Some random Saturday stuff:

I think Charlotte jinxed me. She was talking about mice on her blog yesterday?

Guess what I spied on my kitchen counter at 6:40 this morning when I padded in to make a cup of tea and contemplate fixing toast?

Yup. A mouse. It apparently got ON my counter by coming through the silverware drawer I had left open. (My kitchen cabinets are old and gappy and if I could bear spending the money and also having my life disrupted for six months or so, I'd get them replaced).

So, not only did I make a trip out for poison (Yeah, I know, it's not very humane and it may put other critters that might not object to eating an already-dead mouse at risk, but the little boogers defeat EVERY snap trap I've tried, and I'm not willing to live-trap-and-ferry-them-out-to-the-field-site for release), but I also had to wash everything in that drawer in bleach water (mice are notoriously incontinent) and wash out the drawer itself.

And I will probably need to dig around in the pots-and-pans cabinet, which it apparently came through, and consider washing all of THOSE with bleach water too, but I just don't have the energy right now. I may just pre-wash each pan as I need it, or, when I have an empty dishwasher, just load it up with all of them and run an extra-hot wash.

(Yeah, I'm kind of compulsive about it but mice, ick. I remember an exterminator on Dirty Jobs talking about how mice and rats have no bladder control and tend to leave a little line of leakage in their wake.)

Poison has been deployed. As I said, I hate using it but I am so done with setting snap traps, snapping my own fingers, and then arising the next morning to find the peanut butter licked out of them.

I'm guessing it was a first, initial foray- I could not find anything that had been gnawed on (thank goodness). Then again, my counter doesn't have any mouse-accessible food: it is where I keep the glass bottles of olive oil, vinegar, molasses, and such.

(And I doubt that Charlotte jinxed me for reals. It's probably just fall. There's an old Japanese (? I think) proverb that goes something like, "When mice come indoors, it is time to examine your winter wardrobe.")

****

It's not been a good couple of days. One of my useless neighbors let their useless dog do its business in the middle of my lawn and I stepped in it yesterday afternoon. And didn't realize until I had walked through my house. (So lots of things in my house are getting cleaned this weekend, though I didn't originally plan on it).

I do not know what they feed the beast but I would suggest they ease up on the fiber.

****

It's just little stuff like that. What I describe as "being pecked to death by ducks." Or, if it's work-related, "the death of 1000 papercuts."

My sinus issues are back. But then, that might be because I took part in the city-wide trash-off this morning and spent from 9 to noon sucking down ragweed pollen as I worked. (And breathing in the horrific fumes from old beer bottles, and especially old beer bottles that had been used as "spit cups" - tobacco that is undergoing anaerobic decomposition, its fumes could probably be used as a WMD.)

I had a few scary moments towards the end - I found I was getting a bit dizzy when I'd straighten up from bending over. (I've been checked in the past for heart issues and such when this happened, it was always one of three things causing it:

a. my blood pressure was dropping too low (I have had borderline low bp in the past)
b. I was anemic
c. it was just sinus junk going on.

As I felt better after getting home and showering, I assume it's probably c, possibly a or b. (I should probably go get a blood test.) It could also have been that it was incredibly humid and I had a hard time getting my breath walking back up the steep hill to where my car was. I did the normal workout yesterday with no problems and actually felt pretty good doing it, so I doubt anything critical is going on with me.

Or maybe it was just the beer fumes. Yes, I am that much of a (figurative) lightweight.)

****
Not that I really believe in karma or anything like that, but hopefully my going out and picking up trash helped restore whatever was out of balance that was allowing things like dog dirt in my front yard and mice in my kitchen. Normally I do not have such problems.

****

But now - or rather, before I sat down here - I'm relaxing, watching some programs about ancient Greece on one of the history channels (I get three, usually History International is the best, but even they are prone to Programs of Woo like things about Nostradamus or the Mayan end-of-the-world predictions).

And I'm knitting on the Rosy-Fingered Dawn shawl. This was pure serendipity, I had picked up the shawl before flipping around and settling on ancient Greece.

I've moved from all the floppy dpns to a single circular needle (it's finally big enough to be accommodated on a 29" circular, the smallest size 6 I own). I'm ready to start chart B. I did have to sit down and do some accounting - in one place the symbology is unclear; one place she uses "3X" to represent doing paired decreases surrounding a double-yarn-over three times; elsewhere she says just "3" and I couldn't tell for sure if that meant "3X or just "knit 3."

It means just "knit 3." I pulled out a calculator and added up the stitches both ways, and divided by the number of stitches I was supposed to have at the end of the row, and only the "knit 3" version gives an even (and correct) number of repeats.

You have to be smart and attentive when you knit. And sometimes you have to figure out a way to answer a question when you don't have the answer in the pattern. (I could also have e-mailed Blackberry Ridge; I did that once before on the Hiawatha shawl. But I probably would have had to wait until Monday for an answer (longer, if they were off at a fiber festival) and I wanted to move on to the next section now.

Besides, there's a certain satisfaction in Figuring It Out For Myself. (I was one of those kids who would push their parents away, when they tried to hurry things along by tying my laces or such for me, instead, I would protest, "I Can Do It Myself!" I'm sure it was annoying at times but whatever. It trained me well for solo adulthood where figuring how to take care of things without having recourse to another person is a necessity).

****

Oh, and Charles: are you sure it was the song, and not the bouncy-bouncy dance of the flower girl in it that made the video so rewatchable? :)