Reading:Middlemarch.

Watching: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season two.

Moving: 15' Nordic Track; some abs, some deltoids, some triceps

19July 2002: Mice

Yesterday I took the car to go swimming. Yes, I should have ridden my bike. Ooops. It was 98 degrees and the water not much cooler than that. I drove. Mleah.

So anyway, while I was gone, RDC put Blake on the livingroom windowsill--on the rim where the two sashes of the double-hungs come together, where the lock is--which is his new favorite spot (aside from the top shelf in one kitchen cupboard, where he is no longer allowed because he gnawed on the woodwork). From the window, he watches the neighborhood go by. I keep a catalog wrapped around each sash cord, as a chew-substitute, and there's a toy wedged in there too.

Suddenly Blake began to shriek. RDC looked out the window, expecting to see a big dog on the sidewalk or a magpie on the porch, but instead he saw a woman emerging from green Subaru just drawn up to the curb. "Did she have dark hair?" I asked later. Did the bird have any reason to freak besides the same car? I don't expect a cockatiel to notice that this other car (which I saw when I returned) didn't have a ski rack, when Cassidy does, but I do expect an animal who relies on his sight more than on any other sense to be able to recognize that a dark-haired female human less than a hundred feet away is or is not his mother, and freak accordingly.

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Today RDC mentioned that he wanted a piece of fabric to cover the keyboard of his laptop. I offered him a piece from the newly ripped bottom sheet, which wasn't thick enough. The felt that used to be a tree skirt and has since become insulating curtain was too thick. So I dug out my sewing box to see what might be there. I found the very soft flannel I was going to use to be the spotted elephant from the Island of Misfit Toys. I would have been a great spotted elephant.

"Why again weren't you the elephant?" RDC asked.
"Because I couldn't figure out how to make the trunk," I pouted. "I couldn't make the trunk, so I was going to fail shop, and that's why I had a flare gun in my locker, because I couldn't fail shop--who fails shop? Have you seen some of the people who take shop?"
He didn't get it.

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We've been having a wee mouse problem at Dot Org. Mice have been spotted a few times over the past few weeks, including one scurrying ahead of me along the hallway and into UrBoss's office earlier this week. Today I was on the phone, all professionally masked, and happened to open a drawer of my desk. If I hadn't been on the phone, I would have shouted with laughter. There, in a cozy nest of machine-shredded paper, were four fake mice, all nose to nose. I didn't laugh out loud, but the laugh was certainly in my voice, which made my phone correspondent grumpy. I wasn't laughing at you, you tedious fool.

I checked with another assistant and Überboss first, because Tex was on the phone. I walked deliberately past Tex's office and looked in. His deliberately not glancing up at me me certain I had found the culprit. When he got off the phone and I laughed at him, he tried to play coy for about 2.3 seconds. He had wanted a shriek, he said. Like I look like that much of a girl, just because my hair's long and I never wear trousers? Please.