you roll yer dice & move yer mice. no one gets hurt.

The scene opens this morning, way earlier than I wanted to be up. Blake & the Boy are in the middle of a potty session, so I started puttering around. Clean dishes put away, I folded up the dishcloth and opened the drawer to put it away.

(shudder)

We first noticed the mice spoor on Christmas Day (I saw some mouse come pooping in, on Christmas Day in the morning). We cleaned, but obviously not enough, because they came back and ripped into previously-inviolate dry goods. There being nothing I could do about it at the moment, I showed the evidence to the Boy & went to work.

When I came home, I set about cleaning it all up. It's disgusting, stomach-twisting work, but I wanted to do it myself to make sure it gone done properly. Plus, I know from past experience that my negative feelings about mice scat can turn into arguments when the Boy tries to help me. So I started in sorting, tossing, vacuuming, and wiping down cleared surfaces with Lysol. My dad, observing the vacuum from his seat in the den, asked what was going on. So I told him, knowing what would happen.

Within minutes both of my parents were down in the basement, and my mom had started cleaning out the only remaining space in the cabinets. My dad got a box for our stuff (so refugee chic) and Blake & the Boy were dispatched for mousetraps. Now, I have a completely unreasonable reaction to my parents being in my space, in my business or close to my stuff: I go into a silent freak out. This comes from years of resenting privacy intrusions, or what I thought were privacy intrusions, and the feelings have not lessened as I aged. I like to keep myself well-protected from the casual put-down, in which my parents are abundant.

But this was a necessary evil, I soon realized, as my Mom was feeling the exact same level of panic & revulsion that I was, and she also needed to clean up in order to make sure that it was done right. This realization made it no easier to watch her clean out the stuff that had fallen behind our bed, however. Crawling horror would about describe it. So I helped the best I could and made periodic escapes to the bathroom, where I could close the door and read the copy of At Knit's End that I stashed next to the toiletries.

It's done now, and I even found my yoga mat. (yay!) I'll keep you updated on the continuing saga of When Mice Attack.

I think I even made a semi-resolution today: don't be such a spaz. Specifically, don't make immature ploys for attention (especially from Mason, especially when he is in conversation with someone else) because then I get to burn with shame knowing that it will take weeks of suave behaviour to put my rash attention-grabbing behind me. I just don't have that kind of time, so I need to stop doing stupid things. I'm sure this will be just as easy to do as to say.

Labels: basement, bat masterson

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- Rocketbride's adventure of 1/08/2007 07:42:00 p.m.