I had a restless night.
The ringing of the cell phone woke me up this morning. That was my cue to call Attila with FaceTime. We had a lovely chat, and both agreed, the visual element adds a lot to the interaction, the visual is important. All too soon it was time for Attila to sign off and finish his preparations for work.
I puttered a bit, then decided to see if I could go back to sleep. I crawled into bed, and then the computer dinged. I knew that ding, it has a short history! Yesterday, Terra messaged me in the morning with, “you home”? I replied yes, and then realized she was standing at the front door. I hadn’t heard her knock, but I did hear the ding on the computer. We had a laugh about that.
So this morning, when the computer dinged, I thought she just might be at the front door. I jumped out of bed quick like, and texted her back that yes, I was up.
And I was close, she was on her way. What happened was, she was coming off the night shift this morning and was on her way home. She passed the hospital, and saw a vehicle that looked just like Tank going into the Emergency parking lot. She thought it might be me, but didn’t know my license plate number, so she texted and drove over to the little house. She was very relieved to see Tank sitting innocently in the driveway. It wasn’t me at the hospital. My girl worries about me, bless her soul.
She and I had a nice chat. While we were chatting, I checked the hall cupboard to see if I had caught any mice. Two! One in each trap. I asked Terra if she wanted to take care of them for me, and she most emphatically declined, :). I closed the cupboard door and we chatted a bit more, then Terra headed home to get some sleep.
After she left I finished sipping my coffee. Then I put some newspaper down just in front of the cupboard. I donned a pair of latex gloves, opened the cupboard and removed the mice from the traps, flushing them down the toilet. Attila has always done this with dead mice, but this was my first attempt at it. Usually I bury them, but that is not practical in the winter. The mice had not had a chance to touch the actual bait, cheese, so I reset the traps, put them back into the cupboard, and shut the door.
The thing I like about the traps is that they are instant oblivion for the mouse, no pain, no warning. It is more humane than the sticky traps, or the electric traps that I looked at. I don’t like mice, but I do not wish them to suffer.
I hope that is the last of the mice, but I am not optimistic. For today at least, I am done dealing with them.
We will continue to look for places where they might be coming in, and take measures to prevent their annual entry in the autumn. I was just reading about mouse-proofing a home, and am going to inspect the perimeter of the house, looking for openings 1/4 inch or larger. We obviously have missed an opening, somewhere!
It just occurred to me that my restless nights might well be a result of the rustlings of our unwanted guests, and last night the sudden snaps of their demise. I am a very, very light sleeper, so it is entirely possible that 3:00 a.m. is the magic hour for mice! That is the hour I usually awaken during the night, for no apparent reason. Just a theory.
To distance myself from my early morning mouse duty, I surfed the web for a while and puttered around the kitchen. Then I was ready to prepare breakfast. This morning it was lemon yogurt. I found the lemon yogurt on sale at the grocery store last weekend, when Attila and I were buying supplies. I love citrus flavours, and lemon is my favourite, so I bought a tub. I was skeptical, it didn’t sound very nice to me. Now it is my new favourite yogurt flavour!
Having gathered together vehicle related items, like a pen and notebook, a box of tissues, some blankets, a cooler with crackers kept in it for emergencies, snow brushes, snow shovel, and ratchet straps, they were all carted out and stowed away in Tank. Then, following the instructions in the manual, the seat was adjusted to perfection, to avoid injury from air bags, lots of warnings on that one.
Then Tank and I were off for our first adventure. We visited the grocery store. Very exciting. Milk and bread and pasta and vitamin pills were the only items on the list, but somehow I walked out of there with a cart full of items, which fit loosely into the back of Tank, where they rattled around all the way home.
It is colder today, still cloudy and grey. The sun makes few appearances, so sending out an all out, no holds barred, invitation seems appropriate. Any time sun, you are welcome to pay a visit any time!
Worldly Distractions
Weather
0°C
Date: 2:00 PM EST Wednesday 26 November 2014
Condition: Mostly Cloudy
Pressure: 102.2 kPa
Tendency: falling
Visibility: 24 km
Temperature: -0.4°C
Dewpoint: -6.6°C
Humidity: 63%
Wind: NNE 9 km/h
Wind Chill: -4
[It is below freezing and snowing at the country house!]
Quote
“I truly feel that there are as many ways of loving as there are people in the world and as there are days in the life of those people.”
Mary S. Calderone
I was thinking that along with those crackers in Tank, for emergencies, maybe a new unopened jar of peanut butter might be good… protein if you ever have to spend any time in the Tank and can’t get out.
Great idea Bex, peanut butter is also high in fat, so it will “stick to the ribs”, preventing hunger pains for longer periods of time, and providing a more compact form of energy. I’d better add a plastic knife as well.
The new orthodoxy seems to be: don’t give mice cheese. Peanut butter is what they love. But I’ve never had any luck with pb and cheese seems pretty reliable. Norwegian Jarlsberg, anybody?
Ah, Steve-Paul, I used old cheddar to great effect. I have heard that stinkier is better though, so if I have to get down and dirty about it, Norwegian Jarlsberg it will be.
The peanut butter didn’t work. They liked it, ate it, scooped it out of the trap by reaching in and grabbing it, and escaped unscathed. Peanut butter is too flexible it seems, at least for the types of traps I have.
Maggie the mouse catcher. Burial at sea? Is it possible that the mice may clog things up? You could recycle them as a food source for the wood creatures if so. Sticky traps are so cruel. I won’t even use them for bugs.
I like lemon yogurt too. It is so clean tasting. My favs are café and lemon. I can get away with a few TBS of café yogurt! But it is not the same as hot café.
Your girls worry about you and that is the way I think it should be.
I have read that a candle in glass (or even just a candle) can be a good heat source and light when one is trapped or stranded. I have one in our car winter supplies. Soon to go into Mercury. I’m more concerned about tornadoes then winters.
My favorite yogurt is blueberry, but I’ll happily substitute most berry yogurts (though I’d prefer no seeds). When it comes to lemon, lemon curd and lemon meringue pies are the best!
Glad to hear that Tank now has a safety/emergency kit!
Nora, what a hoot, burial at sea! Love it! I don’t think the mice will clog things up, Attila has been doing it this way for a long time with no problems encountered.
I will have to try the café yogurt, it sounds good too. Yogurt is such a nice snack, I always feel better after I eat it.
I kept candles in four doors, and will have to get some for Tank as well. Actually, I like the idea of including a glass holder in the winter kit, it would make burning the candle in the carl so much easier.
Hmm… if I had a choice between worrying about tornadoes or winter, I would choose winter! How would you create a safety kit in your car to help you through a tornado?
Teri, lemon curd! I love it. A friend, Sarah, suggested it as a salad dressing, and it was marvellous, but in the end too rich. Berries are popular at our house, but the seeds are not so great. Blackberries have a lot of big seeds in them, they are the worst, then raspberries, and not as many in blueberries and strawberries. At our country house the only wild fruit that grows in quantity is blackberries, which means syrup and jelly, to get rid of the seeds.
I’ll have to do some research on the subject of yoghurt, because I love it too, especially the sinful Greek Yoghurt. However, even though I always associate eating yoghurt with doing a favor for your tummy (good bacteria, and all that), I remember back many years ago when I worked in a Skilled Nursing/Rehabilitation Hospital – I was the secretary for medical records and we were situated right next door to the Cardiac Center. A woman ran the Cardiac Center (her name is escaping me right now!) and I would listen in as she talked to her patients about what they should be doing to be heart-healthy, and what they should NOT be doing.
I remember one time I could hear her lecture about what not to eat, and one patient said she had been eating her yoghurt and asked if that was ok. The Director scolded her and said that no, it was not OK to be eating yoghurt, or much of any dairy products! I was shocked by that, but have, in the years since then, often heard and read that dairy is better eliminated from the diet, that it just causes troubles in a lot of people for various reasons. The Director said “well what IS yoghurt? It’s dairy, and haven’t I told you all to eliminate all dairy from your diets?”
This Director was a young woman, a mother, a wife, and a highly credentialed Registered Nurse. I admired her greatly while working around her. Even though I never followed her advice (I wasn’t her patient, after all), I always thought about that little talk she had with her Cardiac patients… and tucked it away in the back of my brain… so it’s worth a thought… it’s worth investigating.
Bex, that is interesting about restricting dairy products. My knowledge of it was that high fat dairy products were inadvisable, while low fat diary products were beneficial. If I remember correctly, there were very few low-fat yogurts on the market in years gone by. I remember because I was making my own yogurt from skim milk to avoid the butter fat in the commercial versions.
http://www.med.monash.edu.au/news/2014/a-heart-felt-need-for-dairy-food.html
http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/GettingHealthy/NutritionCenter/HealthyEating/The-American-Heart-Associations-Diet-and-Lifestyle-Recommendations_UCM_305855_Article.jsp
There isn’t much more I can eliminate from my diet and still have anything left to eat!
This reminds me of a study I saw in the 70s. The researchers were looking for the geographic location, in the USA, where people lived the longest. They found it was in a little community, where people were overweight, smoked like chimneys, sat for long hours playing bingo and watching television etc. They didn’t know their lifestyle was unhealthy, and so they were happy and relatively stress free. Those were the key factors to longevity, the researchers concluded, healthy relationships and happiness. I know life is more complicated than that, but I feel that there is a grain of truth there.
I will be interested in what you find out Bex!
That’s an interesting story, Bex, as it seems to fly in the face of the prevailing wisdom of the times, that dairy is good for you. I wonder, since this was a heart health person, if they were concerned about fats? As much as there’s been an obsession with milk over the last decades, there’s also been a paranoia about fats. But now suddenly things are turning around.
The powers that be are now beginning to admit that you need healthy fats in your diet and that low fat items are laden with unhealthy sugars to give food more flavor. And just the other day I was reading an article that drinking milk wasn’t a boon for adults. For men it wasn’t a real problem but for women a large study actually showed an increase in the incidence of pelvic fractures among women who drank milk.
Guess we’ll have to wait and see how things unfold. Seems best to stick with the advice “Everything in moderation.”
Hi Maggie,
A safety kit would be the same for any emergency. I’m hoping in the event of a tornado the car would be spared!
The dairy I do is almost all organic. I follow a woman who did her own research and she states that dairy has to be at least 2% or the bones will not absorb it. There is a real need for healthy fats and bone health.