It's Been Almost a Year...

since I last posted. My wife asked me to make a cameo appearance on her blog, Down on the Farm with ChiknGirl, and hinted with emphasis that I should resume composing on a weekly basis. We'll see. I have two wonderful children that demand every scrap of attention I can spare when I'm home. On top of that, I am also Cheydinelle, the "Lore Master" of the guild "Tales of Ribaldry." It's a guild on the Horde side of the Darkspear server on World of Warcraft. If you have even the slightest inclination to being an addictive person, please, for the love of all that's holy, please don't start an account and play.

I still check Homestar and News of the Weird every week for updates. I still go to work as a millwright. I'm about halfway through my apprenticeship. I suspect that most of the folks that read my blog aren't from the same social circle as the folks I work with. Most of my coworkers would think that a "Blog" is someone's last name.

We actually have a guy that works with us whose last name is Blagg. It's really hard to describe him. He's rough, but likable. He's proficient, but prone to attract strange circumstances. It's told half-jokingly that "OW OW OW" is Blagg for "Stop!"

I haven't had much time to think about worldly things, with the exception of my recent bacon experience.

There IS a mouse running loose in our house, though. We never really saw him, we just started noticing small objects around the house that greatly resembled what I used to clean out of our hamster's cage. He's been around for a while, too. Sometime around April, my wife moved all of our foodstuffs to a different location, hoping it would keep the rodent out of it. We stopped seeing telltale turds and assumed that the bugger was gone.

Why would he just vacate? My two children drop enough food on the carpet to feed a third-world country. It was foolish for me to believe that a mouse would turn down a virtual cornucopia. It surely was.

Most nights, I am ensconced in the office, playing my games while my wife is downstairs knitting and listening to evening shows. A few months ago, I was alarmed by a scream from her. I ran downstairs to discover that she had seen the mouse. Over the course of a month or two, she continued to see it occasionally. I never did. She began asking me if I thought she was crazy and if I was humoring her by tearing the house apart when she saw it. I was convinced that she was convinced that she was seeing a mouse. But where were the leavings? Where was the nest?

When our movies arrive in the mail, I will sometimes join my wife for the evening and watch those films that are of interest to me. A few weeks ago, I was doing just that when I finally saw it. Skipping and jumping along the baseboard of our living room between the television cabinet and the old trunk in the corner. So!

I found some turds under the stereo cabinet. I put tape over a small hole in the wall nearby. I slashed the bottom of our couches to look for the nest...to no avail.

A week ago, I purchased a live-capture trap. A figured a pear would attract our guest, but after a week there was no caught mouse. So last night I switched to a garlic-flavored Triscuit cracker.

Well, this morning at breakfast, my daughter yells, "There's the mouse! He ran under the fridge!" Isn't it strange how "fridge" is the slang for "refrigerator?" There's no letter "d" in "refrigerator." Shouldn't it just be "frige?" I think most people would pronounce that with a long "i" sound.

I built a barrier of boxes to hem it in. I removed everything from the top of the frige...oops...fridge and moved it. I had to remove the back cover (unplugging it first, of course) and use a flashlight to search the electronics for its hiding place. I now know that all of the turds have migrated to underneath our fridge.

Aha! I spotted him with my flashlight! Well, I had to move my barrier a little in order to try and remove him from our fridge and, ultimately, our abode. Off and away he ran, right by me as I lept to my feet. He skidded to a halt to try and squeeze through the child-gate we have on our kitchen door and I took a wild stomp in his direction. I missed. Then I lost him.

I stood there, mystified on how that damn rodent had managed to disappear so quickly. I had kept an eye on him when I stomped, but he got to the other side of that gate and just vanished. I stood there with my flashlight scanning the area fruitlessly for a minute or two...and then I saw his skinny little tail poking out from under the pile of aprons I had placed in our short hallway. I placed myself in a position to cover him with a large plastic bowl and quickly lifted the aprons.

As big and strong and smart as we are compared to a mouse, they still have ONE good thing going for them; speed.

I'll get him. It's just a matter of time and patience.