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Dangerously cheesy


December 18, 2005 - 3:33 p.m.

Living where I live has a couple of strange aspects to it that aren't readily apparent if you just look at it from the outside. I've already told you about my adventures the other night persuading Mr. Possum not to eat Margaret's food. Well, the last couple of nights I've had a running battle with Mr. Mouse.

You'd figure that in a house with fifteen cats inside, mice would be a nonissue. What you don't know is that my cats are morons, and most of them don't recognize mice (or small birds, per that note a few weeks ago) as "prey." As toys, sure, but not as something they will stalk and kill and eat.

Thus, when I heard Mr. Mouse scurrying around the bedroom -- the only major room in the house where cats are not permitted universal access -- I sort of had to deal with it on my own. My first solution was to have Marnie sleep on the bed and see if she got fascinated with the mouse. She didn't care. So, Mr. Mouse and I have had a running battle these last several nights. The key to the battle: a partial bag of Chee-tos I've put out as temptation.

It goes like this: I leave the bag in the middle of the floor, partly open. I turn off the lights to go to sleep, and after about 20 minutes, I'll hear a little rustling, and I know Mr. Mouse is investigating the bag. After a few more minutes, I know he's inside the bag. I reach over really quick, clamp the top of the bag shut, then shake it up and down for about a minute.

See, I don't want to kill him, I just want him to leave. You'd think that being shaken violently up and down inside a bag of Chee-tos Twisted -- each piece of which is as large as you are -- would sort of freak Mr. Mouse out enough to move on down the road. Apparently not. I don't open the bag up right away, but instead put it back on the floor, expecting that in a few minutes a dangerously-cheesy brown mouse would come out, squeeze out under the bedroom door, and never return.

Instead, he waits me out. I don't hear anything inside the bag, so I eventually turn off the lights and try to sleep, wondering if I actually killed him or something. And then the bag crackles, I turn on the lights, and a mouse covered in violent orange cheese powder runs into the closet.

I said, I don't want to kill him, I just want him to leave. But still, I may have to do him in just so I don't have to worry about it. If I could figure out a way to trap him and take him outside, I would, but the only way to do that would probably be to dump Chee-tos all over the yard or something.

Among other projects, I cleaned and put away about a hundred CDs. I've ripped most of them to MP3 and put them on the iBook and iPod, and having them sit around just encourages the cats to knock them over, sit on them, and occasionally yack up a hairball on them. They got cleaned, stacked in a plastic tote from WalRusMart, and went into the closet with the LPs and 78s. Only about 600 more to put away.

And no, I'm not fanatic enough to rip every single CD I own. Somebody I know did that, basically ripping 400 CDs in their entirety. 7000 tracks, 80% of which are probably the crap you'd skip past on the CD player. Not me. If something's on the iPod, it's there because I specifically wanted it there.

That, and if I just ripped everything I own at a decent bitrate, I... well, they don't make an iPod that big. It'd be something around 13,000 tracks and somewhere around 150 gigabbytes. I could drive from here to work before I'd scroll through the whole playlist.

I'm increasingly picky about what I have on the iPod, actually. I sometimes go back and re-rip or re-download tracks at higher bitrates. For some material (anything recorded before 1947, for example) anything higher than 128kbps is largely not an audible improvement, but for a lot of stuff I once thought listenable at 128 or even 112kbps, now even 160kbps isn't enough. In particular, Fifties jazz, anything by Dire Straits or Pink Floyd, and anything recorded since 1998 really likes 192 or 256kbps.

The speakers in the Volkswagen make the difference, since the speakers are well-matched, reproduce highs better than the Kenwoods in the Saab, and the car itself is much quieter. For all the time I spend in the car, the music, as a minimum, can't bug the crap out of me with quantization errors and switching noise.

OK, time to go exercise and then go out and watch the late games. I'm currently watching Indianapolis attempt to go 14-0, and since this game represents my best chance to win this week's football pool, I'll stick with it.

And no, I have not been eating the Chee-tos. I've merely been using them as a way to torment Mr. Mouse.

We had an evening of freezing rain the other night, and I didn't get mail the next day because the mailbox was sealed shut with half an inch of ice.


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