…Not Even a Mouse [NOT 24/12/21]

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

The My Brain Is Fried Friday NOT series of the most important questions in world continues…

Do you ever have mice?

My experience with mice had been affectionate and from afar, based on children’s books (Stuart Little, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, etc.). Then in November we became a mouse magnet. They were able to climb stairs and furniture, defied trapping attempts, and sneered at the dogs, who are lousy mousers. Finally, we figured out when we updated our kitchen the builder cut corners and left a gap behind our washer/dryer that led to the foundation and an exterior basement window. My son filled it in with super polymer stuffing that get hot and expands, problem solved.

I’d mentioned the mouse debacle in Brain Drain, and am still on alert for small invaders (I swear we are clean about our home) but it was really quite a problem. Anyway, now I’m back to liking mice…elsewhere. How about you?

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About Elliecoo 556 Articles
Four dogs, one partner. The dogs win.

25 Comments

  1. …well…at the risk of spoilers for something over 40 years old…in the hitchhikers’ guide to the galaxy books it turns out that mice are pan-dimensional beings to whom we’re the experimental subjects…so…depends on the mice in question?

  2. I’ve never tired it, but I’ve heard steel wool works good to prevent them chewing through a blockage.

     

    But, I imagine if you have a large enough mass blocking their pathway, they are probably less likely to chew through it?

     

    I also find rodents more amusing then upsetting, but also don’t want them inside my dwelling…

  3. My block had a rat invasion earlier this year that coincided with the cicada eruption. They seem to have both gone away, so I’m hoping that’s it for another 16 years.

    Although we have no end of squirrels and rabbits, which are somehow OK.

  4. My old condo had mice I found twice. One winter I found a dead one just lying on the basement floor and I was very sad for it. The following winter I found mice poopies in a basement closet and had to get some of those traps they dehydrate inside of.

  5. We don’t see many mice here on the farm, but there are a lot of chubby barn cats.  I used to think they came around the house (which is a good walk for them from the barn) just for the belly rubs but I think they’re probably hunting.  It’s like the friggin’ Nature Channel around here, I swear.

      • In my old neighborhood there was a Christian outreach center where we used to buy our tree, and they’d hold live nativities with whatever donkey, sheep and goat they could rustle up in their hundred-something year old courtyard. It was the cutest thing ever.

        The trees were always a bit crooked and misshapen, but everyone was always in a good mood, and the place was all about being a backstop to people at rock bottom, not reinforcing the judge-y mindset of comfortable middle class fundies.

    • You too. You’re lucky, it’s still early there. It’ s almost midnight here and my kid is just sitting down to plate of food he’s fried up and I need him to go to bed so I can put out the last presents.

      • I mean, Santa can put them out.

        Sleighbells, tiny reindeer, pipe, the whole nine yards. Any time now. Any time now.

        The Oxen By Thomas Hardy

        Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock./”Now they are all on their knees,”/An elder said as we sat in a flock/By the embers in hearthside ease.

        We pictured the meek mild creatures where/They dwelt in their strawy pen,/Nor did it occur to one of us there/To doubt they were kneeling then.

        So fair a fancy few would weave/In these years! Yet, I feel,/If someone said on Christmas Eve,/”Come; see the oxen kneel,

        “In the lonely barton by yonder coomb/Our childhood used to know,”/I should go with him in the gloom,/Hoping it might be so.

        Wisful Memories of Christmas Past By Michael Collier Baltimore Sun December 22, 2002

        Thomas Hardy’s “The Oxen” appeared in the London Times on Dec. 24, 1915. This was the second Christmas of the Great War and it was clear that hope for a quick and righteous victory of that conflict would go unfulfilled. Soon Wilfrid Owen, one of the great English war poets, would report on the “hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language … everything unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug-outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious.”

        The skepticism and disenchantment concerning glory and patriotism produced in the generation of the First World War were attitudes the 75-year-old Hardy had been steeped in all his life. A native of the harsh Dorset countryside, Hardy deeply distrusted Victorian pieties regarding God and country. His dark skepticism had gotten him into trouble with reviewers of his novels, so much so that he gave up writing fiction and put all of his considerable energies into poetry.

        “The Oxen” is one of the most powerful poems about the Nativity in the English language because it refuses to serve up an angels-around-the-manger version of Christ’s birth. Additionally, it avoids a religious or doctrinal telling for a folk tale that held animals kneeled in adoration to mark the moment of Christ’s birth each year.

        Hardy uses a traditional English ballad stanza of alternating end rhymes (clock / knees, flock / ease) to recount what is most likely his own memory of having sat spellbound, “By the embers in hearthside ease,” while an “elder” told the story of the “meek mild creatures.” He also relies on the Dorset words “barton” (farmyard) and “coomb” (valley) to contrast a more peaceful rural past with his wartime present.

        Hardy’s wistful and beautiful remembrance recalls both the magic and innocence of childhood that once allowed him to believe “they [the creatures] were kneeling then.” But now “In these years!” — which are the years of war and his old age — Hardy has trouble imagining anyone trying to weave such a fanciful story.

        The power of this poem comes not from Hardy’s inability to believe in the quaint folk tale but from his desire, in spite of the war and his age, to regain his innocence, to return to what “Our childhood used to know.” Yearning and desire — doubt bolstered by hope — give the poem its difficult poignancy. In this way, “The Oxen” mirrors more accurately the battles we fight to keep our spirits alive and hopeful in difficult times, and shows that the season of “glad tidings, comfort and joy” does not, regardless of what we might hope, restore our innocence.

  6. i have 3 cats….i never have mice…least…not live ones

    also…unrelated…but im a little baffled…rained all day yesterday then temps dropped to -7 overnight….why is everything not white outside?

    frozen solid sure….frosted…nope

    the fuck?

    pretty sure stuff is sposed to be frosted now….

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