Of Mice and Men (is that a trite title yet?)

I have a mouse in my house…or perhaps mice. Whatever the case may be, it’s not exactly an ideal situation.

I live in student housing provided by my graduate school and we all share a kitchen (which is complicated enough in its own right, plus I keep kosher). This mouse either has a fancy for whatever it is I buy in particular or just found a hole right near my kitchen supplies. I have baking stuff (really just holdovers from my old place until I move out) and spices in my cabinets. Last weekend, the mouse helped itself to a piece of a Ghirardelli chocolate baking bar and a few other small things and didn’t bother cleaning up after itself. So it was up to me on ours (mine and R’s) anniversary weekend to wipe down the spices, disinfect the cabinet and put everything back in order. The exterminator came and put traps down, so I thought the ordeal was over.

I was wrong. Imagine my surprise this morning when I wake up. I’m supposed to be observing teaching at school, so I’m up early, ready to go, then look outside and see…SNOW!! Glorious, class-canceling snow! I tell myself I’ll straighten up a bit, then head downstairs to do some programming (I’m in a plant bioinformatics rotation now…comment if you’d like to hear more about it ;-) ) until the driveway is plowed (it’s a steep hill, not one I’ll be attempting in the snow). Wonderful! I’ll be productive and get stuff done.

Then I get downstairs and open the cabinet, and see chocolate powder all over everything, including the spices in the adjacent cabinet.

Round 2. It’s on mouse and this time Ima take you down! Or, you know, clean up after you.

I take stock of the damage first, and notice that the mouse has chewed through the lid to my Ghirardelli’s Natural Cocoa (another holdover for baking…word to the wise, when they say Dutch processed coca, this is not a good substitute without some tweaking) and gotten into a bag of shredded coconut. Enterprising little fella. And unlike last time, where all I had to go by was mouse droppings to figure out where the mouse had been, this time, there were chocolate footprints. The mouse had been kind enough to leave a trail, which was great because I knew exactly what to clean to prevent R and me from getting the dreaded “Mouse Poop Disease”. That is a clinical definition.

After wiping down everything and setting aside all the spices and other items that had gnaw marks on them but the package wasn’t broken—which were wiped down anyway but needed new spice jars—I took a deep breath and at 11 AM headed down my freshly plowed driveway and started my day.

At school, we had a lecture from a biotech company before I headed off to my lab and I told everyone who would listen that I had sworn vendetta on the mouse. How dare it come into my food and eat it!? Certainly, such a dastardly act is deserving of some sort of capital punishment. I would give it to a cancer lab and have it infected with tumors! It could donate its body to science! Unwillingly! To make up for its trespasses!

I can be dramatic sometimes.

Then the silly thought occurred to me that the mouse maybe ate a total of $10 worth of food. Is that worth killing it over? Is it worth killing anything over? If it gets trapped, that’s one thing, but outright killing? Perhaps not. Ah well, no lying in wait for the little rodent, then scrambling around trying to catch it. I guess I’m a softie. And very much a bioinformaticist.

(Side note: if you do want to catch a mouse, one my labmates tells me that peanut butter chocolate Clif bars are like crack to mice. He put down one and caught two mice in 20 minutes.)

Everything else is great around here. R and I celebrated our first anniversary in style by seeing Chicago on Broadway and then going out to eat. Her present floored me, and continues to floor me. When I move out of student housing, ask me to show you the present, and I’ll drag out an orange 6 ¾ quart Dutch oven. That baby’s gonna last forever. And so will we.

Sorry for being delinquent in posting, I’m working on a new schedule. But more later!

Back to the Five O'Clock World

More likely to be 6 or 7 o'clock world, but it's certainly not vacation. I've been meaning to write many times over the last 3 weeks (a few posts are still drafts that I should really look at when I get back), but it's hard to focus sometimes, especially when there's Hulu to watch. Hulu is about 2 or 3 days from being blocked temporarily on my computer just to restore my sanity.

So this was my last winter and "school" vacation and hopefully the last time I spend more than 3 or 4 days away from R. From now on, I get 10 days (give or take) a year and we will be traveling together. Vacation was full of great memories, both in NYC and Chicago. R and I spent every free moment together when I was in NYC and I think I did a good job of starting to make up for all the times she came out to the island to spend the weekend with me, only to sit there patiently as I slept for 10+ hours or read and worked most of the weekend away. She's a saint.

I spent the second half of my vacation in Chicago, which was also very good, but sadly, sans R. I missed Chicago a lot, and Evanston a lot too. I missed a lot of my friends also. I didn't get to do everything I wanted, or see everyone I wanted, and if you're one of the people I didn't get to see in Chicago and you're reading this, I am deeply sorry and hopefully I'll see you next time. It was great, but it would have been better still if R and I could have spent it together. A week and a half apart is far too long for us. I know there are couples at there who have to go through weeks or months apart, and I don't pretend to know how difficult that is, but this seems to be our limit now.

I will say one stand-out moment in Chicago, in addition to seeing old NU friends on New Year's Eve and seeing people I haven't been very good at keeping in touch with, was seeing Tom Cruise dancing to Ludacris in Tropic Thunder. I don't see very many movies anymore, and most of the movies I see are with R, who's not a fan of violence (which I have no problem with honey!), but that scene made the whole movie worthwhile. To me at least.

Tonight I went to the wedding of two good friends of mine, A&E (like the channel!), which was great. They're two people I'm proud to know and who I'm happy to be friends with for what will hopefully be a very long time. It was also the last day before I head back to NY and school.

Ultimately, it seems like weddings and vacation have a lot in common. Both aren't nearly long enough to spend the time you want with the people you want to. There were teachers and advisers I hadn't seen in years, and all we had was 5 or 10 minutes to talk. I've spent countless hours with so many friends in high school and college, just hanging out, never realizing that one day (and hopefully not permanently), our lives would become harder and harder to coordinate, that the time we'd taken for granted is now gone. I didn't even see my parents enough. It's a little sad, but at least I have R to spend all my time with. I am very lucky to have many amazing and wonderful friends in my life, but she is firmly my bestest friend for life. I should call a lot of you more often. It's probably a good idea.

R was in Florida this past weekend to celebrate her grandfather's 90th birthday and we spoke a lot over the weekend (as we've been doing ever since I left her side a week and a half ago) and when we spoke the day she was heading back to NY, she told me she wished she could have stayed longer. I wasn't sure what she meant, but I get it now. There's not enough time. There may never be enough time. Ideally, we should have had 6 weeks, everyone we know should have been on vacation too and Florida and Chicago would be minutes from each other. Then we could have spent the whole time together and maybe have come close to spending the time we wanted to with everybody. But this will have to do.

It was a great vacation, and an excellent way to finish off school vacations. Vacations will be a lot different now, better because they'll be with R, but not as easy because the time we have to spend with other people is less than it used to be. I guess it's just weird that only now have I figured out what I'll be missing.