Were you waiting for a fish update? THEN YOU ARE IN LUCK.

Especially because I can’t remember where I left off. Let’s see: we have a 14-gallon tank and it had two rosy-red minnows (“look just like goldfish but don’t grow as big”) in it, and then we bought five twin-bar platys (“yellow fish with black tail stripes”), and one was a little sickly from the beginning (bitten-looking tail, clamped fins, keeping to the top or else the bottom, not swimming with the others) and eventually died. We bought three more platys, all female because we read that it’s best to have 1 male to 3 females or else the males can chase the females to literal death, which made me hate men for a moment. Then one of the new platys died, too. So now we have six platys, four females and two males, which is not perfect but it seems like it’s working okay.

We’d thought the minnows would enjoy the company and stop hiding so much, but instead they hid even more than before. So we moved them back to the 2.5-gallon coldwater tank, and we bought three long-finned zebra danios (“stripey grey fish”) for the 14-gallon tank. One of the danios died. Fish are tricky business.

So. We have six platys and two danios in a 14-gallon tank, and two rosy red minnows in a 2.5-gallon tank.

Actually, the “six platys” count is not accurate, because one of the platys had babies awhile back, and we’ve seen up to three baby platys at a time, but we’re not sure we still have three because for awhile we’ve seen only one at a time. I tried to catch the babies with a net, but I was unsuccessful: they are SO TINY, and so good at hiding.

Baby platy, tiny, in front of T-Rex decoration.
Compare to gravel for scale.

We also bought a little “fish nursery”: a small box made of plastic sticks and netting, which fits inside the main tank. I got it because one of the platys looks pretty clearly pregnant, and what you’re supposed to do is put the platy in the sub-tank, then after her babies are born take HER out, and then the babies are safe in the sub-tank. But it’s been, like, 2 weeks, and a platy pregnancy is only 4 weeks, so I’m starting to feel like this is going to end that she’s not pregnant at all but just a little plump (and pissed with us for rushing her to the maternity ward when she’d just had an extra fish flake or two), so we’ll see.

This morning I thought I would have green tea instead of coffee. AHA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!! Coffee has been brewed, and I’ve had some.

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This is the last day to enter the worst Valentine’s Day gift contest. (Don’t worry: the winner isn’t chosen by who has the worst story. It’s random selection.) I encourage you to enter, not only because there is a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate on the line and because it makes me look good to my boss if there are lots of comments on a post, but also because I am SO ENJOYING reading the stories. Some of them are so appalling, but in the “slap your hand across your mouth” kind of way, rather than the “heart sinking in dismay” way.

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Elizabeth has chosen the color for her new room. After a week of dithering between “aqua” and “aqua with pink corners” and “pink with aqua corners” and so forth, she was getting ready for school one morning and said, “I’ve decided, and it’s my final decision: magenta.” I borrowed one of her magenta gloves, drove to Home Depot, found one single color that met that standard, and bought it.

Paul has done two coats of it and is going to finish the third coat of it tonight. It is just as startling a color as you would imagine. Very pretty, too! But if we ever want to paint over it, I’m predicting eight coats of Kilz. Here’s a screen shot from Behr.com, and keep in mind that not only is her room not that large (I think it’s 11×9), nor as high-ceilinged, nor as sparsely/whitely furnished, nor as well-lit, but also we have medium-dark wood trim instead of white:

Exotic Bloom

This color makes the “bright lilac” we used in the office look like a pale model-home lilac in comparison.

The Milk Divinity looked yummy, and I’d say it was “nice”: light sweet nougat-like filling with nuts in it, covered in chocolate. I don’t think I’d order it again: it was so mild, it barely made an impression.

Milk Divinity
(image from Sees.com)

I was certain I’d like the Maple Walnut because that’s usually one of my top favorites in any assortment box. It’s coated in dark chocolate. I think I’d like it with milk chocolate, too, but the dark is perfect. MMM YUM. Mapley without being over-mapley, and some nuts, and definitely in my upper tier.

Maple Walnut
(image from Sees.com)

I thought I was very likely to like the Caramel, and I did. Very nice caramel (not too sticky, not too hard on the teeth) with almonds, coated in milk chocolate. Seems like it should be called Milk Almond Caramel instead of just Caramel. Upper middle tier.

Caramel
(image from Sees.com)

I knew the Light Chocolate Truffle was unlikely to be a success: I always give Paul the truffles from an assortment. But this one was milk chocolate and had ground almonds on top so I thought maybe? But no. This is not the fault of the truffle, but rather that I don’t tend to like chocolate-covered chocolate truffles. Lower tier for me, and I gave the other half of it to Paul.

Light Chocolate Truffle
(image from Sees.com)

The Milk Butterchew is a nice caramel. It’s very much like the Caramel, above, except without nuts. It says it’s a “brown sugar” caramel, which is why I chose it, but it tasted like regular caramel to me. I wouldn’t specifically order them: they’re yummy, and I’d enjoy them in an assortment, but they’re not special to me—I’d much rather have the one with nuts, above. Middle tier.

Milk Butterchew
(image from Sees.com)

I mentioned the Milk Bordeaux in my first post on this topic. I’m glad I also got a Dark Bordeaux, because as with some other very-sweet fillings (like vanilla buttercream), I preferred it with the dark chocolate coating. I still didn’t like the texture of the sprinkles.

Dark Bordeaux
(image from Sees.com)

I was pretty sure I’d like the Walnut Roll enough to want a piece but not enough to get a whole bunch, and that was exactly my opinion of it. The inside is like a cross between a buttercream and a caramel: neither creamy nor chewy, but more like a nougat. Then rolled in walnuts. Yummy, a nice large satisfying piece, and a nice break from chocolate. Middle tier for me.

Walnut Roll
(image from Sees.com)

One of the reasons I got so! excited! about this See’s order is that I chose one or two pieces each of a bunch of kinds that were pretty adventurous considering the price per pound. If I’m just considering a box of regular chocolates, I keep converting it into “bags of peanut M&Ms I could have for the same price.” But if I’m SAMPLING ODD FLAVORS—well! That’s valuable scientific experimentation right there!

I was very curious about the Almond Truffle, in part because I think it LOOKS so yummy. One of the reasons I don’t usually choose truffles is that I don’t like how they’re so dense and rich AND covered in chocolate: it’s like taking a piece of fudge and dipping it in chocolate (okay, that sounds a little good). The Almond Truffle is like a piece of fudge rolled in crushed almonds. Upper tier for me.

Almond Truffle
(image from Sees.com)

I chose the Walnut Square mostly because it was so neat-looking: why only dipped on the bottom half? And it’s a very satisfying piece to pick out of the box and hold: heavy and largish. The caramel has a noticeable butter flavor and is a nice “chewy but I won’t have to keep prying it off my teeth” consistency, and I like the nuts in it. I’d want one of these in an assortment (for beauty as well as for variety), but I don’t think I’d specifically order it again: I would prefer it with more chocolate, I think.

Walnut Square
(image from Sees.com)

The Scotchmallow intrigued me: “Honey marshmallow” and caramel. I can’t tell you if I liked it or not. The contrast of very-thick caramel and very-light-and-fluffy marshmallow (I didn’t notice any honey flavor, but I also forgot I meant to take a nibble of it separately to check) was odd, and I didn’t like the way the chocolate was breaking off with each bite. But…I think I like it anyway, and it’s definitely distinctive in an “I wouldn’t/couldn’t make this myself” kind of way. I would put it in the middle tier so far, with more testing required while I get used to the oddness.

Scotchmallow
(image from Sees.com)

In my top three favorites from a box of Russell Stover chocolates is the Roman Nougat. I would buy a whole box of just those. (And in fact, in looking on their website to make sure I got the name right, I found that I CAN buy a whole box of just those, as soon as they’re back in stock. This is a happy, happy day.) ANYWAY, when I saw See’s Rum Nougat, it looked very similar to the Roman Nougat and I wondered if it WAS similar. And it IS! The See’s version has a more intense rum flavor, and it has raisins as well as cherries and walnuts. I lovvvvvve it, but it’s one of those WEIRDISH candies where if someone else said “AAAAAAAAAAAA how can you EAT those, I SPIT THEM OUT patooie-patooie!!” I would said, “Dude, I TOTALLY see what you mean, and also can I pick them out of your assortment box?”

Rum Nougat
(image from Sees.com)

I don’t usually like coffee-flavored things unless they are coffee, but the Kona Mocha looked so yummy I tried it anyway. But I was right: I don’t really like coffee-flavored things. I would like a variation with chocolate buttercream covered in white chocolate and toasted coconut but without the coffee flavor. Still, really fun to try.

Kona Mocha
(image from Sees.com)

I ordered the Pineapple Truffle out of astonishment: PINEAPPLE? with CHOCOLATE? But I really liked it: intense pineapple flavor, with teensy barely-noticeable bitlits of pineapple in the filling. Upper tier for me: A+++ would order again. Not a whole box, but definitely would get some in any custom mix.

Pineapple Truffle
(image from Sees.com)

The Divinity Puff looked a little WHITE: divinity, white chocolate, walnuts, coconut. I wanted to try it because I wasn’t sure I’d like it but I thought I MIGHT. And it is kind of yummy! I’d put it in my middle tier, maybe lower-middle. I’d want one in an assortment but probably wouldn’t specifically order it.

Divinity Puff
(image from Sees.com)

A Mayfair is like if you liked the taste of chocolate-covered cherries (which I do), but you didn’t like the way they sploosh if you don’t bite into them carefully (indeed I don’t), and so you chopped the cherries and filling into a buttercream instead and then added walnuts. YUM. Upper tier for me.

Mayfair
(image from Sees.com)

Oh, man, what a bad night’s sleep. It wasn’t up there with, for example, the night in the hospital after one of my c-sections, when I spent all night feeding one twin while the other one cried, then switching so the crying one was being fed and the fed one was crying, until 4:00 a.m. when the nurse took them to the nursery, and then she brought them back at 4:20 a.m. and I am not even kidding, saying they were hungry, so that I watched incredulously as the sun came up and I STILL hadn’t slept after SURGERY 24 HOURS EARLIER.

But as we know, an experience does not have to be The Worst Anyone Has Ever Experienced in order to qualify as Bad, and last night was still Bad. Elizabeth joined us around 11:00, and Henry joined us at 2:00. I’d gone back to sleep after Elizabeth, despite the way she kept flipping over so that first her hair was in my face and then she turned over and started kicking me and then back to the hair in my face, but Henry talked for awhile about avian dinosaurs, and once he’d gone to sleep I lay awake fretting about assorted financial stuff, my parents’ eventual decrepitude, Paul’s mother’s estate (WHEN will it be settled, WHEN?), my overdue GYN check-up, and the time my landlord wouldn’t refund my security deposit OR a month’s rent I’d paid in advance, with him saying I’d left tons of boxes in the apartment all month (I HAD NOT) and adding that if I wanted money I should “get a job” (I HAD ONE) (also: MY EMPLOYMENT OR LACK THEREOF HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT).

Around 3:45 I felt too claustrophobic to lie there even ONE MORE MINUTE: we have my side of the bed directly against a wall while we rearrange the house, and so I was trapped between the wall and a bed crammed full of snoring people, and I had to get OUT OUT OUT AAAAAAAAAA. I couldn’t find my blanket in the dark closet, and both throws are on our bed but in between other blankets so not easily extracted, so I put on Paul’s wool coat and lay down in a recliner. The coat was itchy but warm, and a cat came and hopped up on me, and I had jusssst drifted off to sleep when the clock chimed six. And I thought, “It can’t be six o’clock. I can keep sleeping. I KNOW it’s not six, because it was 3:45 less than fifteen minutes ago.” But then I started thinking, “What if it REALLY IS six o’clock? Then Paul will be late for work, and Rob will miss the bus and I’ll have to drop him off at school and it will cheese up our whole morning.” So I had to get up and check, and no, it was four o’clock and the children had been playing with the clock.

I settled back into the recliner and thought for awhile about the time in high school when a friend of mine heard a rumor that I’d slept with my boyfriend and she confronted me about it, and her attitude was that if I HAD done so, then I was absolutely required to have divulged that to her, and that she had every right to feel I’d violated our friendship, and that it didn’t really matter if I denied it because the rumor-spreader had no reason to lie. When MY points were (1) I HADN’T, but (2) if I HAD, I would have had the perfect right to keep that sort of thing private, and (3) the whole “girlfriends before boyfriends” thing did not mean my relationship with her was in fact closer than my relationship with my boyfriend OR that I had to tell her everything about my relationship with him, and (4) where’s the whole “girlfriends before rumor-spreaders” part? Then I dozed off and dreamed that Rob had left the freezer door open and everything had thawed out and had to be thrown away, including two cartons of Breyer’s ice cream, and when I was speaking to him about it he was defending himself and rolling his eyes and blaming other people and making the kind of insult-humor backtalk we’re currently training him to see is not the same as “just joking,” and in short behaved pretty much exactly how he would have in real life, except that in the dream I started trying to HIT him, and my arms were too weak and it was very frustrating.

Then the STUPID CLOCK chimed the quarter-hour and it was 4:15 and I was awake again. And I needed to pee. I got up and peed, and returned to the chair, and was just drifting off when I heard a cat making a “covering” sound behind my chair. I didn’t get up to investigate, but instead listened so hard I woke myself up entirely and started mentally composing a post about how St. Valentine’s Day is not in fact a Hallmark holiday and it’s very tiresome to keep hearing it called that in scornful tones year after year by person after person, and then I fell asleep and dreamed I was trying to load the dishwasher but the cups wouldn’t stay upside down. And then a cat went skittering across the hardwood in pursuit of another cat skittering across the hardwood, and it was 4:30.

So then I sat in the recliner thinking about how nothing I ever try to do ever works: not weight loss, not exercise programs, not psychological improvement programs, not “trying to be a person who likes social stuff,” not stopping pulling my eyelashes out, not keeping the house clean, NOTHING. It took me until 5:00 to remember that other things HAVE worked: maintaining a blog, having children, investing in the stock market, paying off our student loans years early. I fell asleep and woke up at 5:18 when Paul got up for work. I lay there feeling very sorry for myself and needing to pee, until I got up at 5:45 to take my own shower.

But have I mentioned our old water heater broke and we replaced it with a new one with a feature that lets it heat the water much hotter while still preventing scalding by mixing it with cool as it leaves the heater? This increases the hot water supply without increasing the tank size. Which means that I had a HOT SHOWER.

Also I still have a lot of See’s chocolates to taste and to report on.

Also the house-rearranging is going very well, so that I am now writing in a bright lilac room.

Finally, FINALLY, after a long week of waiting, my See’s chocolates have arrived.

Because I have been making such a gd fuss about it on Twitter, people have been asking if they are REALLY so good. Er…I’m not sure. That is, I know I like them, and I’ve never found an equal to the Butterscotch Square—but I haven’t compared to many other higher-cost chocolates, and the non-Butterscotch-Squares don’t strike me as being Beyond! Compare!, and I think hardly anything is worth $20/pound plus shipping, and probably I wouldn’t have spent the money if I hadn’t had some gift money burning a hole in my pocket plus the recent annual discussion with Paul where we decide not to do Valentine’s Day. I think on a regular day I would get more satisfaction per dollar out of $20 worth of Dove chocolates with almonds, or $20 worth of peanut M&Ms. But because having expensive candy is a rare thing, and because it was kind of a thrilling situation to have ordered them for myself (and I added a mug at the last minute, and the mug came with another little box of candy), and because my appetite for Butterscotch Squares was whetted by Doing My Best’s Crappy Day Present of See’s—well, I got kind of WORKED UP about the package arriving, and about trying other kinds to see if perhaps there was another Butterscotch-Square-level candy among them.

The first thing I noticed was that the first box I picked up felt like it weighed more than a pound. I have a postal scale, so I checked it:

My two 1-pound boxes together weighed just a teeny bit less than 2.5 pounds. Packing techniques can vary, and also probably the pre-assorted chocolates are much closer to an actual pound than the pick-your-own boxes, so I wouldn’t want to make a big THING about this and then have us all disappointed if we ordered boxes later that were “only” a pound—but it certainly was a happy discovery. That’s like a free $10-worth-of-chocolate-plus-shipping right there. [Edited from the future: Did I forget to weigh the boxes without chocolates in them, though? Because that’s some of the difference.]

Now. Let’s open the boxes:

Oh, wait, I forgot to switch it to my camera’s “Blogger Mode”:

The one I wanted most to try was the Milk Bordeaux. I’ve mentioned (perhaps OVER-mentioned) that my favorite is the Butterscotch Square, which is described as “Firm brown sugar buttercream.” Milk Bordeaux is described as “Brown sugar buttercream,” so I’ve been wondering how it differs from the Butterscotch Square. I have now tried both and am ready to make my report: the Bordeaux is more like a regular buttercream, with a dense (I’d say it’s as dense as the truffles), sweet, very smooth and creamy filling that tastes only a little bit like brown sugar (primary flavor is “sweet”); whereas the Butterscotch Square has a grained texture like actual packed brown sugar, and also tastes like actual packed brown sugar. The Bordeaux also has a layer of little chocolate bits (like jimmies, but better) over the chocolate coating, and I don’t like those: messy and I dislike the texture.

Milk Bordeaux
(image from Sees.com)

Butterscotch Square
(image from Sees.com)

So to me, Butterscotch Square wins HANDS DOWN NO CONTEST. The Bordeaux is NICE, and I’d put it in the lower middle tier of my own favorites, with Butterscotch Square in the top tier and Ginger in the lower tier (I got Ginger in a mixed box once and I don’t remember if I spit it out or if I just didn’t finish the piece—it was like a strongly-flavored ginger-root gumdrop covered in dark chocolate that peeled off brittley when I bit) (oh, ick: that gave me a taste/texture flashback).

Next I wanted to try the stripey one. It’s a Blueberry Truffle, and I didn’t expect to like it so I only put it at 5% of one box (in this case, 5% of a 1-pound box was one truffle). But I DO like it! Middle tier, possibly even upper-middle. Nice blueberry flavor, some of it “blueberry candy” flavor and some of it “actual blueberry-the-fruit” flavor, and it’s a very pretty color with flecks of what is either blueberry skin or a very nice approximation of it.

Blueberry Truffle
(image from Sees.com)

From there I moved on to the California Brittle. I was excited to try this because I love Skor bars and Heath bars, and this looked like an upscale version. I got three large pieces of this (they’re on the far right of the lower box in my photo) and I would definitely get more next time: SO YUMMY. The brittle was just the right type of brittle: it shatters exactly right, neither hurting the teeth nor being too sticky, and the nuts made it even better. In my top tier: I’d still choose a Butterscotch Square over it, but they can keep company.

California Brittle
(image from Sees.com)

Last, I tried a Pecan Bud. This is another large piece, like the California Brittle (the Pecan Buds are on the far left of the lower box in my photo: two slots are double-stacked Pecan Buds, and one is an extra-large Pecan Bud all by itself). I THINK I like them very much, but it will take another try to be sure (good thing I have five of them): I was expecting more chocolate per pecan, so the first piece I tried was a little disappointing—but that doesn’t mean I won’t love them when I go into it knowing what to expect. …In fact, I’m going to have another one right now to see. Yes, this time it was much better. These would be lower-upper tier, except that I feel like anyone can put caramel and chocolate on some pecans. Even _I_ could put caramel and chocolate on some pecans. So although these are very yummy and I really like them, I probably wouldn’t ORDER them at $20/pound again.

Pecan Buds
(image from Sees.com)

Five flavors down, fifteen more to go!

Here is something I find exasperating. As you may know, bloggers are required by some sort of law to tell you whenever they’re talking about something they’ve been paid (in cash or in product) to talk about. That’s not the part I find exasperating, though I DO find it irritating that, for example, businesses are not held to the same requirements and can put “1 cup Brandname sugar” on their recipes all day long without disclosing their relationship to Brandname, and magazines can talk about how extremely awesome a product is without disclosing that they were given it for free, and so on. It’s not that I mind the rule (I DEFINITELY want to know if a blogger has been paid to tell me about how awesome something is), it’s that I mind the unfair/uneven application of it.

ANYWAY. Moving on to my point. There are MANY RULES for this disclosure stuff, and they are CONFUSING AND ALSO STRICT, but the gist is that if I’ve been given ANYTHING or benefited in ANY WAY from writing about something, I have to TELL YOU SO.

So! In theory, this should work great for things I’m NOT being compensated to talk about: I write about it, I don’t mention compensation, and you know that no compensation has occurred. HOWEVER: because of the blogging rules, the general blogging public is being extra-careful and doing the “disclose when there IS NOTHING to disclose” policy: i.e., saying “I wasn’t compensated in any way and I bought my own stuff with my own money” when such is the case—which means that THAT has become the default, and that NOT saying that specifically seems to imply that the reader needs to wonder about compensation.

SIGH. This clutters the place UP. And it makes it seem sleazy, too, like a salesperson saying, “Hey, I would sell this product FOR FREE, just because this product is SO AWESOME I feel an almost RELIGIOUS FERVOR for spreading the news of its existence!”

All this is to say that I am about to talk about something AWESOME, and I have not been compensated IN ANY WAY—which you SHOULD have known by the fact that I wasn’t saying I’d been compensated, but instead you get THIS crap.

*cleansing breaths*

SO. I recently got a Target RedCard (LINKED FOR HELPFULNESS NOT FOR COMPENSATION) (SIGH!!), which means everything I buy at Target is automatically 5% off. I’d wondered how that would WORK, since I don’t slide the card until AFTER it rings up a total so how does it know to take 5% off? And this is how: the clerk says, “That’s $100,” and I slide my card, and the total changes to $95 automatically and then charges THAT amount. Awesome. It was also easy to apply: it asked me a few questions (SS#, address, income) on that little screen you have to sign on, and then I was done. My mom told me afterward that what she did was apply at Customer Service, so she wouldn’t hold up the line.

But I’ve had that card for a couple of weeks, and this NEXT part is what made me rush to Inform The Internet: they sent me a thingie that says I can have 1% of what I spend sent automatically to any school I choose (er, of participating schools) (duh). And I thought, “Hey, why not? Free money. For schools.” So I went to http://www.target.com/tcoe, I chose one of my kids’ schools, I entered my name and card number, and DONE.

The unexpectedly cool part is that you can see how many other cardholders are having THEIR 1% sent to each school you’re considering, AND how much money has gone to the school, AND how much has accumulated since their last payment. So in our case, in which our children are spread over three schools, I could look at each of the three and choose the one with the fewest cardholders already donating money to it.

…I’m not succeeding in making this sound as fun/cool as it actually was, which is probably why I am NOT being compensated to talk it up. There were even daycares and preschools on the list! And this COSTS ME NOTHING. And yet I am giving money to SCHOOLS! Automatically! So I never have to think about it again, unless I want to change schools, and yet money will continue going to the school!

This is one of those things that gives me this huge IMAGINE WHAT COULD BE DONE feeling: imagine if everyone with a RedCard signed up—whether they had kids in school or not. It’s not as if it costs the cardholder anything except that couple of minutes it takes to choose a school and type in a name. And 1% isn’t much, even if you shop at Target the way I shop at Target, but it ADDS UP, and there’s NO REASON NOT TO, and it BENEFITS THE COMMUNITY, and *pant pant*

I’m feeling especially passionate on this issue because our school system has been asked to cut their budget this year by a huge amount of money, the kind of amount that’s causing them to wonder if they should choose MUSIC to cut or ART, or maybe THREE teachers should be laid off, and OMG PEOPLE JUST SIGN UP SO TARGET WILL GIVE A SCHOOL THE 1%!! It doesn’t even have to be a LOCAL school: if you have a niece in school in another state, you can have the money go THERE. Or if you want to give to your old hometown elementary school, or WHATEVER.

In other news:

(Uncompensated) reviews to begin soon!

Over the weekend I watched two movies, both of which were “We are drawing your attention to a grim situation you can do nothing to fix” movies. WHYYYYYYYYY?? Either entertain me or educate me, Movies, but don’t do Grim Awareness for the sake of Grim Awareness. Yes indeed I WOULD prefer to be ignorant of bad stuff if there is no way I can improve it. This is why I don’t watch the NEWS.

The first movie was Good Night, and Good Luck. I’d thought, “George Clooney, what could go wrong AMIRITE?” but he’s barely even IN it. This movie says “If our government goes on a witch hunt, EVERYONE IS SCREWED.” Then it says, “Look, it’s done it before, so it’s not a crazy thing to worry about at all!” Then it says, “Okay byeeeeeeee!”

I’d had a little wine while watching it, and this is my explanation for a series of comments on Twitter, beginning with: “Saw Good Night and Good Luck. Am now ready to take on McCarthyism. …What do you mean, ‘too late’?” and ended in “‘Anything that ends in -ism is automatically THE DOWNFALL OF CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT’ is dumb. #Anti-McCarthyismTooLate”

So. Message received, Movie! I assume you wanted to hint that the same appalling craziness we just saw about trumped-up fears of COMMUNISM AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA SCARY SCARY COMMUNISM applies to, for example, trumped-up fears of SOCIALISM AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA SCARY SCARY SOCIALISM. But what I got out of it was that nothing can be done about what our elected officials take into their heads to do, and that furthermore even the craziest crackhead politician will find abundant equally-crazy supporters among the citizens. And this is something I have ALREADY NOTICED in our own city, where a certain member of the board is a noisy unpleasant loon and yet he wins way more votes than he needs to stay in office, EVERY SINGLE TERM, so I didn’t really need to spend another hour and a half getting schooled.

The second movie I watched was The Visitor, in which the dad from Six Feet Under discovers that the government (again with the government) is mistreating friendly attractive immigrants with cute accents, by putting them in bad prison conditions indefinitely, denying perfectly reasonable requests to live and work here, trumping up fake charges as excuses to send them back to their original countries, etc. Well! This is certainly eye-opening, Movie, at least for those of us who had not already read Little Bee and already ALSO knew about the monetary and physical bribes required in those prisons!

And what is the solution to this terrible state of affairs? According to the movie, NOTHING. Just KNOW IT and SUFFER YOUR OWN IMPOTENCE, movie-viewer! Because in the movie, a United States citizen with ample time and money can hire a special immigration attorney and STILL be unable to do anything about even one single immigrant! But at least he learned how to play the drums, yay!

The painting has begun! We are painting the room that used to be our room but will soon be the office/computer room. And when I say “we” I mean “Paul,” because I was researching painters and he said, “Oh, I’ll paint it,” and I said “OKAY” before he was even done saying the “it” part of that sentence. We chose Behr Fresh Heather, a bright lilac color. And when I say “we” I mean “Paul chose it from my Dither Pile because he would rather go with HOT PINK than endure more than an hour or two of paint-color-related dithering.”

Okay, so here is our room Before (note the Krazy Bedding that results when a cat keeps peeing on the bed and so eventually you are making the bed with six twin blankets because all the king-sized ones are in the laundry, and you’ve put your pretty comforter away for the time being):

And here is some of the stuff now living in our hallway (the rest is in the living room), and please note Melty‘s genius idea to just MOVE THE WALL STICKERS TO ANOTHER WALL to store them. I’d been thinking I’d need wax paper and baggies and a flat place and AAAAAAAAAAAA, and then she said her idea and I was like “o.O”.

And here is the paint going on the walls, showing us just how smudgy and dingy our old walls were:

At the far left of the photo under Paul’s arm you can see the hole he cut in the wall for the new computer cables. I keep expecting a mouse to come popping out of there.

Speaking of mice, we have caught a fifth mouse with the shock trap. It’s getting totally routine: each morning I go down to the laundry room to look, and each morning the light is blinking and I remove a mouse. The second trap isn’t catching anything in the oven drawer, so I might move that one to the chocolate-chip shelf.

When Benchley the cat joined our household, we soon realized he was a good mouser. He brings us birds, moles, mice—and it is a little sad that we don’t appreciate him more for it. He would have made someone SUCH a good barn cat. We’ve discussed how we didn’t want to hurt his feelings by rebuking him in any way when he thinks he is being SO good—but that on the other hand we wished he would, er, STOP.

That was before we realized the mice were COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE. Well, or else Benchley brought some in and didn’t sufficiently kill them, and THAT is the reason we now have a thriving mouse metropolis. But if they were here already and he’s been doing his little cat job by killing them for us, that changes my whole point of view on the issue.

I first noticed mouse droppings and little tufts of mouse fur in the oven drawer. Then in the laundry room, on the windowsill over the washer and dryer. Then I went to get a bag of chocolate chips from the shelves in the basement, and it had been gnawed open, and fully a third of the bag was gone, and I was PRETTY SURE I would have used scissors if it had been me.

So. Getting rid of the mice. The thing is, I know there are various virus/germ/dirt/wiring/takeover reasons that mice should not be living in our house, but mice don’t horrify me OF THEMSELVES (though you can bet I’d be screaming and leaping back if one SKITTERED OUT when I didn’t expect it). I would, in fact, like to have mice as pets, for our next Household Pet Acquisition. So I briefly looked into the idea of capturing some of the mice we apparently ALREADY HAD, and putting them in a cage—but as you may have instantly intuited, this is not a good idea. Wild mice are not the same as mice that have been bred to the cage life.

I started with this 12-pack of Mice Cube no-kill mouse traps. I could just return the mice to the outdoors! We have several wild areas of the yard where they could live peacefully! This plan would be a total fail, of course, if there was an undiscovered place where the mice were coming into our house (I’m picturing a Family-Circle-style cartoon where Swistle is lovingly freeing a series of mice into the yard, each of which follows a dotted path right back into the house), but would work pretty well if our mouse population was the result of Benchley sparing the lives of two captured mice who subsequently found love in the oven drawer.

I put out just three traps to start with: one in the oven drawer, one in a gap under the cupboards the cats have been keeping a very close eye on, and one in the laundry room. The next day, the bait was missing from a trap, but no mouse was in the trap. Another trap, the one from the laundry room, had been tipped off the windowsill, and contained neither mouse nor bait. The third trap had a mouse in it. A terrified, quivering, ADORABLE SOFT LITTLE mouse.

I prepared to release it into the wild, and this is where I ran into the part of my plan I should have thought of already: it is WINTER outside. There is SNOW on the ground. Tossing a mouse into that snow would be the same as killing it with a mouse trap, except it would take longer and the mouse would suffer more and we’d end up with a carcass in the yard—or possibly a carcass brought back into the house by a cat.

I took the mouse back inside to think further about this. And the result of all that thinking was, I gently turned the trap upside down (which allows the door to open), and I put it back in the oven drawer, and I closed the oven drawer. My thought process was this: I have not ADDED anything to our mouse population; I have merely canceled one poorly-thought-out transaction and given myself time to think things through with the new information about what season it is right now.

The problem was, I still didn’t really want to kill the mice. And yet, they are eating our pantry supplies and/or possibly spreading disease, and that can’t be allowed to continue. And yet, it is going to be winter for quite some time.

So. My second purchase was of the Victor M2524 electric mouse trap. It kills the mice with a quick electric shock. It claims to meet “International Humane Kill” standards, which was comforting even though I’ve never heard of such a thing and have no idea what those standards are. For all I know, the standards are “Anything it takes to get rid of the little suckers HAR HAR HAR!” But it SOUNDS good: electric shock is one of the two ways we execute PEOPLE, and I couldn’t find little mouse-sized lethal-injection needles. More important to me is that it doesn’t use poison and it doesn’t snap.

I set the trap before bed, and in the morning the green light was blinking—meaning it had caught a mouse. I removed the mouse and re-set the trap. In the evening I checked the trap again, and the light was blinking again. I removed the mouse and re-set the trap. This morning I checked the trap again, and the light was blinking again. I removed the mouse and re-set the trap—and ordered a second trap so I can put one in a second location.

The trap is EXPENSIVE ($20) and the reviews are mixed, and if you try one I highly recommend reading the very helpful review by CF, which has a lot of troubleshooting stuff. It’s not that it’s a complicated trap (you put batteries in, you put a smudge of peanut butter in, you flip the switch on), but there are a few things it would be easy to do wrong (like putting in too large a portion of peanut butter) that the instructions don’t give you any idea about.

In short: I like both kinds of traps, but I’ll use the no-kill traps when it’s nice outside, and the electric shock one when it’s not—or if the mice keep coming back in.