Me and Kerry and Mice

My sister Kerry and I have a completely irrational fear of mice. My sister is one of the toughest cats around, but show that girl a mouse and she will freak out. Growing up, I don't quite recall having that same fear of mice, per se, but in an incident that occurred during college (in which a mouse joined me on the family room couch, causing me to scream absolutely bloody murder, subsequently jarring my dad out of sound sleep to come to my aid) I discovered that mice really do scare me.

I cannot explain this. I also have no trouble admitting this.

We live in an old house, so in the fall and winter time we are sometimes visited by mice. Susan was over at our house for dinner one night and she saw a mouse. I jumped up, ran across the room, and then threw a box at the mouse. Smart, huh? Sunday afternoon, AV and I were standing in the kitchen when a mouse (bravely) bolted out from under the radiator. AV had not yet been party to my reaction, and when I screamed and sprinted out of the kitchen up the stairs, he was--we'll say--surprised.

'Tis the season, I guess.

Given my recent variety of issues about (a) High Fructose Corn Syrup, (b) Cows eating their own poop and developing an immunity to e. coli that gets passed along to us, (c) Cow poop making it into our food by not-so-neat slaughtering practices, I have been agonizing far more than usual about the ways in which one might dispatch mice. For example, I can't actually say that I think those sticky traps are such a good idea. However, I cannot be okay with the appearance of evidence in a variety of areas in our kitchen.

Anyway, that is what has been going on in my life...in addition to some mammoth grading and some "excitement" in one of my classes (which I'll write about another time). In case you were wondering, I have managed to faithfully keep up with Days of Our Lives in spite of my busy schedule. Philip Kiriakis, who (when we last left our recapping of the show) boarded a plane never to be heard from again, now resides bandaged from head to toe in his father's manse awaiting a face transplant.