Wednesday, January 07, 2004
Don't let the description fool you: I may be a Southern girl, but that does not make me country. On the contrary, I'd much rather be in a city, large or small, with ample overpriced shopping and caffeination opportunities. I'll take rats over snakes anyday.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about how I ended up in rural Maryland, with a house whose main selling point - wooded acreage - has spawned all new phobias. I'm aware that toilet snakes are probably just an urban legend, but in the 15 months I've lived in this house not ONCE have I used the bathroom without first checking for something scaly coiled around the rim. Also, since I encountered the black widow spider in my flowers, I have developed a unique yardcare technique that I call "Gardening Scared", which basically means that if I can't get someone else to do it, the yardwork doesn't get done at all. At least $100 in flowers baked to a crisp out on the driveway last summer because I was too panicky to actually plant them. And the planned lush backyard 'mingo habitat? Uh uh. The mingoes are wintering in the garage.
With the exception of spiders bigger than pro basketball players, none of the lovely Southern Maryland fauna had made its way inside the house. Until yesterday, that is. Sometime last night I went into the basement offices (the current home of Ali Cat) to check my email, noticed a weird gray lump on the floor, moved just close enough to see that the lump was mouse-shaped, and went screaming out of the basement and up the steps.
People, let me tell ya, I have owned pet mice, hamsters and chinchillas, and the fact of the matter is that the critters are a whole lot cuter when they're running on a wheel in a cage than when they are dying on your basement floor. As it turns out, the mouse was not quite dead when we found it, but was in severe shock from being roughly handled by the cat. Sean scooped it up and it died a short time later. I'm told by our animal expert (Sean's sister) that we shouldn't feel bad about that. So I'm trying not to.
Two things I know, however:
(1) Now we have to figure out how the little bugger got inside the house, and make sure he didn't bring any friends,
and (2) Ali just might be the solution to the mole colony issue in the yard. If that's the case, she has just earned her way back into my good graces.
# posted by Amanda at 12:59 PM |
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