Tag: slice of life

Cage 0, Mouse 2.

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Remember Stumpy/Houdini/Pickle? She has sadly buggered off. How she managed it, I don’t know, but she has escaped from a completely enclosed and seemingly secure cage. Twice.

The first time was when we first decided to keep her and Katy went to Scottsdale to buy a cage. After setting everything up on the kitchen table, we put her in and shortly thereafter noticed that she was sitting in our fruit bowl grooming herself while sitting on an apple. After a bit of fun trying to catch her and put BenBen to bed at the same time, we borrowed a glass aquarium and put her in there until she got big enough to stay in the cage without being able to slip through the bars.

Last weekend, we put her in the cage again – mistakenly thinking that since she’d doubled in size, the bars would be able to keep her in. We were wrong. We hadn’t seen her moving around the cage for a few days yesterday so we decided to have a closer look. She was nowhere to be found :( Somehow she managed to squeeze through the bars and climb (or fall) down the wall shelf where the cage was. The cats haven’t been going batshit so she’s either hiding/dead somewhere well out of the way or she’s managed to make it back outside.

Godspeed to you Houdini, wherever you are, and watch out for the cats.

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Holy crap, I’m British!

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I’ve just received a phone call from the lawyer handling my immigration case. I am now officially British†. I’ll shortly be getting my certificate of naturalization, with which I will be able to apply for a full British passport. YAWP!

This means, of course, that more money needs now leave my poor, depleted account. We’ve just this morning transferred close to £37,000 to our solicitor to cover the house deposit and all the various fees that are the last step before the contract exchange, and then the house is ours.

Egads!

† Conditionally on calling up the Cambridge registry office and setting up an appointment to take an oath to the Queen, of course :)

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State of the Richard

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Lots of things happened in the past week.

My folks came for a visit, which was excellent. They spent a week on this side of the pond, mostly cooing at the Benster. Katy and I managed to have some us-time and spent more money than we should have at Ikea, buying new furniture for the house, and going to see The Boat that Rocked at the cinema. I highly recommend the movie, it’s a blast.

BenBen’s cold took a turn for the worse near the end of the folks’ visit. He’s normally a very chilled out and happy baby. Not these days. He’s a cantankerous snot monster that refuses to eat anything. He went from eating around 35 oz in a day to anywhere between 15 and 20. He just does not want to eat. He’s usually a good sleeper in the night as well, but the last few days have been trying. On Sunday, when he hadn’t had anything significant to eat for his last two feeds of the day, he had a complete meltdown from 4pm and we had to just put him to bed at 6pm. He was exhausted and just didn’t want to do anything but scream and go to sleep. We thought that he’s be wailing down the walls in the middle of the night – because he’d hardly eaten anything – but it turns out that he had a decent night. He woke up around 3 am in a coughing fit, but managed to put himself back to sleep with a minimum amount of fuss. I, on the other hand, hardly slept that night. I was so worried that he’d be waking up that I was dreading it and ended up sleeping at most 5 hours that night, in fits and bursts of 30 minutes here and there.

We took him to the docs yesterday because he was seriously off his feeds and was running at a higher temperature than normal for him. They prescribed us some antibiotics and we went home. He was still fractious but had a better day than Sunday. He ate more, which is a good thing. We put him to bed at closer to his normal bedtime and things seemed to be going well, except that the coughing fit he had at 2:30 am kept him – and us – awake until 4am. He wasn’t crying, but was very vocal in his attempts to go back to sleep. In the end, we put an extra blanket on him, put his bedtime CD back on and Badger Badger’d him again and he drifted off to sleep. We managed to get a few more hours of kip, but I’m rather tired this morning. Katy and I have also caught whatever bug is plaguing him. I’ve been horking up yellow phlegm and Katy has a cough that would make a lifetime shag tobacco smoker envious.

Things might be progressing on the housing front. We had a phone call out of the blue from the estate agent on Saturday and, after a bit of phone tag, it would seem that the seller is “disappointed at having to reduce the house price but is going to be pragmatic about it”. Apparently, she’s had her own electrician do as estimate of the work that would need doing and the quote she got was about 1/3 of ours. We met somewhere in the “middle”. We’re still eating more of the costs than I’d ideally like, but I’m tired of waiting and I won’t quibble for a few hundred quid – even if we are morally in the right. Anyway, she wants to exchange this week, so we’re going to chase up the solicitors and see what we can do. Watch this space.

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Houdini, the stumpy mouse

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Remember, a few days ago, when I mentioned casually that if the cats brought that same mouse in again for the 3rd time, we’d keep it as a pet?

They did.

Katy phoned me up at work yesterday in a fit of giggles, informing me that she and Sue had seen it when they moved BenBen’s play mat out of the way and had captured it in a cardboard box. Was I serious about keeping it as a pet? Hell yeah :)

I mean, come on. It’s survived Reen-pig’s TLC and managed to escape the (admittedly dim-witted) cat for the third time running. And if it comes where we think it’s from, her story is even more impressive. I just didn’t have the heart to chuck it back into the wild or dispose of it in a more permanent manner so Katy went to a pet shop in the afternoon and bought a hamster cage. We found out the hard way that she’s small enough to fit through the bars of that cage and spent part of the evening moving stuff around in the kitchen to re-capture it. In the end, we borrowed Donna’s old aquarium that she used to keep her tree frogs in. It’ll do until Houdini is big enough to not fit through the bars any more.

There’s still a chance she won’t survive the stress of the situation, so I’m trying (and failing badly) to not get too attached. Still, she touched her food during the night and seemed to be burrowed somewhere in her cage today, so those are good signs.

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Weekend update

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I felt like crap on Friday so I stayed home from work. I still have a major case of the lurgie and I’ve been feeling off and on all weekend. I blame the new grad student at work for giving me his Ebola.

We had to go to Saffron Walden in the afternoon to go meet our solicitor and sign some paperwork. On the way back, we stopped at the duck pond. BenBen was completely out of it, but we had a bit of fun with Katy’s new phone.

DUCKIE!

When we got home, BenBen went into a major meltdown. We think that, between his teeth beginning to play up, his last round of shots and a bit of a cold, he’s been feeling very under the weather and has been feeling very tired and grumpy and has been a cast-iron bugger to feed. So, when we got home, he decided that he was most decidedly not a happy camper and wailed. Solidly. For close to two hours. As soon as we brought him upstairs to start his bedtime routine, he settled down and had a good night but Katy and I were rather traumatized because – for all our griping at times – he is normally a really good baby and rarely kicks up a fuss.

Just as we were going to bring Ben upstairs, Reenie barged in the house with another mouse – still alive – and ran to the shoe rack to drop it in my boot. Again. Except this time, she missed the boot and the mouse got away from her. We so didn’t need that extra little bit of aggravation when our nerves were still frazzled from all the crying. I tried to look for it but I couldn’t find it and we had to go get the boy to bed.

Once things settled down and there was blessed quiet again in the house, I was able to shift some clutter around and find the wayward rodent. Lo and behold, it was the same mouse as two days ago!!!

Photographic Proof

We freed it in some bushes. If it comes in again, we’re keeping it as a pet.

We spent most of the weekend packing stuff away in boxes and got some good progress done. Most of the mice that Reenie brought in over the weekend were deceased, so we didn’t have too much aggravation. She did manage to drop a live mouse in my boot though, and Katy had to use some fancy penmanship to get rid of it. I just hope it didn’t pee too much in my boot.

Such are the joys of cat ownership.

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Rodentpalooza

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So, tonight, Reen-pig broke her own record and brought in three mice. One, we think, was an escapee from the Sanger, even! It had either been ear-tagged and tailed or had some very coincidental scars. That one was still alive and was released back into the wild (and hopefully won’t be back tomorrow). The other two were less fortunate. And yes, both of the dead ones ended up in my boots.

Gotta love our pussycats.

Katy thinks it’s because the weather is warming up and the mice are getting more active but are still dopey. Hopefully they’ll be able to give the cats more of a run for their money before my mom gets here or she’ll really freak out :)

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As a follow-up to yesterday

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Oh dear, Reen-pig has a mouse. Keep an eye on her.
Well, it’s still alive and it’s currently in your shoe.
*laugh* somehow that doesn’t surprise me.
Now it’s alive and in my boot.
/cut to picture of cat madly trying to stuff her whole head into a hiking boot/

In the end, the mouse was still in good enough shape to be chucked out of my boot into the front yard.

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Don’t worry, love Jesus!

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We were in Leicester this past weekend and we had a pootle in the town center. The High Street is a magnet for God-botherers. There’s always a gaggle of Krishnas, and generally more than one dude-with-a-megaphone vying for your attention (and your money). It’s fairly innocuous. I overheard a reggae band singing a “remixed” version of Don’t worry, be happy. These guys though caught my attention:

Jesus he knows me

I know they were probably going for the shock value to start a discussion, but something tells me that – by the looks they were getting – a lot of people were thinking of letting their fingers (or fists) do the talking.

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