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gementThe mice persist, and are scoping out my bedroom since the candy supply in the closet disappeared. They're also investigating the boxes we moved to the laundry room, and leaving more droppings on the photographs I laid out on shelves to let them air-dry/sterilize. Jason is angry and miserable, and I still have to find live traps. (Anyone know where to buy them in the city?)
Long version and some lighter bits, segmented for your summarized pleasure:
Saturday,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
arjache helped me clean for about 6 hours, which hung coat hooks (a year after acquiring them), decluttered the living room and my desk, got the carpet vacuumed and the fireplace swept out.
In cleaning out the fireplace, we discovered A PASSAGE TO CHINA. Seriously, it was crazy. Just a little hole at the back of the fireplace, about the size of a brick, packed with ash. I dug out the ash. Beneath it was a metal flap that swung open like a teeter-totter, horizontal to vertical. I was hoping for a secret compartment with some previous child's toy car collection or love notes or something. I flipped it open. Darkness. I prodded with the poker. No bottom.
I told arjache it went to China. She laughed. I went looking for a plumb line. She stopped laughing.
It was great fun, like being in a Hardy Boys story. We weighted a scrap rope with an old bottle of face foundation (which looked silly, but it was a heavy object no one wanted) and down down down it went. 7.5' it went, and swung a couple feet to either side. We measured from the exterior wall, upstairs and downstairs, and determined that it must be going down between two studs in my bedroom wall. Note to self: see that hot ash does not fall down that hole every again.
Presumably, the original design was that the ash went down a chute to a bin in the unfinished basement for easy removal. It's well below ground level, so it can't have been intended to go outside. Fun with old houses.
We watched the movie version of Phantom of the Opera, which I liked more than I thought I would. It helps that I was totally thrashed from cleaning and was barely good for more than a nap at that point. By the end of the day, I was kind of a small shaking mess. But Arjache read more of my fiction, and that always makes me happy.
Middle of the night, we heard a mouse in our room. Couldn't flush it out. Went to go look in the laundry room to see if there were any more and there was one on top of the washer, which led me on a merry merry chase. While it was treed in one corner, we heard scrabbling from the other side of the room, so that's at least three mice. We went back to bed and slept poorly.
Sunday morning, I was up, I was revved. I was going to clean all the mouse-sign, I was going to make our room barren of hiding places, and hopefully I was going to still have some time to go helpcinnamonteal clean her place as well. J said, "But today is Tara's Firefly game!"
Oh. Right. At that point I was almost balled up in anxiety, between left over cleaning stress from Saturday (I get anxious to the point of paralysis about cleaning my embedded clutter, hence arjache's support), and mice, and new social situation, and wanting things to be clean, and leaving cinnamonteal hanging and...
The game was okay. I felt lost at sea a lot of the time, and burst into tears repeatedly, but I made a character that will be fun to play (ex-Alliance officer now working as a corporate mining inspector) and got to play with Tara's cat, Tommy the Pineapple (named after the gun and the grenade -- it suits him). I ate tasty food and enjoyed an alcoholic beverage in tea to cut down my nerves, which did help for a while.
After the game, Tara kindly took us to Home Despot, where we got insulation to close the gap under the garage door, sonic devices that mice apparently hate, and lots of plastic bins. They did not have mouse-sized live traps, though they had 5 ways of killing mice and live traps for everything larger. I was still so anxious that they were kind of gently walking me through the store.
When I got home, I sat on the couch, bundled up and shaking in my leather jacket, and tried to find my way out of panic. I wanted to clean, but I couldn't move. I have coping strategies (cold water on my head, breathing exercises), but I was too frozen up to use them, and when I mentioned them to J, he said, "Maybe you should just sit and relax for a while." I tried to order live traps, but the Internet kept breaking.
J went to clean the kitchen, which has been oppressively filthy mostly due to another housemate who's still learning to keep a shared kitchen clean. Some of it's ours as well, because it's hard to find the gumption to wash your one dish and wipe the counter when the sink is full and the counter is covered with other dishes. But his real button is the yard waste stacking up, and she was up to 3 bins of it, when there's only supposed to be one.
J came out to the living room after a while, and I told him I'd like his opinion on which live traps to buy, since I'd gotten the Internet working long enough to pull up some options. He said, "Actually, I was going down to the convenience store for some kill traps to just deal with it." I'd told him that if he wanted to take responsibility for kill traps, I'd be okay with it, as long as they were snap-traps, not poison or glue or any of the other automatically lingering options. That didn't include thinking it was okay if he was just disgusted with the house and ready to take it out on the mice.
I did a lot more sobbing. He stayed quietly angry. He used the phrase "rat-infested hovel." Him angry/miserable/noncommunicative and me anxious/paralyzed/crying/desperate to know what's going on is a bad and annoyingly consistent cycle when things break down. I'm scared of everything and want reassurance and opinions; he just wants to throw away everything he owns and live by himself in a tiny apartment with no things to take care of and no people to interact with and no decisions to make. It's really unpleasant. It also tends to lead to a productive spate of cleaning, followed by me saying again, "Let's try this supporting each other cleaning thing without starting miserable, huh?" And he agrees we should and then we don't, and I don't know what to do about it.
When my head cleared a bit, I remembered that I'd asked to spend the day home cleaning but he was unwilling to cancel gaming. I didn't think getting pissed back would really help the situation, so I just reminded him of it civilly and it helped me calm down a little.
We cleaned the kitchen. We took out some garbages. We reminded housemate (who it turns out has been dealing with a dying uncle) that the rule is one yard waste bin, and I had another calm talk with her in which we continued agreeing that things really need to change but I appreciate that this is a big shift for her.
We got all the mouse droppings swept, though I did not get to bleach the floors. I got all the clothes up off the bedroom floor and into bins, put the cardboard boxes in the laundry room in bins, put my photographs in a bin. I need to scan them. Another thing to worry about deteriorating before I get around to it. A lot of the pictures from high school are fading and I want to stop it. I hate losing things. But everything's in bins now. I got the bedroom floor vacuumed, and while there's still a lot of table clutter, the floor is clear and relatively clean. It's a start. We plugged in sonic warfare and went to bed.
J plugged the bedroom sonic warfare in near the door. Middle of the night, he heard scampering by our bed (and my undefended clothes shelves), pounded on the nightstand to scare them, and plugged in the sonic warfare by the head of our bed instead.
My recollection of this is interesting: I heard him wake up, and say that he'd heard them, but then I remember having to move my head so he could pound on my corner of the mattress, because they were in the mattress and he had to scare them out. And then he moved the sonic warfare. I didn't sleep well the rest of the night, thinking they'd tried to move into the mattress. I only know the truth of it because when I woke up, I realized it can't have been *in* the mattress, it must have been under the bed, so I asked J. Wacky. I really remember him punching the mattress right next to my head.
On the shiny-bright side, Sunday morning while looking for my dice bag, I found two things that I had been desperately missing.* My writing notebook and my new phone. Particularly my writing notebook. The one with a bunch of stuff I hadn't transcribed, and all the writing I did while I was sitting vigil with my grandmother last June. Probably including her last words. I have some transcribing to do.
* Why I was missing these things: Last November, our house was robbed. We didn't have much worth taking, and they were very considerate and didn't go into the living room, so my Buffy collection was spared.
Total losses: J's laptop, housemate's camera, housemate's 20 DVDs, and the bright purple grocery bag that I'd used to carry my Joker stuff for Halloween, which they used as a loot bag. That's right, they used my Joker kit bag as a loot bag. This also meant that the way the robbery was discovered was that Jason found a rubber chicken where he expected to find his laptop.
Other odd feature: a little wooden box was placed neatly on the bed beside the rubber chicken. It had been on my nightstand, with a 3" lead TARDIS on top. It contains my lead Dr. Who figurines, irreplacable. It was undamaged. They had apparently opened it looking for jewelry and then neatly closed it and set it back down.
The cop was friendly, patient, and made me feel good about our local police force. She didn't make us feel small over the piddling size of our damage report, she thanked us for all the details we'd already put together and asked us for more, down to the color of the power cords, laughed with us about the Joker bag and made a Monty Python joke (Filling out her report: "What... is your name?"). She gave us all cards and reminded me that I was a victim of the robbery too, as having a house broken into is a scary thing.
No damage except a torn window screen where they got in. No permanent data loss.meowse wondered why they didn't take more, and I asked him what they could have taken that would be light-weight enough to be worth the hassle. I have a bit of jewelry that would be worth a few bucks (silver and amber), but it was in a plastic ziploc bag in plain sight, so it was presumed worthless. We own nothing else worth taking that could be carried inconspicuously in a Joker loot bag. It's kind of relaxing, knowing that.
But a month or so later, I realized I hadn't been able to find my writing notebook or my new phone (that I hadn't moved the SIM card into yet) for some good long time. Like maybe long enough that they could have gone in the robbery. But they left my figurines, so no way would they have taken my notebook. It's taken several months before I stumbled across the bag that I'd put the notebook and the phone into, though. Those were some nerve-wracking and occasionally grieving months.
This has been very long. Those of you who like all the mundane details, thanks for following along. I've really meant to post more as I go, just... life. You know. Maybe read it in pieces and pretend I posted three different days.
Long version and some lighter bits, segmented for your summarized pleasure:
Saturday,
arjache helped me clean for about 6 hours, which hung coat hooks (a year after acquiring them), decluttered the living room and my desk, got the carpet vacuumed and the fireplace swept out.In cleaning out the fireplace, we discovered A PASSAGE TO CHINA. Seriously, it was crazy. Just a little hole at the back of the fireplace, about the size of a brick, packed with ash. I dug out the ash. Beneath it was a metal flap that swung open like a teeter-totter, horizontal to vertical. I was hoping for a secret compartment with some previous child's toy car collection or love notes or something. I flipped it open. Darkness. I prodded with the poker. No bottom.
I told arjache it went to China. She laughed. I went looking for a plumb line. She stopped laughing.
It was great fun, like being in a Hardy Boys story. We weighted a scrap rope with an old bottle of face foundation (which looked silly, but it was a heavy object no one wanted) and down down down it went. 7.5' it went, and swung a couple feet to either side. We measured from the exterior wall, upstairs and downstairs, and determined that it must be going down between two studs in my bedroom wall. Note to self: see that hot ash does not fall down that hole every again.
Presumably, the original design was that the ash went down a chute to a bin in the unfinished basement for easy removal. It's well below ground level, so it can't have been intended to go outside. Fun with old houses.
We watched the movie version of Phantom of the Opera, which I liked more than I thought I would. It helps that I was totally thrashed from cleaning and was barely good for more than a nap at that point. By the end of the day, I was kind of a small shaking mess. But Arjache read more of my fiction, and that always makes me happy.
Middle of the night, we heard a mouse in our room. Couldn't flush it out. Went to go look in the laundry room to see if there were any more and there was one on top of the washer, which led me on a merry merry chase. While it was treed in one corner, we heard scrabbling from the other side of the room, so that's at least three mice. We went back to bed and slept poorly.
Sunday morning, I was up, I was revved. I was going to clean all the mouse-sign, I was going to make our room barren of hiding places, and hopefully I was going to still have some time to go help
cinnamonteal clean her place as well. J said, "But today is Tara's Firefly game!"Oh. Right. At that point I was almost balled up in anxiety, between left over cleaning stress from Saturday (I get anxious to the point of paralysis about cleaning my embedded clutter, hence arjache's support), and mice, and new social situation, and wanting things to be clean, and leaving cinnamonteal hanging and...
The game was okay. I felt lost at sea a lot of the time, and burst into tears repeatedly, but I made a character that will be fun to play (ex-Alliance officer now working as a corporate mining inspector) and got to play with Tara's cat, Tommy the Pineapple (named after the gun and the grenade -- it suits him). I ate tasty food and enjoyed an alcoholic beverage in tea to cut down my nerves, which did help for a while.
After the game, Tara kindly took us to Home Despot, where we got insulation to close the gap under the garage door, sonic devices that mice apparently hate, and lots of plastic bins. They did not have mouse-sized live traps, though they had 5 ways of killing mice and live traps for everything larger. I was still so anxious that they were kind of gently walking me through the store.
When I got home, I sat on the couch, bundled up and shaking in my leather jacket, and tried to find my way out of panic. I wanted to clean, but I couldn't move. I have coping strategies (cold water on my head, breathing exercises), but I was too frozen up to use them, and when I mentioned them to J, he said, "Maybe you should just sit and relax for a while." I tried to order live traps, but the Internet kept breaking.
J went to clean the kitchen, which has been oppressively filthy mostly due to another housemate who's still learning to keep a shared kitchen clean. Some of it's ours as well, because it's hard to find the gumption to wash your one dish and wipe the counter when the sink is full and the counter is covered with other dishes. But his real button is the yard waste stacking up, and she was up to 3 bins of it, when there's only supposed to be one.
J came out to the living room after a while, and I told him I'd like his opinion on which live traps to buy, since I'd gotten the Internet working long enough to pull up some options. He said, "Actually, I was going down to the convenience store for some kill traps to just deal with it." I'd told him that if he wanted to take responsibility for kill traps, I'd be okay with it, as long as they were snap-traps, not poison or glue or any of the other automatically lingering options. That didn't include thinking it was okay if he was just disgusted with the house and ready to take it out on the mice.
I did a lot more sobbing. He stayed quietly angry. He used the phrase "rat-infested hovel." Him angry/miserable/noncommunicative and me anxious/paralyzed/crying/desperate to know what's going on is a bad and annoyingly consistent cycle when things break down. I'm scared of everything and want reassurance and opinions; he just wants to throw away everything he owns and live by himself in a tiny apartment with no things to take care of and no people to interact with and no decisions to make. It's really unpleasant. It also tends to lead to a productive spate of cleaning, followed by me saying again, "Let's try this supporting each other cleaning thing without starting miserable, huh?" And he agrees we should and then we don't, and I don't know what to do about it.
When my head cleared a bit, I remembered that I'd asked to spend the day home cleaning but he was unwilling to cancel gaming. I didn't think getting pissed back would really help the situation, so I just reminded him of it civilly and it helped me calm down a little.
We cleaned the kitchen. We took out some garbages. We reminded housemate (who it turns out has been dealing with a dying uncle) that the rule is one yard waste bin, and I had another calm talk with her in which we continued agreeing that things really need to change but I appreciate that this is a big shift for her.
We got all the mouse droppings swept, though I did not get to bleach the floors. I got all the clothes up off the bedroom floor and into bins, put the cardboard boxes in the laundry room in bins, put my photographs in a bin. I need to scan them. Another thing to worry about deteriorating before I get around to it. A lot of the pictures from high school are fading and I want to stop it. I hate losing things. But everything's in bins now. I got the bedroom floor vacuumed, and while there's still a lot of table clutter, the floor is clear and relatively clean. It's a start. We plugged in sonic warfare and went to bed.
J plugged the bedroom sonic warfare in near the door. Middle of the night, he heard scampering by our bed (and my undefended clothes shelves), pounded on the nightstand to scare them, and plugged in the sonic warfare by the head of our bed instead.
My recollection of this is interesting: I heard him wake up, and say that he'd heard them, but then I remember having to move my head so he could pound on my corner of the mattress, because they were in the mattress and he had to scare them out. And then he moved the sonic warfare. I didn't sleep well the rest of the night, thinking they'd tried to move into the mattress. I only know the truth of it because when I woke up, I realized it can't have been *in* the mattress, it must have been under the bed, so I asked J. Wacky. I really remember him punching the mattress right next to my head.
On the shiny-bright side, Sunday morning while looking for my dice bag, I found two things that I had been desperately missing.* My writing notebook and my new phone. Particularly my writing notebook. The one with a bunch of stuff I hadn't transcribed, and all the writing I did while I was sitting vigil with my grandmother last June. Probably including her last words. I have some transcribing to do.
* Why I was missing these things: Last November, our house was robbed. We didn't have much worth taking, and they were very considerate and didn't go into the living room, so my Buffy collection was spared.
Total losses: J's laptop, housemate's camera, housemate's 20 DVDs, and the bright purple grocery bag that I'd used to carry my Joker stuff for Halloween, which they used as a loot bag. That's right, they used my Joker kit bag as a loot bag. This also meant that the way the robbery was discovered was that Jason found a rubber chicken where he expected to find his laptop.
Other odd feature: a little wooden box was placed neatly on the bed beside the rubber chicken. It had been on my nightstand, with a 3" lead TARDIS on top. It contains my lead Dr. Who figurines, irreplacable. It was undamaged. They had apparently opened it looking for jewelry and then neatly closed it and set it back down.
The cop was friendly, patient, and made me feel good about our local police force. She didn't make us feel small over the piddling size of our damage report, she thanked us for all the details we'd already put together and asked us for more, down to the color of the power cords, laughed with us about the Joker bag and made a Monty Python joke (Filling out her report: "What... is your name?"). She gave us all cards and reminded me that I was a victim of the robbery too, as having a house broken into is a scary thing.
No damage except a torn window screen where they got in. No permanent data loss.
meowse wondered why they didn't take more, and I asked him what they could have taken that would be light-weight enough to be worth the hassle. I have a bit of jewelry that would be worth a few bucks (silver and amber), but it was in a plastic ziploc bag in plain sight, so it was presumed worthless. We own nothing else worth taking that could be carried inconspicuously in a Joker loot bag. It's kind of relaxing, knowing that.But a month or so later, I realized I hadn't been able to find my writing notebook or my new phone (that I hadn't moved the SIM card into yet) for some good long time. Like maybe long enough that they could have gone in the robbery. But they left my figurines, so no way would they have taken my notebook. It's taken several months before I stumbled across the bag that I'd put the notebook and the phone into, though. Those were some nerve-wracking and occasionally grieving months.
This has been very long. Those of you who like all the mundane details, thanks for following along. I've really meant to post more as I go, just... life. You know. Maybe read it in pieces and pretend I posted three different days.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-30 08:07 pm (UTC)While I am sorry you were robbed (and I AM very sorry, home invasions SUCK), that sentence was...very fun to read. Especially given that they took your Joker kit bag to carry off loot with. I just thought, "Yes. This is how it should be." Sometimes life is too true to art for its own good.
My sympathies also on the mice. We solved our rat problem at my parents house by the simple expedient of having two very skilled and brutal mousing cats living with us. This sometimes led to some gruesome discoveries, but it felt like the natural order of things was being observed. Failing that, there are (as I see someone else pointed out) some very efficient and fast kill traps on the market now.
I'm glad to see you have a Firefly group! I am envious. I've wanted to try out the system, you'll have to tell me how the mechanics of it works out for you. Fun fact: in a recent purge of old gaming notes, I found my notes from our 7th Sea game, when you had the half-breed Fate Witch. More specifically, I found my notes for running Rawhead and Bloody Bones, the meanest old fae on the Isles. Good old Rawhead...
no subject
Date: 2009-04-01 02:07 am (UTC)