I'd like to take this time to personally invite anyone reading this to PanicFest 2012, hosted by yours truly. It's going to be amazing this year, with Cold Sweats, The Shakes, and Total Mind Blackout all in attendance. Did you miss all that bottomless dread and unnecessary lashing out at family members from last summer? Well they're back! Now more intense than ever! Trust me, nothing is going right, and there's nothing you can do about it.
So enjoy PanicFest 2012. I'll be back when it's over.
Seriously, though. Things have gotten frustrating lately. There are problems at work, money is tight, and each step of this getting to Scotland business is proving to be more complicated and troublesome than the last. I know it will be worth it when I get there, I just need to get there without having a brain hemorrhage. As a result, the goal to blog at least once a week is going on the back burner for a little bit, though I'm not saying I won't blog at all. I'm just saying I'm not going to force myself.
However, I haven't come to this post unprepared, so here's a fun little story about my weekend: Over the past couple days we've been occasionally hearing a weird scratching noise while hanging out in the living room. Last night I was up late, and the sound got really intense, so I followed it into the dining room (adjacent to the living room) cold air vent. I flipped on the light, and caught the slightest glimpse of a little mouse face poking through the vent before it popped out of sight.
While I'm not afraid of mice, it did startle me. My main concern was that it may be trapped since it had stayed in one place for almost two days, and I didn't want it to slowly starve to death or anything like that. I was also worried about my cat getting a hold of it. My parents got his front claws removed, so while he's quite good at catching mice (despite being a total fatty), he tends to bat them around for a few hours until one of us humans manages to get it away from him or it dies in what I'm sure is a long and painful ordeal. I just didn't want it to suffer. Unfortunately it was very late and I didn't want to risk waking up my parents, who have to get up very early, so I left a note on the kitchen table telling them what the noise was and went to bed.
Today I woke up pretty late, and didn't hear anything until after my parents had come home. This time both my father and I saw the mouse, still trying to push its way out through the dining room vent, so we tossed the cat in the basement and unscrewed the vent cover. It had skittered away of course, but upon looking through vent into the wall you could see there were a limited number of place it could go. We left it alone for about twenty minutes, and then I heard more scratching. The mouse was out inspecting the shoes in our entryway. I tried to just open the door and scoot it outside, but it hopped over my hand and dashed under the piano. Then my mother grabbed a Tupperware and my father got the mop and slip the handle under the piano to shoo the mouse out. It took a good five minutes or so, but we got the little guy trapped under the container.
From there we got a baking sheet (the kitchen was the closest room with anything useful in it) to slide under the Tupperware, effectively trapping the mouse so I could take it outside. I carried the makeshift cage to the bushes on the edge of our property, set it down, and released our new friend into the wild. It was frozen for a couple seconds, then it dashed away. Mission accomplished.
Sure, there are probably more mice in the house, but traps aren't an option. My father told me that, when his father tried to teach him how to hunt, he only shot one squirrel before he knew he didn't want to do it anymore. I hit a bird once with my car, and I had to pull over to cry because I couldn't take how it flopped around the road more and more slowly until it didn't move at all, but I couldn't just leave it there all alone either. We're hardly vegetarians, but we just can't kill things unless it's quick and painless and for a good reason. We're just babies that way.
In short, the mouse is safe, the kitchen utensils have all been cleaned, and the cat is sniffing everywhere trying to figure out what went on while he was stuck in the basement. If only all my problems were so easy to solve.
