Well, I decided to write again after a long layoff. Not because I have anything important to say, but mainly because I was getting tired of having my cute little niece flipping the bird at the top of my page.
Nancy got to see her a couple of weekends ago while she was in Austin. I still haven't seen her since the week she was born, so I'm looking forward to seeing her again on Thanksgiving. How am I going to be a bad influence on her if she doesn't even know who I am?
We have been going to College Station on all of the home football weekends, so we have been staying pretty busy watching our sad, pathetic excuse for a football team. It's still a lot of fun to get to go act like a college student again for a day 6-7 times per year. The group has dwindled a lot this year, due to our team's ineptness on the field. Most of them are bandwagoners who will act like the biggest fans in the world when the team is winning, but are nowhere to be found when we are not. If you can't stand behind your team in the bad times, you won't enjoy the good times as much. That's what we keep telling ourselves, at least. However, if the cesspool that is Texas Tech University wins a national championship this year, I may have to swear off college football altogether. I could not handle such a thing. I guess there's always the Houston Texans to fall back on. Wait, that would be even worse. Between the Aggies, the Texans, and the Astros...it has not been a banner year for our sports teams.
In other news, the vacant land next to our neighborhood is now being leveled and prepped for another section of homes to start going up. One consequence of bulldozing that land is that it has forced many a mouse from his home. I went to take the trash out one night and saw a mouse scurry across the garage floor. Then I made the mistake of telling Nancy about it. From her perch high atop the chair she got on within 2.3 seconds of my sharing the mouse sighting, Nancy screamed at me to do something about it...NOW. The only problem was, "now" was 11 pm, and I am not a cat, nor do I keep mouse traps on hand for this type of situation. So I was "urged" to make a late night trip to the store in search of some sort of mouse getting-rid-of apparatus. I returned with two packages of trusty old-fashioned mouse traps.
I put the squeezy cheese on the trigger and attempted to set the traps. Unfortunately, the traps did not like to stay set and I nearly lost a finger about eight times. I'm guessing that would not be good for my surgery business. Finally, after wrestling with the stupid thing for 20 minutes, as well as a good bit of cussing, I finally got two traps to stay set long enough to put them in the corners of our garage.
The next morning, I fully expected to find the little booger dead as a doornail in one of the traps. Then I would dispose of him and my wife could get down out of the chair. However, it was not to be. You see, despite the fact that the traps have such a hair trigger that I nearly amputated my finger every time I looked at it sideways, the mouse somehow managed to eat every last drop of the squeezy cheese off both of the traps without setting them off. Nancy, from atop her chair, so cleverly exclaimed "Mouse 1, Randy 0". So I tried it again the next night. Same result. Mouse 2, Randy 0.
I had opted for the traditional mouse trap on my late-night field trip to Kroger, instead of the glue traps, because I figured it would be a much quicker way for the little bastard to die. But now I was mad. No more humane treatment for this guy. So Plan B, the glue traps, were strategically placed throughout the garage. I knew now that it was only a matter of time before I got him. Except it wasn't him, as it turned out...it was them. Five so far. All about three inches long, head to tip of tail (But to hear Nancy describe them, they are rats the size of small possums). One even struggled so mightily against the glue trap that he peeled off his own skin. That was interesting. It has been three nights since we have caught any mice...so Nancy is down out of the chair. For now.
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