shut up and let me see your jazz hands

Gross (yet funny & kinda cool in that yes, sometimes I am a ten-year-old boy sort of way)

When I threw up Saturday, I just grabbed the little trashcan by the bed, which already had a bunch of Kleenex and trash in it. Because Bruce has a weak stomach and can't clean up stuff like that without getting sick himself, he just put it outside in the back with its lid on (it has one of those swinging lid things). Anyway, so this little trashcan full of now-vomit-soaked tissues and papers sitting in a further pool of vomit, as most of what I threw up was liquid was just sitting out there all day and night. At some point a possum came along and ate a bunch of the Kleenex and drank the throw up! Bruce told me about it Sunday morning and I totally went out and looked, cause dude. Since it was raining, I didn't clean it up today either, and last night he (they?) came back and ate some more.

In conclusion, possums rock.

Annoying

I think we have more than one wily mouse. The only other option is that we have some sort of superhuman (superrodent?) mouse that is completely immune to poison and just eats it up like candy. Three blocks of poison have been chowed down upon as of this point in time and there is fresh mouse shit behind the washing machine. I have three blocks left, I think. Maybe four. If that doesn't do them in, I don't know what to do. Aaaaargh.

In conclusion, mice suck ass and omg why will they not go away!?

Took Bruce to the airport this morning, then came home and fiddled around on the computer for a couple more hours and ended up going to bed at like 7.30 or 8. Was awakened four times by the phone, only two of which were Bruce.

See, he had been expecting his friend Mike to pick him up at the airport in Indianapolis. They'd had this arranged for quite a while, but when Bruce tried to call Mike this week and confirm, he just kept getting voicemail and Mike never called back. Didn't respond to emails, either. Now, Mike is kinda flakey, but I didn't expect him to be this flakey and neither did Bruce.

So as of dropping Bruce off at the airport this morning, we still did not know who would pick him up. His sister lives in Indy, too, so there's always that, or since he does have some cash and a credit card with him, he could rent a car to drive up to his parents' (it's only about an hour away). But he made the mistake of calling his parents on the way to the airport and they got all worked up, so that by the time he got off the plane for his layover in Atlanta (thanks, Delta, for sending him hours out of the way!) they had already made up their minds that he wasn't going to stay with Mike.

I had looked up Mike's dad's phone number and gotten it to Bruce before he got on the plane. He called them in Atlanta and got Mike's cellphone number and finally got in touch with Mike. Yes, Mike would pick him up. He called his mom and got "No, Carol Lynn's going to pick you up. End of story."

So he doesn't get to see Mike at all, after being excited about getting to spend a day with him before going up to Huntington. That's why we did all this stuff with the jpop videos, cause he wanted to take a harddrive to Mike and share the vids with him. And instead his mom bullied him into once again not spending time with his friends.

There is still a chance he can see Mike before his flight out. I told him to put his foot down and make sure his folks take him down there on the 27th so he can spend the day with Mike before flying out on the 28th. Otherwise I'm sure they'll try to drive him directly to the airport.

It's so, so frustrating. He never gets to see his friends who still live back there (well, at the moment it's just Mike, since Pam & Andrew moved back to SF) because his mom bullies him into spending all his time there. I get that she misses him, but if she misses him that much, then why not pay for him to come and visit more often? They have money and we don't. Is that not the obvious solution? Or why don't they come see us? They've visited once in the eight years Bruce has lived here. Bruce's mom hates to fly, so before they drove, and they're really getting too old for a cross-country drive now, but they could take the train.

But they just don't get it. They don't get that people might not have money. They don't get that "we don't have the money" isn't an excuse, it's a fact. In their Christmas letter that they sent off to everyone, they said Bruce was coming to visit but that I was staying in CA because I didn't want to come. Totally ignoring the part where we can't afford for both of us to go. (Oh right, I forgot that they offered to pay my ticket, and thus I should have lept at the chance, despite the fact that by then there were no more seats on Bruce's flight, so I would have had to fly separately. Sorry, but I am not flying all that way by myself to see someone else's family! Also there's the little matter of work. I cannot take time off of work and with all the five million things they do during the holidays, I could bring my laptop, but I would not have two seconds alone to myself to actually get any work done.)

Argh, argh, argh. I am so annoyed by this.

Also I got an Amazon package from his aunt today with my Christmas present. I had Bruce send a list of Amazon links to her so she could just click and order. Somehow she managed to order THE WRONG THING. *headdesk* I got Wilde, which I am thrilled with having, yay. Especially since I saw it had been marked down to $16 and was like ooh, ooh, ooh, and now I see that either that was a super Christmas sale or a mistake, because it's back up to $26 and the reason I've not bought it yet is that I refuse to pay nearly $30 for a DVD unless it's a box set or a super special edition or something. However, the other thing I got was not the Cold Mountain DVD (this is the year for filling in the cracks of my Jude and Ewan collection), but the Cold Mountain SOUNDTRACK. How do you click on the link for the DVD and then click away from it to order the soundtrack?

Well, I can return it, right? Only I went most of the way through the return process only to find that since it's not a mistake on Amazon's part, I have to pay shipping (or rather, it will be subtracted from my credit). On a $10 CD, they will take out $3 in shipping and handling. Argh!

And while I'm ranting, I just took a break to do some cleaning. Found a stack of old Japanese dramas on VHS which we will never watch, and anyway Bruce has downloaded a lot of them on DivX anyway. Tossed two big trash bags full of VHS tapes. We now have two big shelves free in the bedroom, so tomorrow I will dust them off and see what could get put there to clear up floorspace.

I also yesterday put two big stacks of magazines in the recycling. It pained me to do so - old anime mags, mainly, and some Japanese children's magazines, but they won't fetch any money on eBay, I've tried - but it felt good to get rid of stuff. With those out of the way and some other boxes combined together, I managed to get my "to eBay" boxes from five to three, clearing up a huge section of floor here in the computer room. Also put a stack of Japanese kids' books in the "take to the library" pile. We bought them years ago at a library sale just because "eee Japanese books!" but they've just been sitting in the closet, of course.

Anyway! I then went around looking for other tapes that could be tossed. We still have a couple stacks of blank (as in unlabelled) ones that Bruce needs to look at and see if he wants to keep. I did find a few more anime tapes that he has since got DVDs of. Tossed those. Then I opened up the drawer under the TV stand in the living room to see what was in there. Do you know what was in there?

MOUSE SHIT! Yes, somehow the mouse squeezed his way in (there's a small space in the back, maybe an inch, between the top of the drawer and the shelf above it), panicked that he couldn't get out (I've noticed they poop more when they're scared, and I hate that I have enough experience to know this) and shat up a storm. They're just hard little pellets, so I just vacuumed them up and no harm done, but argh! I did put a DVD and VHS manual in the recycling, though, but otherwise didn't really find much in there to get rid of as it was mostly empty.

So...that's been my day. But at least Bruce has landed safely for grate yay. And I got Wilde on DVD, which I've been wanting. And in the mail there was a Christmas card from obscene_art. :D Oh! And yesterday I got my package from helens78 with the raspberry Coke she was kind enough to haul back from her trip to New Zealand. She sent an 8-pack! I would take pictures, but Bruce has taken the camera. I'm sure he will take pics when he gets back, though. He drank one can last night and I had a bit. It's pretty tasty, but not super wow. (Which is actually good, because now he won't be pining over it the way he would if it were the best soda evah and he couldn't get ahold of it.) But he was very happy to get the chance to try it, so thank you, thank you, Helens! :D She also sent two king size Crunchie bars, and I've already eaten one. Mmm...honeycomb.

Bruce just went back by the washer and said to me, "Did you move the mouse trap?"

"No..."

So I go back and what do I see? That fucker! That stupid mouse has moved the glue trap, pushed it out of the way and shat all over the floor!!!

( photographic evidence )

I will not be outwitted by a fucking mouse!

Am going to see Stay tomorrow with obscene_art. *dances*

Lots of meh stuff going on today. We finally had to face the fact that we have a rat or mouse, or God forbid, more than one. For some time I've been hearing occasional scrabbling in the walls and crawl space under the roof. Of course I ignored it as much as possible. Lalala, no rodents here, yo.

Then when we cleaned out the closet (sort of) a month or so back, we found things that looked suspiciously like rat droppings covering the floor in the back. There's a hole where a tube from the dryer comes through the back there, so a mouse could get in from there. But again, just vacuumed it up and lalala.

However, this morning Bruce opened the cupboard in the little space off the kitchen and found more droppings, plus a bag of peas or beans had been gnawed open. He pulled back the little cart by the washing machine there and sure enough, more droppings and also pee. Blech. Even some droppings in the dirty laundry that was in the washer (which we always keep open so that you can just throw laundry in there - no laundry baskets for us, no). Well, of course there's a huge hole behind the washer as well, where all the pipes go, where a mouse could scamper in a have a grand old time.

So we had to face the facts. Definitely something here. Oh yeah, also the other night I came out of the computer room and saw something scurrying in the kitchen, but once again I chose to ignore it and assume it was just my imagination. No, I really did not want to deal with this situation, did I?

Got a couple snappy traps today at the grocery store and put one behind by the washer and one in the closet. When I went in the closet, sure enough the floor was covered again... Vacuummed it up before putting the trap in.

So hopefully that'll do it. We got the snappy traps, cause honestly I don't trust those glue ones to hold the little buggers. Plus the snappy ones were cheaper.

We've never had a mouse in the nearly thirty years I've lived in this house, so, you know. Exciting!

( TMI about my period )