I am sick. It started yesterday afternoon, and I tried to will it away. Compiled with a shitty day at work yesterday, the Almost Cold revved up and turned into the real thing last night. I feel like ass. Stuffy head, kinda achy, no cold medicine for daytime in the house and no real desire to fight the ice on the sidewalks to walk to the store today. So I took some DayQuil Cough and called it good, sat through several episodes of the 1991 verson of Dark Shadows and didn't move much, other than to answer the door when the pizza guy came. (Hey! I drank orange soda, so that kinda counts, right?)
Which brings us to one of the points in my title. I've been drinking tea like it's going out of style for the last couple of weeks. I had some fresh honey I bought over the summer from a guy I know, but that's gone. I had a honey bear, but he's long empty now as well. And I found another 1/4 full bear in a box from my office down in the basement, which I have now consumed too. I just had to dig into my sugar stash to sweeten this last cup before bed (it's caffeine free). Only to see that I am just about out of sugar as well. What I do have in my cupboard, which does me no good for my tea, is about 3/4 of a bag of Ghirardelli semi-sweet chocolate chips. Which I have been consuming at an alarming rate for the last ten minutes. My tea is no sweeter, but dammit I feel better.
My mother, kind hearted woman that she is, is sending some care packages to Bmore to me, via The Guy. He returns tomrrow night, but is vacillating on whether he wants to go straight home from being on the road, or come see me on my sickbed. Problematically, he has dog food (I'm out after they eat breakfast tomorrow), honey, sugar, and vitamins for me. All things that my mother magically knew I was out of before I did, as she bought this stuff more than a week ago and I had said nothing about any of it. If I can hold out until he comes over, I can have all these things free of charge. If I cannot....then I just have twice the honey, I suppose.
The ice portion of the title is something ridiculous, but I feel I must share it. Last night we had a nice little sleet/ice/snow system move through the city. I don't know how the commute was this morning, being a creature of the night at this point, but I know that driving home from the restaurant wasn't fun in the dark and ice. I'm from the midwest, so driving on slippery roads doesn't bother me. I had to run a red light because hitting my brakes would have been far worse, but that was about it. However. I don't keep an ice scraper in my car. 99% of the time this is not an issue, as any snowfall we get can be wiped off the windows with the sleeve of my coat, and ice is melted in about a minute. Not so last night, because when I got in my car the driver side door window was a solid sheet of ice. I sat with the heater turned up full bore for about five minutes, so I could get all the ice off my windshield, but it wasn't budging from my side window. I finally decided I was tired of waiting (and just tired, and sick, and a little upset, and WHATEVER I WANTED TO GET HOME OK?!) So I just rolled my window down when I was making right turns, so I could make sure no one was coming from the left without their lights on. It was pushing 1am on a Monday, so I wasn't too concerned with traffic, especially since folks in the mid-Atlantic don't go out when there's snow. I got about halfway home (it's a three mile trek, but can take me a considerable amount of time depending on weather, traffic lights, and traffic itself) and thought to myself, "Hey, I bet if I roll down the window now, the ice will fall off." And yes, it was true. By rolling down the window, the ice, which had been loosened by the heat in the car, did in fact fall off the window. And directly into my lap.
Finally, there is my mouse. In order to protect the innocent, let's call him Mickey. Mickey used to be a skittish little thing, running into the kitchen from under the basement door without a moment's pause, getting past my watchful eye quickly and silently. I planned to kill Mickey, because he's a pestilent rodent and he poops on my kitchen counters.
Insert The Guy into the equasion. The Guy is a vegetarian, and mostly a pacifist. I don't think he's ever fired a gun in his life (this summer should be interesting), and when I mentioned my plan for Bmore Mouse Genocide 2010, he reacted strongly against it. My Final Solution was not to his liking, it would seem, and thus Zyklon B was right out of the plan.
Recently, I heard someone say that the hardest part about a relationship was recognizing that you couldn't change the other person, and instead determining how much you, yourself, were willing to change. Thus, I felt it only just to give The Guy a chance to get rid of the mouse sans Goering-styled gas chambers. Therefore, just before the holiday break, I bought a live trap for Mickey and told The Guy it was his duty to trap and dispose of Mickey.
Then the holidays were upon us, and thoughts of the mouse disappeared, replaced with thoughts of driving for nine hours together and wrapping gifts and and and and and. Then we were back in Bmore for a week, but I was back to work, and so was he, and the mouse yet again did not get trapped. And he's been gone for over a week, again, back in Michigan to visit his parents (and mine, apparently). So still no jailed Mickey.
At the same time, the mouse has gotten bolder. Much much bolder. In fact, here's a short version of my mouse interactions now:
Mickey runs out from under the basement door. He stops along the wall, stands up on his hind legs, waves at me, and says, "HAHA! Your boyfriend is a vegetarian!" Then the little fucker runs into the kitchen, somehow Spidermouses his way up onto the counter, dons a top hat and spats, finds a little mouse cane, AND FUCKING TAP DANCES ACROSS MY KITCHEN COUNTER DROPPING MOUSE SHITS EVERYWHERE while singing show tunes. This happens every night, replete with a barking, whining audience of two perturbed dogs, who, for the life of them, cannot figure out how cats work that mousing magic.
At some later time then, Mickey, tired from his song and dance routine, Spidermouses his way back down the counter, and comes around the corner on the floor again. For the second time in one night he stops, stands up on his hind legs, and chats with me. This time, he typically says something along the lines of "your boyfriend is a wuss", then flips me the bird, and runs off back home again. Where he probably gets drunk on bourbon and beats his wife when she complains about his life in show business.
I've told said boyfriend that he has a minute amount of time when he gets back to Bmore to fix this problem. He's hemming and hawing about where the mouse can go once 'we've' caught him. I explained earlier tonight that the mouse was going to go to the Great Mousehole in the Sky very very soon if he didn't work something out. In fact, I told The Guy about the song-and-dance routine every night. The Guy, however, seems to think I'm projecting onto the mouse, and that Mickey doesn't actually say these things to me. HA! As if. The little shit is probably under contract to MGM or something, and just can't perform in public, so my kitchen serves as his warm-up space.
Projecting?! Just wait until the first time Mickey flips The Guy off and calls him a pussy. Then we'll see how long the littlest tap dancer gets free reign of the Kitchen Club before The (Vegetarian Pacifist) Guy grabs an armband of mouse-hatred and joins my one woman army.