The menagerie

The current baby quilt (Fishy, Fishy) is inching towards completion. It doesn't help that I realized that I cut one of my templates and therefore sixteen pieces wrong, and unfortunately they're all too small instead of too big. I realized I never posted a picture of James's quilt, so here it is on my bed:


(Please ignore the mess on the floor. That's Eric's side.) I like the watercolor technique a lot, now that I know better how to use it.

The kitchen is finally almost clean, but the mice are still around. This despite the twelve (no kidding) traps we laid out around the kitchen. I'm quite tired of having the contents of my pantry piled on top of the chest freezer (for one thing, bread and flour go in there, since there's not enough room in the regular freezer) and of having vermin in the house, but we're not sure what to do. Today I saw one skitter across the floor and climb up a hole between cupboards, and I swear it did it on purpose to avoid the glue trap that would otherwise have been in its way. I moved the trap directly below the hole but I have a feeling the mice are too smart for us and we'll never get rid of them. Until I give up and call in the poison, anyway.

Eric's job may be in danger again...his principal told him that he's giving too many Fs and not enough As, and he should do something about it. Anything. Or else. He's told a couple of people at work and they're highly displeased, but not shocked, so apparently his new employers aren't as much better as his old ones as we'd have liked. He was potentially going to be out of a job next school year anyway, since there are statewide education budget cuts and he's a new teacher, but now we're pretty much planning on it, and working out what we'll do if he doesn't get another teaching job at a different school (which, with the budget cuts, is looking unlikely). We did this last year and were okay, but of course we'll have a baby around this time...but if he stays home and maybe picks up some community college classes to teach at night, we'll be saving some $6000-$7000 on childcare anyway and earning a few thousand. And we've been saving money. And I'm working on the freelancing, though not as much as I should. We should be okay; I just wish adulthood weren't so complicated.

New year, old news

I am tired and irritable about eating. (Only four things never sound gross: oranges, grapefruit, crackers, and toast. Of course I'm tired of those things now.) There are twelve mousetraps around the kitchen; we found a missing trap under the stove (dead mouse included) and caught another one, which I discarded, and immediately heard the scrabbling of another behind the garbage bin, which left us only the one from the Orkin man which hadn't caught any, so we cleaned everything and put out more traps. Nothing yet.

I was supposed to go on a business trip today, but the person I was going with injured her knee shoveling snow (we got about ten inches between Friday and Saturday; another three or so expected tonight) and can't drive, so it was cancelled. Probably a good thing. I'm tired and irritable, as mentioned above, and the house is a mess. And I'd like to make some apple turnovers, since I haven't made a treat for Eric in a while and it actually sounds pretty good to me too.

I'm working on my first of four baby quilts for this year. This one's a fishy theme: a kind-of-checkerboardy watery background with some large and some small fish swimming around. I love my little fish. It would make a great bigger quilt, but I'd never have the patience. This one needs to be done by February 1, so there's another reason to be glad I'm not going on the trip. I have no knitting project at the moment, which feels very weird. I'm going to have to decide on one. I'm considering making my niece some mittens, since she came by the other day (her grandmother decided to dress her up for a walk in the snow and brought her over because she looked so cute bundled up) dressed very warmly except that her tiny mittens were falling off because the cuffs were so short. I might also make myself some socks. Or start on a baby sweater. Or even work on the gloves for Eric that I've been planning to do for over a year. Decisions, decisions.

Ring in the new

Happy 2009! Other than not having done dishes since last year, things are well in my house. --Oh, and not cleaning up the mouse droppings. We caught another one and I'm hoping that was it, but we're keeping the traps out and I'll see if more droppings appear. I don't know why cleaning was so low on my list of things to do when all I had was a single party and a single article to deal with.

Except that's not true. I also had early-pregnancy nausea and tiredness (not to mention abundant food aversions) to deal with. Our IUI worked on the first try and I'm eleven weeks in. I go to the doctor to hear the heartbeat tomorrow. I'm terrified that I'll go and be told that the embryo (now a fetus) died six weeks ago, but I looked that up--it's called a missed abortion or a delayed miscarriage, depending on how scared you are of the word "abortion"--and it's accompanied by loss of pregnancy symptoms, and green vegetables are grossing me out as much as they ever have (which was not at all until a few weeks ago, when I of course had plenty of them in the fridge because up until then I'd had no food aversions and was delighted to be getting my healthy meals in), so that is probably not really likely. My fingers are crossed anyway.

My goals for 2009 are pretty much the same ones as my goals for 2008: work on nonfiction, work on fiction, have a baby, get the house in shape, don't drive myself crazy with crafts. I think I did pretty well in 2008, especially on the nonfiction side. Not as well as I would have liked, but it's probably good for me not to hit all my goals; it means I didn't set them too low.

Merry Christmouse

So the mouse was not gone. Or at any rate a mouse was not gone, as we discovered when we trooped into the house at about 1:15 AM, having picked up my parents at the train station. They flew American Airlines, and after a delay in Seattle (due to O'Hare traffic, apparently, even though Seattle was getting what I believe was its worst snow on record) landed in O'Hare at about 1 PM to find that their connecting flight was cancelled. They were 66th on the standby list. American booked them on a flight for 7:30 PM the next night--Christmas Eve--which would have been a 30-hour wait in the airport. American offered no hotel or food vouchers. "Are we supposed to spend the night in the airport, then?" Dad asked, and the attendant said vaguely, "I hope not. We're sorry about this."

So I called six or seven rental places and found nobody had any cars to rent. Dad said he didn't want us to drive with the weather the way it was, so Eric and his mom checked Amtrak and bought two of the last train tickets out of Chicago, and Mom and Dad went off to the train station. We'd had to get first-class tickets, but that meant they got to go into a quiet lounge with free drinks rather than stand outside with the poor souls who were also stuck in Chicago but didn't have the travel staff Mom and Dad did and so were vainly begging for coach seats. Apparently a steak dinner with dessert was included, and they got a sleeper compartment to themselves, so it was actually quite nice. And they didn't have to spend thirty hours at the airport.

"The mouse isn't gone," Eric said when we stood there in the kitchen. "I just saw it run across the room."

I elected to totally ignore the problem until Mom and Dad had left, and the mouse--mice--fortunately decided to do the same. We had a nice visit--a little noisy the first two days since we were having two big holiday dinners with Eric's family, and then very quiet the next two. I got some con T-shirts and an enameled cast-iron pot and some books I've been wanting, plus a copy of The Bible According to Mark Twain, which I used to own but lost years ago--I left it with either James or Dad to read, but I can't remember which and both deny any knowledge of it, and neither ever found it again. Dad finally decided he'd heard enough of my complaining (though that's not how he said it) and bought me another copy, which pleased me to no end.

Mom and Dad got home without any trouble, although they decided to take flight vouchers for taking a later flight in O'Hare. Since they vowed never to fly American again I can only assume they're going to give them to James.

Yesterday after work we went and bought traps, some classic and some glue traps, and put them down. Then we went upstairs into the computer room. Not long after I came down and called to Eric, "We caught a mouse!" These glue traps are apparently great stuff. But it doesn't kill them, and despite the "anesthesia" advertised on the box this one was struggling. Eric and I discussed humane ways of dispatching it--I didn't want to let it starve to death--or die of thirst, though I think that's just a semantic difference with mice since they don't drink--and Eric ended up taking it outside and crushing its skull with a hammer.

Not long after I was in the pantry making my lunch and another mouse decided it would be a great time to rummage between the bread and the chips. "We definitely had more than one!" I said when Eric rushed down to see whether the shriek I'd emitted was because I'd been murdered. I put a glue trap up on the counter but no luck yet.

I'm really pissed off at that particular mouse. On the floor is annoying, but within the bounds of acceptability. On my counter means war. Also, what is the damn thing eating? There aren't any holes in the bread or chips or rice as far as I can see, but there are droppings so it's clearly eating something. M--f-- b-- mice.

When the homeowners are away, the mice will play

We canned apple pie filling a few days ago. It was a total disaster--one of the jars broke in the canner and then when I pulled out the rest they all oozed filling over the counter, so most of it's in the freezer now and I'm trying to decide whether I failed to secure every lid properly or whether I should blame the ClearJel--but it also gave us valuable but annoying information: we have, or had, a mouse. Or mice.

When I opened the drawer to get the quart jars I found a few pellets of what were undeniably mouse droppings in it. I cussed a little and got the jars out to be sterilized, and then I opened other drawers. The one below the jar drawer drew more enthusiastic cussing. It's where I keep the candy-making supplies I got for my wedding shower, and it was practically filled with droppings. We discovered later that the lower shelf of the storage under the counters also had droppings, and the bag of basmati rice had been nibbled and defecated into. (Luckily it wasn't a full bag--we keep most of our rice in a Tupperware container and the bag only held what wouldn't fit.) Eric ran out of Pop-Tarts before we thought he would (we stocked up at a good sale) and I'd swear the mouse/mice got that, too, except we can't find any wrappers.

We intended to get mousetraps yesterday, but went haircutting and Christmas shopping instead. Today I get the mousetraps (and make turnovers from the apple pie filling that's still in the fridge) and maybe some antibacterial spray for the drawers. I'm not sure how much that will help--I also have paint, which might be better--but we do need the space. Even if apple pie filling is out of our reach, we do just fine with pickles and apple butter.