The very end of the [mouse] tail… tale.

The exterminator found a dead mouse in the attic in the trap that Josh set at the beginning of the week.  And then, that evening, while we were watching the end of the very intense episode of Sherlock, a mouse died in the kitchen.  Josh went to bring our tea cups downstairs at the end of the night, and came upstairs, his hands clasped as if in orison, praying for me to remain calm.

“Melissa, there is something I need to deal with downstairs, so please don’t come down.”

Yes, there was shrieking on my part.

The rest of the week has been quiet, not a scritching to be heard.  Not that I didn’t think I heard the skittering of little feet.  I spent a lot of time with my head pressed against the heat vents, holding my breath while listening.

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “The Quest You Get” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Earth & Ink!
• “Thirty Days of Caemon–Day Five: Caemon’s Story–Explaining the Impossible” (C is for Crocodile)
• “Word Barf” (Three Geminis and a Sagittarius)

Okay, now my choices this week.

A Separate Life has a post about a moment 35 years ago that changed the whole course of her life.  At the time, she had no clue how it would impact her, but now, in retrospect, she can trace so many life choices back to this one moment.  It’s a cool story, and one applicable to so many moments in life when we can’t know how the here and now will affect the years to come.

Earth & Ink’s valentine took my breath away.  Though she isn’t infertile, she explains why she relates to the infertility community.  And it made me cry.  Because she gets it.  She gets it in a way that you really wish the rest of the world would get it.  And she gets it in a way that highlights the fact that the emotions of infertility are so universally applicable that it defies logic that more people don’t get it.  I love this post so much.  I will return to read it again and again.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled writes about Family Day.  When I first heard about Family Day, I was a little bummed the US didn’t have it.  We could, let’s say, knock some other holidays off the calendar with it.  But now, reading Loribeth’s post, I’m glad we don’t have to contend with Family Day if family requires one to have children in order to be able to participate.  I hope that next year, as they race to be inclusive of everyone, they actually become inclusive of everyone and include families without children.

The roundup to the Roundup: The end of the mouse story.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between February 13th and 20th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

The first Mother’s Day pitches arrived on February 16th.  February 16th.

83 days.

One day shy of 12 weeks.

Pitches.  As in, 3 pitches dedicated to Mother’s Day all came on the 16th, amid all the other PR pitches.

This is unconscionable; even in a world controlled by the market, where businesses need to glom onto holidays in order to stay afloat.  The pitches put me in a foul mood.  Businesses may need to start three months ahead in order to set plans into place, but they do not need to subject the general public three months ahead of time.

We do not need Mother’s Day commercials three months ahead of time.  We do not need Easter candy in January or Christmas decorations in October.  We all know where the holidays fall in the calendar.

Make it stop.

Please.

This is the end of the story.

*******

We now know that it was a mouse.

The mouse watched me work.  He stood in the doorway, at the mouth of the kitchen, and watched until I felt something staring at me and I turned around.  I immediately jumped onto the sofa, shrieking.  The mouse stared at me and then slooooowly waddled back behind the refrigerator.  Truman stopped chewing a lettuce leaf to stare at me for a bit with an expression of confusion on his little rodent face.  Why was I screaming about that rodent when I rub my cheek against this rodent?

Love isn’t rational.

I called Josh several times and told him to come home nooooooooow!  NOW!  Did you hear me?  NOW!

Still standing on the sofa, I managed to reach across the carpeted divide and grab my notebooks.  And then I ran out of the house, snatching up a pair of shoes along the way, and put on my boots in the car.  And then I drove away from the house, shuddering shuddering shuddering.

*******

Josh came home a few hours later, telling me that it was safe to return home myself.  He set up traps in the kitchen while I twitched in the living room, trying to save all the documents I left up on the computer when I ran from the house earlier.

He went to stand in the hallway, and then he whispered, “Melissa.  I’m looking at it.”

The mouse wandered out from behind the refrigerator, went to taste the peanut butter treat, and… well… you know the rest of the story.

5 minutes.  That’s how long it took to end his life after we set the traps.  5 minutes.

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I started wailing when I heard the trap snap closed.  Out of exhaustion — I was working on about four hours of sleep that I grabbed between an intense episode of Sherlock and the mouse’s 5:30 am wakeup call in the attic.  Out of stress — we’re waiting on a lot of things right now and tension has been high.  Out of guilt — I’m not a fan of mice, but I’m also not a fan of being a killer.  I sobbed and sobbed while Josh held me.

And then the mouse was gone.  Out of the house.

*******

We left out the traps while I went through the afternoon activities, and I finally told the twins about the mouse when we arrived home.  I promised to go inside and check the traps.  If any had been moved or there was a mouse there, we’d leave and come back once dad was home to deal with it.  But if all was still the same, we’d take back our house.

I crept into the house, cursing the fact that I had to be the adult.  That no one was there to do this for me.  All was quiet, untouched.  We went about our evening routine.  But I’m not going to lie; I spent the whole evening listening for little mouse friends, an exterminator appointment in hand.

I cleaned out the cupboard.  I bleached the kitchen.  And I spent a great deal of time trying to convince Truman that I love some rodents.  Not all rodents, but definitely him.

I woke up at 5:30 in the morning because of a scratching sound above my head, coming from the attic.  It sounded like a squirrel trying to stack acorns.  Which is different from the time that it sounded as if a serial killer was dismembering a corpse in our attic.  Still, as much as I didn’t want a serial killer in the attic (likely a man and likely someone who hadn’t bathed in weeks and likely someone who was going to track bloody chunks of intestine through my house), I also really really really didn’t want a squirrel.  Or a bat.  Or a mouse.  Or an opossum (which is only one step above a cricket, in my book).

I went into the hallway to see if I could still hear the sound, and there it was, a tiny pattering, a scratching.  I went back in the bedroom and woke up Josh.

“There’s a noise,” I told him.

He sat up in bed to listen, heard it too, inexplicably went to turn on the light (why?  So we could see the animal’s face poking out from the ceiling as it gnawed its way through the attic floor?), turned back off the light when I hissed at him, and then grabbed his phone to Google for answers on what to do, missing the bed as he tried to sit down because I had made him turn off the lights.

Meanwhile, the squirrel gleefully danced around his acorn structure.

*******

Back in college, I had a friend who wrote a short story called “Bats.”  It was about a husband waiting for his wife to come home so he could confront her about her infidelity, and in the meantime, his young son has woken up due to a noise and wants his father to investigate.  The dad lies in his son’s bed with him, waiting for the noise, contemplating the worth of changing the course of their lives by leaving his wife.

That’s what I was thinking about as we Googled.  That the dad was awfully calm in that story.  He wasn’t nearly focused enough on the bat in his attic.  And while, yeah, I get that the rest of his life was falling apart, it turns out that when you hear an animal in your attic, you drop all that other shit and Google.  You focus on the animal that has moved into your home, not the animals (human or otherwise) outside your abode.

*******

We decided that the sound didn’t fit the description of a raccoon.  And it didn’t fit the whispers of bats who apparently don’t scurry at all but sound more like someone rubbing their finger against the wall.  It was probably a squirrel or a mouse.

“We’ll go up in the morning,” Josh decided.

“After the kids go to school because we’re never telling them about this,” I agreed.

Josh set up the ladder while I was out at drop-off, and when I came home, he grimly climbed up while I stood in the hallway with my hands clasped over my mouth saying over and over again, “What if something runs out?  I will diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiie if something runs out.”

Nothing ran out.  He explored the attic and save for a tiny hole near the roof that he covered with duct tape (and said had been there since we bought the house) and a patch of wall where we could see the siding (again, apparently there since we bought the house, though that doesn’t seem good, does it?), there was nothing unusual in the attic.  No gnaw marks on the bags of clothes in storage.  No animal droppings.  And no acorn sculptures.

No sign that anything had been there at all.

He set a trap anyway and climbed back down.

It’s possible that the sounds were on the roof as they were last time with the crow.  It’s entirely possible that if I had remembered that blog post at 5:30 in the morning vs. when I sat down to write this that Josh would have gone outside, seen an animal on the roof, and we could have saved ourselves a trip inside the attic.  Or it’s possible that we’re going to be lying in bed one night in the not too distant future and hear the sharp snap of a trap closing.

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It’s time like these that I wonder if it’s worth being a home owner.  Aside from the ability to decorate as we please and build equity in a piece of property, there are so many drawbacks to home ownership that I sometimes think that we would have been better off renting.  This could have been someone else’s problem.

Instead it is ours.  It is one of those things you never think about as a kid when you’re waiting to grow up.  The twins talk about how they’ll be able to have cookies for breakfast when they’re an adult and not go to school and stay up late.  But they never gleefully exclaim, “And I’ll be forced to deal with animals living in my attic at 5:30 in the morning!”

It sucks to be an adult.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Bad smells: any and all perfume, lavender, vanilla, chamomile, flowers.

Good smells: bleach, my detergent, my soap, bookstores.

Can you tell that I just had to spend time in a too warm space with a person wearing too much perfume?  I should not be able to smell someone else’s perfume if my nose isn’t pressed up near their body.

I wish I lived back in pre-Industrial Europe when it was fashionable to carry around a scented handkerchief and press your face in it when you passed ill-scented matter on the street.

My handkerchief would be soaked in bleach (and would likely kill me, as a result).  And barring that, I would take lemon.

What are your favourite (and least favourite) smells?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored posts.