dogs are not cats

in case you hadn't noticed.

but then again, my dog doesn't really qualify as a dog anyway. she is rather felis cattus in many ways. she doesn't fetch balls. she lays in the sun and expects a good scratch and gives nothing in return. well, there is the walk thing and the chew-on-bones thing. hmmm. and she wags her tail. we'll call her dogg-ish for now.

we have a mouse. in the house. dr. seuss i am. our mouse does not like peanut butter. our mouse does not like tuna fish. our mouse does not like chocolate, cheese or any combination of the aforementioned foods. it does, however like jelly bellies. but i'm not about to part with any more of those. i keep finding poops in odd places. places where we don't have any food. we rinse out our recyclables, so the jars and cans are pretty clean. we have a really TALL trash can with a lid, so it can't get in there. we don't generally leave food sitting out and i am a former tupperware representative, so we have very little food sitting in plastic bags or boxes. dude's running out of options. especially now that i know it's here...thus i am being more scrupulous in my cleaning efforts. *sporfle* as if i make any effort to clean.

we have bars of soap in our bathroom for the first time ever. EVER, ever. i'm a liquid soap snob, preferring the pretty scents from bath & body works over anything else. the boys recently earned their whittling chip in boy scouts by carving shapes into a bar of soap; so they are proudly washing their hands with their creations. i found gouges in the soap one morning and i thought one of the kids had used my hair brush to make scratches into the wet soap...but they must have washed it off really good, because i didn't find any soap in my brush. so i decided not to yell at them. which was a good choice.

three completely unrelated paragraphs right?

my alarm chirped me awake at 2:30am again today. metric friday. i stumbled towards the green nightlight in the bathroom. i nudged the door open in time to see a long tail attached to a black body scurrying off my bathroom sink. who really knows about the color of the body though, because the color of the nightlight makes everything freakish. i only saw the ass and it moved so fast, i couldn't really judge its size. i did not scream. i did choke out a semi-muffled "oh FUCK," but i did not scream. (please hold your applause until the end of the program.) barefoot. bare legged. i pulled the door shut so it could not leave the bathroom and as my husband leapt from his slumber, (as fast as he leaps at 2:30am, anyway; i was pretty impressed with his distance) i heard it go splat and chitter-scratch onto the tile and under the baseboard heater.

when all was silent we managed to drag the dog into the bathroom by the scruff of her neck to investigate. the dog. my protector. the canus ridiculous who goes absolutely apeshit over the squirrels that dare to climb into her tree in the back yard, the freakazoid who barks at the sewer rats scuttling on the other side of the fence from her. this dog o'mine couldn't be arsed to check out the bathroom and make sure it was free of rodentia. what a total bitch. our last dog actually caught a mouse in his mouth, mid-leap. i let him outside and he spat it into the yard and chased it away with a series of barks that i assume amounted to, "get thee hence, little fuck, and if you return i shall unseam thee from the nave to the chaps." we never did have to set traps for that one. it never came back. so i suppose my expectations for trixie-poo may have been a bit high.

after a short investigation (and a bit of a wash for the sink), we determined that mousie has been eating soap. oooookay. i guess when one runs out of food, one must resort to....soap. when i returned home from work, around noonish, i found a poop on the sink that had not been there first thing this morning. so mousie came back for seconds. we're changing our bait to ivory shavings tonight. and locking up the soap.