Exciting tales of Mr. Mouse

See, now... it's April second, so you can reasonably guess that there aren't any strange gags hidden in this post. I usually avoid those sorts of things.

This has not been a good weekend for Mr. Mouse. Suzanne and I were in bed the other night, and Mr. Mouse came skittling up onto the dresser to nibble on a pack of cookies there. He would climb inside the packaging (these were those Archway store cookies), nibble loudly a while, then, when he saw me coming, skittle away.

Well, I put an unbaited mouse trap directly in the path to and from the cookie package and waited. The first time, he got into and then out of the cookie package without stepping on the trap, but the second time, when I tried capturing him inside the cookie package to carry him outside, he stepped onto the trap and it caught him across one of his legs. I picked the trap up -- he was quite alive -- and saw that he was slowly pulling his foot out from under the bail. I carried it downstairs, looked him in the eye and told him, "look, if you jump out now, the cats will be all over you and you'll die," and he calmed down a little. Just as we made it out the front door, he reached over and bit my thumb, then leaped out into the night.

Well, that solved the problem of that particular Mr. Mouse. Sunday, though, I went down and there was a very dead Mr. Mouse #4 on the carpet, having been chewed on a little by some cat in the very recent past. Bert was sniffing him but not chewing on him. I picked his carcass up and tossed it out in the bushes. I am pretty sure it wasn't the Mr. Mouse I'd tossed outside the night before, but if it was, and he was stupid enough to sneak back into the house past eight cats lounging on the couch, then he was too stupid to truly assume the title of Mr. Mouse anyway.

The plant on my desk at work is shedding blossoms out onto my keyboard. I got it quite a few years ago at an employee-association plant sale... it's a Jasminum sambac, or Arabian jasmine, though its flowers don't exactly match anything I can find online. When I first bought it, it was in full bloom and smelled to heaven, but over the years it's gotten a bit stringy and the flowers are fewer but no less pungent. It probably wants a new and bigger pot, which is also the case with the Key lime tree and the poinsettia I have here. I have a few citrus trees at home that, after being put in large pots with new soil, practically exploded. One of them has probably 30 little micro-oranges on it, with more on the way. I wonder if the guards in the building would mind me bringing a bag of potting soil in through the metal detector?

Suzanne is thoroughly enjoying her MacBook. We've introduced to it all the other devices in the house, including my phone, so that if we're ever out of range of 802.11 networking, we can use my phone and my unlimited data plan on T-Mobile to connect. We tested it the other night and it metered at about 157kbps... nowhere near as fast as 802.11, but about six times faster than an old analog dialup modem (which new Apples don't even have, anyway).

I feel considerably better these days. Stopping Ambien probably helped a lot. Weird things were happening when I was taking it, and I don't trust it again. Sleeping with Suzanne on a decent bed is much better than drugs, anyway.