Barmy Blue's Bland Blog

Well kind of.
So been absent for quite a while. It's not like I've had nothing to say I just didn't feel like it. Also the blogs seem to have been a bit sparse lately, unless everyone has somehow suddenly switched to members only viewing, most of the time when I check in to see if any of lit. net friends has written a new blog I'm not logged in. I'll usually only log in when I have my own blog or to post a comment. So that's why you haven't seen me online lately.

So. Recent events that I usually write about every year.
I made chocolates for Valentines, same as last year but with a little less variety. They were pretty nice.

I made pancakes on Pancake Day. This time I bought pancake mix and lemon juice about a month in advance, as soon as I saw it, so that Pancake Day wouldn't sneak up on me. I say that. It kind of did. I was ready for it for about a week before but for some reason by about Sunday I'd forgotten that the following Tuesday would be Pancake Day. I made them on the Tuesday but I'd hoped to make some from scratch some time before as practice, but like I said it kind of snuck up on me. I got six pancakes out of the batter and all but one came out pretty well so I was very pleased with that.

Mum has a little job going and I have another new story idea that I'm very excited about. I think of it as a kind of Monster High/ 'Allo 'Allo! (Wiki it, it was a really funny series. My favourite character by far was Officer Crabtree for obvious reasons, if you've ever seen it you know why ). I say Monster High but without monsters or the high really. I can't think of a better comparison. I don't want to divulge any details at this time because, as you know I'm very paranoid about these things. It's basically characters from classic monster movies trying to run a little business but they're not actually "monsters" just, what some might consider, "freakish" people. It's really fun. So far I'm just writing up characters. It's what I do now instead of diving blindly into the story, that way I can set up a little plan and come back to it later.

Oh and also for mum's birthday I baked her some green cupcakesand got her the Sherlock season one and two box set (I had a change of heart about that) and about a week or two later we bought the third series too. I actually prefer the cover for the season two box set over the new season three box set, just because it loose more Sherlock-ish so I'm glad we got that one. The DVD player doesn't actually work so I have to plug in the old portable DVD player that Napoleon gave me, for Christmas I think, during my first year at uni that I never used. I know his logic behind it but it was unnecessary. I didn't watch DVD's at uni and if I wanted a DVD player I could have just used my laptop, which I practically lived on for that year. As you may remember I didn't see the point in taking a television to uni, I'm pretty much the only one who didn't.

Also both Napoleon's and my birthdays are coming up. Not sure what to get him and I'm dreading turning 26. It's closer to 30 than I'd like it to be. At least 25 is only half way.
Yuki turned six years old this year. She's off the pills and her fur has started growing back in some places. I found a much kinder preventative measure to stop her nibbling that plastic bottle on a stick. Although my intentions were good with that it didn't actually help, it just annoyed her and made her nibble more. It didn't really work at breaking the itch-scratch cycle. So I had the idea of squirting her with a water bottle when she starts nibbling. It startles her so that she forgets about the itch and so breaks the cycle, and it's kinder to her as well.

I think that's all the things you've missed. Now to the main event.

You may recall that I had an annoying mouse in my room that I couldn't get rid of. And yes. Poisoning was out of the question. What kind of heartless person would poison an innocent but extremely annoying mouse? It couldn't help being a huge pain in the arse, it was just doing what mice do.

So. This thing has been driving me mad for a couple of months. You already know it's hard for us to shift mice. You also know that I have a lot of stuff in my house. The best way for you to picture it is something like this.
You know those shows about the "crazy" people who hoard things and can't really move about their home because they've piled up so much crap? I'd say our house is about half way between that and a "normal" house, although veering a little more towards the "normal" side. Most people store stuff in the loft/attic but we can't because Napoleon still has is train set up there, also he practically forbids us to store crap up there, even though he doesn't actually live here anymore. So we end up storing things in places we don't use. The little spare room that was once my nursery. Well, we never have guests so what's the point of the spare room. We only use half of the kitchen so the other half might as well be used for something. The dining table? Well, mum eats in her armchair and I eat at my desk. What do you really need a dining table for when there's only two of you anyway? There's an unused corner of my room for a bunch of my stuff. Even though I'm too old for stuffed toys now I couldn't bear to part with them, books, uni stuff and so on.
If we emptied the house of crap it would be more open yes but also empty. The size of this house is more suited to a family and there's just the two of us and the dog, it'd be pretty bare and lonely if all the space was free and open. So it doesn't really bother us. People never come round so we don't need to worry about them. The only real problem is a small calamity, such as mice. They're small. Small and very fast. So even if you see one out in the open it's gone before you can catch it.
I built some homemade traps that worked...to begin with. Now they almost seem to repell the little buggers.

So. This mouse. Driving me crazy. Running around and gnawing things while I'm trying to sleep. I set up, what I like to call, the squeaker seeker. It's an electronic mouse deterrent. Again, worked for a while but started to lose impact. I set up the trap. No luck. The thing seemed to like my drawers. I don't really care. They're old and cheap and they've been broken for years. I never open them anymore. I just use the top as a bedside table. It's at the end of my bed so when it was scurrying around in there it kept me awake. I had the squeaker seeker by my door and the drawers were the furthest thing from my door so I wondered if the damned thing couldn't go near the door and decided not to use another escape route. So I moved the squeaker seeker to the end of my bed, to scare it out of my drawers and hopefully out the door. No such luck. It still scurried around in my drawers after a couple of days and to make matters worse the squeaker seeker makes a constant clicking noise that is out of time with the tiny alarm clock under my pillow and it has a little green light which stays on all the time. Needless to say I couldn't sleep.

About two weeks or so ago I went into my room and saw it just sitting there in front of me. It didn't run right away so I tried to catch it with a bucket. Usually when they don't run instantly they're either getting old or sick and they're likely to die soon. Needless to say. I failed. I set the trap back up and left it all day.
That night mum went up to bed and called me. I hoped the trap had been successful and I could put it in a box and set it free outside, where it belongs. But no. Not quite. There was a little dead mouse outside, next to the dog bed upstairs. I bagged, boxed then bagged it up again and put it in the bin. I'm done burying animals in the garden. I was the undertaker of the garden for a while. If one of the birds died or a fox brought in a dead rat I would bury it. But that's so tedious and usually something could steal the corpse. I had to rebury a creature twice and so realised it was a pointless exercise.

So after we disposed of the mouse I hoped that it was all over. No such luck. It started gnawing again about a day later. They've been going crazy in the ceiling recently too. They usually get anxious about this time of year. They generally tend to go back outside when it gets warmer, generally. We sometimes get the stubborn ones.
So. It's been quiet in my room for a while now. I moved the squeaker seeker and trap out, since they weren't doing much anyway and since it had suddenly quietened down. I had a peaceful sleep without that damned clicking, and now I can use the pretty lights again (the socket I plug the little lights into that mum gave me for Christmas is the one I had to use for the squeaker seeker. I missed having those lights on, they're very soothing). For the past two days I've noticed the smell.

I just mentioned that I've buried small animals before, so I know a rotting corpse when I smell it. The first day it was just a faint hint I barely noticed. Yesterday it was stronger. I opened my window to air the room and dragged Yui upstairs (she didn't want to go) so see if she could sniff it out. Dogs can smell decomp better than humans. She doesn't like my room, ever since that time she got stuck in there, so I had to shut her in with me. She didn't like it but I encouraged her to sniff around. She showed an interest in one area by the door, after having jumped on my bed as soon as she got in, of course. Why do dogs do that? I couldn't be sure it was there so I let her out and waited for mum to get home, just to confirm that there was a smell and that I wasn't imagining it (It's happened before. Sometimes I think I can smell gas in the hallway but there is none and sometimes it smells like rain when it isn't cloudy at Tesco, I think it's exhaust or something because usually when I can smell rain the clouds are very heavy and just waiting to burst).
She confirmed it. There was a dead smell. I had to got to bed with it because it was too late to go rooting around for a tiny corpse in a mountain of crap.

Today I got right to it. I dragged Yui upstairs again. She really didn't like it. She's more uncomfortable going upstairs since we gave her her first bath earlier this year with an anti-itching shampoo, it had little effect but her coat looked lovely after.
So I shut her in my room with me again and started moving things around. The poor thing was very confused and quite unhappy. I took her with me so that she could help me pinpoint the location of the mouse. If she showed a lot of interest then I'd know I was close to the stinking little corpse. It wasn't buried as deep as I thought so that was good. Yui tried to eat it but it was still covered up so all she got was a mouthful of mouse poo and shredded plastic bag she spat it out right away. When she did that I knew I was close so I let her out. I was using two of the little nappy bags that we use to pick up Yui's poo on her walks as gloves. My thinking behind this was that I wouldn't be toughing stuff covered in mouse germs barehanded and also when I found the little beast I could just grab it and wrap it up like I do with dog poo.
So. I found it, disposed of it then opened the window and used a little odour neutraliser then hoovered. It was still solid. It even had it's eyes. Anyone who's seen a dead bird in their garden knows that they eyes go first, usually because of ants. I wasn't worried about ants in my room but I was very worried about flies and maggots. None that could be seen. So I was very happy with that. So. Now I have my room back, the smell is gone, a teensy bit of tidying up has been done and there was a bonus cherry on top. There's a bag of pocky in my room that's been there for a couple of years. I put it there to get it out of the way for something, forgot about it and only remembered after a mouse infestation. That's the only food in my room that I could think of. They must have eaten it. So I've been reluctant to look for quite a long time.

As I was disposing of mouse stuff today i decided to finally look in the bag. Imagine my surprise to find no holes in it. Imagine my even greater surprise to find that not a single box of pocky had been chewed. Not a single hole. Not a single tooth mark. There's seven boxes in there, all different flavours and they're completely untouched. All I can think of is that since all of the boxes were unopened the mice couldn't smell the food so they didn't know it was there. Now this pocky is four years out of date so I do wonder if it will still be edible but I plan to find out. It's the stuff I bought when I last went to the expo, remember, when I went as a cat maid? Weird huh?

I gave Yui a few rewards for helping me find the mouse. I kept phrasing it "you caught the mouse" though not really. I dug it out. I grabbed it. I disposed of it. She just sniffed it out for me. Also it doesn't really count as catching when it's dead. Would've been better if she'd caught it when it was alive. But who cares now? I just so happy that it's finally gone and I'm so proud of Yuki for helping me to find it. She's not trained as a cadaver dog and she's not a hunting breed so I'm even more proud of her.

So. That's everything that's been going on.
Bluebiird out.