneaker survive the turn? Or did the kid dangle the second sneaker by the shoelace for a while before letting go? Was this an abduction and someone was trying to leave a trail? Better than breadcrumbs, certainly. Weird.

Of such everyday events are stories made. Perhaps the errant sneakers will eventually find their way into a book or story. One never knows.

The worms are officially dead. Well, actually, a couple survived, but they went into the compost heap to see if they'd fare better with even more neglect.

And the mice are gone. All four of them. We caught three of them--one still alive, but doomed to spend the rest of his days hopping around with a tiny crutch, like Tiny Tim Cratchitt. The last mouse had spent the last four years attached to my computer. When it didn't move anymore, I suspected foul play, especially when I took it to the computer store and it worked fine there. The tech, however, suggested I might want to get a backup, just in case. Smart man. Back home, the mouse still wouldn't work, but the new one did. I'm glad I got it, too, because I just purchased a new laptop and will need one there.

Hope you're enjoying the trans-seasonal weather wherever you are!

4/3/08

HAND TO MOUSE

Sometimes the "truth stranger than fiction" really hits home. It happened this week when I found little tracings of mice in my dishtowel drawer and butter dish, and tiny bits of pastel colored foil behind the toaster. Evidently, mice like chocolate Easter candy like the rest of us. But yikes! I thought. We can't have that. Really, we can't. A trip to Sears Hardware showed me there were all sorts of ways to get rid of Mickey and Company. I decided on a "no touch" trap that was reusable and was covered so you didn't even have to look at the end result. Not that I would have anyway. Sydney Carton was again on hand to take the far, far better course of tossing the body in the trash. We caught another one last night, but I've again left it for SC.

But I felt bad, you know? Here I am, all ready to publish a delightful Christmas story called Twitcher McGee and the Wonderful Tree--and it's all about a poor little mouse! I want to create such sympathy for Twitcher so readers will be hoping he gets his cupboard filled for the next year and here I am, not only taking away his food, but also his reason for needing it! I wonder if Walt Disney had that problem.

I also should note here that I think I killed my worms.