Iced gem

Mouse #3 in the trap today - or was it Mouse #2 again? We made a family outing to Five Rivers to release it. They're not doing so badly, these mice: slap up meal of peanut butter in a cosy snapless trap, then a short drive out to a nice nature reserve. They're probably phoning all their friends and sending them round.

But this blog is rapidly turning into 'Rodentiana'. I'll ease up on the mouse news for a bit.

Yesterday I was undeservedly bumped up into the top group at skating (there was a shortage of instructors). 'Ok,' said the teacher brightly, 'Today we're going to do some ice-dancing!' Whhhaaat? The other two students (lets call them Torville and Dean) went skimming away across the rink, leaving me standing (though not butt-down on the ice, at least). The teacher took pity on me, demonstrated the basics of the first part of the dance step, and left me to practise. Round and round I went following a circle on the ice. Round and round so many times that if I'd been on a pond I'd probably have ground right through the ice and into the water. But by the end of the session I'd more-or-less got the manoeuvre, so it wasn't all in vain. My muscles have been aching again today though.

Temperatures were around freezing this morning, so we went out for an ice-cream, because why not?

Very mouseterious

We caught another mouse overnight. Out it went onto the porch, still in its trap, to be dealt with after breakfast. Problem was, something else decided to deal with it first. The Man found the trap out on the snow of the front yard, opened and empty, and no mouse to be seen. Could a cat have got to it? Maybe - in which case the mouse was breakfast. But the part of the trap with the peanut butter bait on it had also disappeared, so I'm not discounting squirrels. In which case the mouse could just have done a runner and be back in the kitchen tonight. Sigh.

Twice Times Two

Happy Birthday to two great men - Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln - on their bicentennials. And also to my twin nieces, who have reached the grand old age of five.

Now for a mouse update: both traps were shut when we came downstairs this morning. One was obviously empty. The other - definitely occupied. Aha!

I dropped the Man at work then detoured home through some countryside and stopped at the side of the road. Here's our squatter, about to be decanted into a field. Cute, eh? I'm hoping he was a lone operator. I'm hoping he was a he and hasn't left behind a set of octuplets under the kitchen cabinets. I shall be setting the traps again tonight, just in case.

And skating latest: I spent a good hour at the rink today and established that in fact it is possible to skate backwards in a circle. I feel quite pleased with myself.

Keep yer traps shut

One of the mousetraps had been sprung when we came down to the kitchen this morning. It kind of rattled as the Man put it out on the front porch while we had breakfast and got the kids ready for school.

Once everyone else had left (kids on the bus, the Man collected by the Exile) I prepared to release our rodent friend into the wild. I didn't want it to find its way back to the house, so I popped the trap in the back of the car and drove about a mile to a field by the side of the road.

The trap operates by way of a see-saw arrangement. The mouse heads up towards the bait, activating the see-saw which causes the door to snap shut behind it. I could hear the see-saw rattling, but there didn't seem to be any scratching sounds. Whatever was in there was being as quiet as... proverb suggests it should be. Or perhaps the trap wasn't so humane, and the mouse had copped it? I opened the door gingerly, ready to shake out a little mousey corpse, but instead found...

...nothing! Darn it! I felt like a proper Charlie.

I've set the traps again, ready for tonight. Was I just imagining that squeaky snigger from under the cooker?

Mouseketeering

I hadn't expected to be using my tracking skills domestically. Though to be honest, it didn't take a training course at Five Rivers for me to work out what had moved into the kitchen.

The most obvious sign was the half-nibbled avocado on the counter. A little investigation revealed a mouse play-area under the cooker - only recently adopted, I think. Out with the Marigolds and a bottle of disinfectant, then, and a trip to the DIY store for wire wool (to fill up the possible entry-hole) and traps. Humane traps, of course, in deference to the kids' sensibilities and my own squeamishness.

Here's one of the traps. It's baited with peanut butter. Tune in tomorrow to find out if it works...

Thaw point

Over the last two or three days the daytime temperature has been consistently above freezing - for the first time in, oo, seems like months. The result is we've got a bit of a thaw on, and the result of that is that the Boy came home from school soaking wet.

Snow pants and snow boots are great in the snow, but not so useful (it turns out) when the snow turns into big soggy puddles on the school field. The Boy managed to soak his first pair of socks and trousers during morning recess, then did the same to his spare set of clothes in the afternoon. He was a forlorn and disgruntled figure getting off the bus in a pair of damp shorts and squelching boots.

Tomorrow I'll be sending him in with two spare sets of everything, and standing by to load the dryer at home-time.

Fishy horror show

I took the Boy to Proctor's Theatre in Schenectady this morning. One of his friends was holding her birthday party there. All the guests were invited to a screening of Sea Monsters, an Imax movie in spectacular 3-D.

I'd never been to a 3-D film before. Wow! It's like those fishes were actually swimming over our heads! I was full of child-like wonder. The Boy was more full of unadulterated terror, as prehistoric sea creatures swam right at us snapping their ferocious teeth. Not to mention the distressing numbers of fish that were being eaten throughout the movie, and the Boy has tender feelings for fish. He had to keep whipping off his cardboard specs to hide his face in my shoulder. By the end he was practically in tears.

Anyway, he later managed to recover his composure, enough to eat a large slice of birthday cake and handfuls of candy from a pinata, and by the time we were heading home he'd decided that maybe he wouldn't mind seeing that film again some time even though it was, you know, horrible.