Its been awhile but to be honest the busyness has been nothing more than mundane.
O.k, so this is one of those logs I am kind of hoping my daughter doesn’t come across until enough time has past that she might be able to see the funny side of it.
Alex has been looking after (if that’s really the right word for it, because it seems more to me like, held captive) two pet mice for the past two years.
She got them when they were very small and for quite some time they seemed more than happy to stay within the safe confines of their cozy wee cage. However as time came to pass and they became more adventurous they began to make nighttime forays out into the house to peruse the contents of the various rubbish bins situated throughout.
It was not uncommon for me to wake to the sound of Alex returning one or both of the wayward explorers back to their cage in the middle of the night having found that she was in fact sharing a bed with one or other or both!. Often we would notice them near one of the bedrooms and several hours later they would have returned themselves back into their cage, they seemed to come and go entirely as they pleased and in the end we gave up worrying too much as so long as they could get back in the cage we reasoned that they would at least be able to find plentiful food and water.
At first I was concerned about the possibility of interbreeding with locals who would often turn up from the fields out back whenever the weather started to turn cold. I was also concerned that mouse pee, no matter the miniscule size had a tendency to cause a powerful and long lasting odor that was extremely difficult to hunt down to source and certainly did nothing to make a house more welcoming.
This went on for quite sometime and I was pleased to find that neither of my fears were realized and although both Alex and I lived in constant fear that our cat would be found one morning proudly displaying the sad remains of Honey or Bella this too proved not to be the case. In all honesty I found it quite cute to discover one of these brave little ladies trotting around my feet in the kitchen, quite unperturbed by my presence. In some ways they were like really, really small cats.
Eventually one of the large field rats from outside decided to take up residence in the floor space below our dishwasher and before I had a chance to feed him the deadly green barley of horrible and intense thirst I believe he met with Honey and Bella because from that day to this, the two mice have never again left their cage under their own steam.
That was nearly a year ago and since that time Alex has grown and changed quite a great deal and the mice are not as attractive to her as they once were. As such they receive, in my belief the most frugal of attentions. Yes, she still feeds and waters them regularly but that is about the limit of interaction they have with their master these days.
So... last weekend I looked at these two (who I believed were looking at me pleadingly) and decided that their lives had more worth than old and forgotten toys and they simply deserved better than to be locked in a small cage never to be played with caressed or stroked and.... I took it upon myself to release them back to the wild.
Well it was the proper thing to do right?
I took them out into the back garden and found them a nice warm, dry and sheltered little spot up beside the house where the rain never gets to. There was plenty of dried grass for them to use as nesting material and lots of grass and flower seeds down by the soil for them to eat. There was also a large pile of old firewood that had been stacked right there but never used and it looked nothing short of perfect as a new lodging.
Sweet!
Problem solved.
Fast forward to today, Wednesday.
I hear Alex going into the spare room where the mice cage is... There’s the rattling noise of the mouse food container as food is poured into the bowl and then she emerges holding the water bottle. She fills it and returns to the spare room. I’m sitting in the kitchen, the hairs on the back of my neck all stood up and my sphincter drawn up to somewhere just below my neck, waiting, waiting... Next minute she appears at the door, flashes me her usual smile and heads off to her room to finish getting ready for school.
See – I thought to myself. You did the right thing; she didn’t even take the time to look for/at them and realize they aren’t there. So it was with a certain degree of relief that I went to shut the door to the room and pass a cursory glance at the now redundant cage...
Fuck me!
The little bastards had found their way back! And got back into the cage again!
Daryl. W
Currently listening to:
Blips via Blip.FM
O.k, so this is one of those logs I am kind of hoping my daughter doesn’t come across until enough time has past that she might be able to see the funny side of it.
Alex has been looking after (if that’s really the right word for it, because it seems more to me like, held captive) two pet mice for the past two years.
She got them when they were very small and for quite some time they seemed more than happy to stay within the safe confines of their cozy wee cage. However as time came to pass and they became more adventurous they began to make nighttime forays out into the house to peruse the contents of the various rubbish bins situated throughout.
It was not uncommon for me to wake to the sound of Alex returning one or both of the wayward explorers back to their cage in the middle of the night having found that she was in fact sharing a bed with one or other or both!. Often we would notice them near one of the bedrooms and several hours later they would have returned themselves back into their cage, they seemed to come and go entirely as they pleased and in the end we gave up worrying too much as so long as they could get back in the cage we reasoned that they would at least be able to find plentiful food and water.
At first I was concerned about the possibility of interbreeding with locals who would often turn up from the fields out back whenever the weather started to turn cold. I was also concerned that mouse pee, no matter the miniscule size had a tendency to cause a powerful and long lasting odor that was extremely difficult to hunt down to source and certainly did nothing to make a house more welcoming.
This went on for quite sometime and I was pleased to find that neither of my fears were realized and although both Alex and I lived in constant fear that our cat would be found one morning proudly displaying the sad remains of Honey or Bella this too proved not to be the case. In all honesty I found it quite cute to discover one of these brave little ladies trotting around my feet in the kitchen, quite unperturbed by my presence. In some ways they were like really, really small cats.
Eventually one of the large field rats from outside decided to take up residence in the floor space below our dishwasher and before I had a chance to feed him the deadly green barley of horrible and intense thirst I believe he met with Honey and Bella because from that day to this, the two mice have never again left their cage under their own steam.
That was nearly a year ago and since that time Alex has grown and changed quite a great deal and the mice are not as attractive to her as they once were. As such they receive, in my belief the most frugal of attentions. Yes, she still feeds and waters them regularly but that is about the limit of interaction they have with their master these days.
So... last weekend I looked at these two (who I believed were looking at me pleadingly) and decided that their lives had more worth than old and forgotten toys and they simply deserved better than to be locked in a small cage never to be played with caressed or stroked and.... I took it upon myself to release them back to the wild.
Well it was the proper thing to do right?
I took them out into the back garden and found them a nice warm, dry and sheltered little spot up beside the house where the rain never gets to. There was plenty of dried grass for them to use as nesting material and lots of grass and flower seeds down by the soil for them to eat. There was also a large pile of old firewood that had been stacked right there but never used and it looked nothing short of perfect as a new lodging.
Sweet!
Problem solved.
Fast forward to today, Wednesday.
I hear Alex going into the spare room where the mice cage is... There’s the rattling noise of the mouse food container as food is poured into the bowl and then she emerges holding the water bottle. She fills it and returns to the spare room. I’m sitting in the kitchen, the hairs on the back of my neck all stood up and my sphincter drawn up to somewhere just below my neck, waiting, waiting... Next minute she appears at the door, flashes me her usual smile and heads off to her room to finish getting ready for school.
See – I thought to myself. You did the right thing; she didn’t even take the time to look for/at them and realize they aren’t there. So it was with a certain degree of relief that I went to shut the door to the room and pass a cursory glance at the now redundant cage...
Fuck me!
The little bastards had found their way back! And got back into the cage again!
Daryl. W
Currently listening to:
Blips via Blip.FM
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