We have a mouse in the house. Or should I say, a moose is loose in the hoose. This isn't the first time, a few months ago we saw one and chased it out the front door. That seemed to work pretty well but didn't stop one of its brothers from coming back. New York is famous for its pests and has earned every sour word ever spoken about the problem. The subway tracks aren't literally full of rats, just figuratively. You see them all the time down there, going about their business. And cockroaches. Their reputation precedes them of course, those hard shelled chunks of prehistory. Knock on wood we haven't seen any in our current place but they were frequent guests on Rivington Street. Together the next door neighbor's cat and I would route them out, chase them down and squash them. Followed by a little 'High Paw'. There is an urban myth that if you step on a pregnant cockroach a billion little cockroaches will run everywhere. Such is the level of hysteria. And finally, the mice. Compared to the first two creatures, mice are like furry little pets that you kill when you can. They don't stink or bite or dwell in the recesses of your nightmares, but they do eat stuff and scurry across your toes when you are least expecting. I'm not scared of mice so much as I am scared of their scurrying. Will they scurry up my pantleg and claw my privies? Probably not, but that thought is present when looking under the stove for their cheese furnished houses. I should relate the story of two men, or sub-men, who tried to rid a ski cabin some years ago of the one mouse that lived there. They cornered the thing behind the refrigerator (they are ALWAYS behind the refrigerator) One of these guys broke out the tools and they made a plan. "I will use this broom to scare it out from under the fridge" he said. "You catch it with this bucket" He handed the other one a bucket. The bucket wielder, some thirty or forty times larger than a mouse, prepared to entrap the fleeing rodent. The Broom Swiper did his job and before long the mouse shot out from under the fridge like a fur bullet. The Bucket Wielder screamed like a very little girl and threw the bucket in the air. The mouse went someplace else to ponder the high pitch noise that had made its ears ring so. I would like to say that the bucket came down on the head of the Broom Swiper to complete the comic picture, or that the Bucket Wielder was not myself. Neither is true. Mice still employ this method of psychological warfare on me but I've found that killing them is not a problem for me via the mousetrap. I started laying down traps and sometimes they even work. Now if only I could get the vacant beady black stares of the recently departed out of my head so I can sleep. Someday I will build a better mousetrap. It will be made from an elaborate pulley system, a tiny set of scales, a swinging boot on the end of a stick, a paper cutout of a mean looking cat, a tin can full of ball-bearings and of course: a bucket. I'm a little scared that the world WILL beat a path to my door since I basically only speak English and our kitchen is neither Kosher or Halal.
We do our laundry downstairs. That's what I'm doing now as I write. It's not far away, quite convenient actually and we rarely have to wait. In fact it's a little eerie that we almost never see any of our neighbors down there, when do they do their laundry? DO they? Once something sort of interesting happened down there. Someone had apparently left their clothes in the dryer and then moved out of the building. There was a pile of ironic t-shirts and $200 tattered jeans (the hipster uniform) lying on the dryer. Over the next few weeks none of the clothes were claimed, but they were thrown all over the room. Hanging from the lamp, draped over the door, and chucked in the trash. Sometimes I have to stand back and look at it from the perspective of our Hassidic landlords, what the HELL are these goyim DOING? Or did the superintendent Eugene get tired of looking at the pile of clothes and momentarily loose it, hurling hipster uniform like a righteous dervish. I can see him breathing a little heavily afterwards, admiring the fruits of his outrage, then plopping the kippa back on his head and marching out of the room. Right, now I must go claim my ironic t-shirts before they meet the same fate. Actually I only have one, if you can call a tattered shirt with the word "BALLARD" written across it ironic.
I'm back. I thought that the above would be the end to today's entry but no, the clothes weren't dry. We considered putting them away anyway, since we are out of quarters but instead ransacked the apartment looking for some. I found some in a little box I like to think of as my treasure chest. Basically it holds all of the shiny object I've ever been distracted by and took home like a magpie. I'd like to bury it in the ground but a. I'd lose it like I've lost everything I've ever buried, and b. that's where I keep my stamps. Also if I'd buried it we wouldn't have been able to fully dry the clothes tonight and gone to work like we'd spent the night in the rain. I am preparing to iron my shirts, whenever they dry. We got a new iron at Costco the other day. Oh man, I have to go off about the Costco out here some time. Talk about building a better mouse trap. Not now though. I do have this theory that the iron will scare the mouse away though, since it sort of looks like a mouse and blows steam and has one red eye. Thats some scary stuff if you are a mouse. "That giant robot mouse has just helped 'Bald Tall' flatten the torso of another Bald Tall! SICK!" the mouse will say from it's cheese house under the fridge, "It's too intense, I'd better leave."
Anyway, if I were a mouse I'd leave. Or I'd build an alter to it out of crumbs. Okay, let's check out the wash.
Posted by ian at January 29, 2006 07:59 PM