*pong*

Cross posted from facebook so if you read my notes there you can just skip this.

Mouse fail.

So last night I'm comfortably curled up on the couch with a blanket when I see the cat come in out of the corner of my eye. Also out of the corner of my eye I see her drop something small and gray which goes shooting away under the cat bed.

I actually look over there at this point, and my fear is confirmed. Splodge is now doing the "I have something cornered" dance, which I'd describe but really, if you have a cat you've seen it, and if you've never had a cat no amount of description will help.

"Antony! Splodge has a mouse!"

Out I go from my warm comfy blanket and Quantum of Solace (btw, was it just me or was that movie nothing but one big chase scene punctuated with explosions?) over to the cat bed. I pick it up and I see a teeny tiny little mouse, which runs for cover behind a nearby table leg. Wee sleekit cowerin' timorous beastie indeed.

So I try to grab it before it can get away, and it goes right up my sleeve. For about 2 seconds I'm just like "wha??", thinking it must have gone somewhere else. Then I feel whiskers on my elbow. I begin laughing in disbelief.

"Antony! Help! The mouse is in my sleeve!"

He finally makes it over to me, and also begins laughing. We're both trying to figure out how to get the mouse back out of my sleeve without it escaping. Splodge is trying to figure out where her toy/snack went.

I figure if I reach in through the under arm into the sleeve, I can probably grab the mouse. I manage to stop laughing long enough to get Antony to hold the wrist of the sleeve shut, and I try it.

The mouse is having none of this. It promptly runs further up my arm, and ends up approximately in the middle of my back.

"Ahh! It's on my back!" (or something to that effect) Then I start laughing again.

So I point to exactly where the mouse is, and Antony tries to reach up the back of my hoodie and grab the mouse. When his fingers come in contact with it, it does some kind of super mouse spazz maneuver, which startles him into letting go of it again.

There's a minute or two of trying to figure out where the mouse went, because I can no longer feel tiny claws and heartbeat on my shoulder blade. For a bit, we think it must have fled my shirt. Then I realize I feel a tickling sensation on my side. Yep, the mouse is still in my shirt, and at this point I'm laughing so hard that the cat has fled and tears are beginning to come to my eyes.

I try to reach in through the front of the shirt to get to the mouse, and what does it do? It runs back up to the middle of my back. How did it know to do this? Is this one of the mice that escaped from NIMH? I'm kind of feeling like I'm the straight man (woman?) in one of those old Warner Bros. cartoons.

Antony reaches up my back again and this time he actually manages to grab the little beastie. We decant it into a big plastic jar, and sure enough my initial impression of it was right. It is a teeny tiny little mouse. And it's looking at us like "What?"

Finally, because I'm a sucker who can't bring herself to kill invasive species like she should, I poured my mousy nemisis out into the bush. Hopefully that's the last I see of it.

Splodge spent the next couple hours haunting the corner by the cat bed, looking hopeful

Yesterday there was a bee in the bathroom when I was showering. I shut off the light and left the window open, assuming this would lead the bee outdoors. Apparently not, because today it (or its identical cousin) flew into my forehead while I was rinsing shampoo out of my hair.*

Showering with bees: Living dangerously, or just kinda unhygienic?


*I'd kind of like to know where it hid all yesterday and last night, too.

Cross post from my Facebook, so this may look familiar to some.

http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/exhibitions/monet/Default.aspx

I went, and it was really nice.

You can look up impressionist stuff online or buy prints, but it just does not compare to the awesome that is the actual paintings themselves. They're luminous. Monet's stuff in particular, but they had some Renoir and some Degas too. There's really not a whole lot I can say about them that hasn't been said, probably by someone using much more flowery prose than me. But yeah, really really awesome.

I really didn't want to leave, but the place was closing. I plan to return, and spend more time being amazed by the art.

I'm really not feeling the love for xanga. I was kind of considering posting something about something, but then when I logged in it once again tried to make me use the hideous new homepage. It's irritating as hell, and I really dislike how they keep trying by redirecting you when you sign in. So whatever I was going to post about has been replaced with this winge.