Baldur

Gerardus Mercator is born (1512)
The Catholic Church bans Copernicus' book on heliocentricity (1616)
The Boston Massacre (1770)
Howard Pyle is born (1853)
Mefistofele premieres at La Scala (1868)
Zhou Enlai is born (1898)
Sir Rex Harrison is born (1908)
Momofuku Ando, the inventor of ramen noodles is born!!!!!!!!!! (1910)
Sergei Prokofiev dies (1953)
Penn Jillette is born (1955)

Happy St. Piran's Day

matthew

Momofuku Ando is my hero...

Baldur

Happy Birthday katpedro!

Baldur

Baldurbear: horrors
Baldurbear: bon mouse jour
RassleBear: ??
Baldurbear: Kyle jumped on the bed at 5:23
Baldurbear: AM
Baldurbear: which aint that unusual
RassleBear: it's just about that time here, now.
Baldurbear: except that he kept running around in circles
Baldurbear: which he has done only once before
Baldurbear: when he 'drug' a dead mouse up onto the bed to show us
RassleBear: a gift por vous
Baldurbear: well I am somewhat prepared and reached under the bed and retrieved my handy flashlight which I keep there so I don't have to turn on the big ceiling light and wake up Robert
Baldurbear: and sure enough there is a mouse lying there on my red paisley comforter
Baldurbear: I get up to retrieve a piece of paper towel from the kitchen because I sure as hell aint picking up a dead mouse with my bare hand
Baldurbear: and when i come back Kyle is there but the mouse is not
Baldurbear: and Kyle suddenly lunges at my pillow
Baldurbear: I lift the pillow and the mouse who is quite obviously not dead runs off the pillow side of the mattress and then under the bed
Baldurbear: that was enough early morning entertainment for me
Baldurbear: Chloe was guarding the doorway so the mouse could not get out unnoticed
Baldurbear: so i put on my robe
Baldurbear: and went into the living room to try to get back to sleep on the couch
Baldurbear: until I heard crashing and chasing noises in the bathroom
Baldurbear: where obviously the mouse had managed to get to
Baldurbear: Chloe and Kyle have this charming habit of letting their prey run ahead of them a little bit so they can chase it all over again
Baldurbear: the litter box is in the corner of the bathroom
Baldurbear: and the mouse had managed to run behind it where the cats couldn't get it
Baldurbear: so I pulled the litter box away from the wall and closed all 3 in the room
Baldurbear: so now it sounds like a Tom & Jerry cartoon in there sans the soundtrack music
RassleBear: too bad there's no camera set up
Baldurbear: apparently it's no fun to kill it too quickly
RassleBear: nope. cats like to play with their food
Baldurbear: they won't eat it
Baldurbear: only Shakira, who is sleeping quite soundly, would do that
Baldurbear: but then she would barf it up all over the place lol
RassleBear: perhaps if you cooked it properly...
RassleBear: lol
RassleBear: they're still in there? leaving it for a surprise for when Robert gets up?
Baldurbear: so I'm now up rather early
Baldurbear: robert knows
Baldurbear: the ruckus in the bedroom eventually woke him
RassleBear: rah-thah ("rather" with a british accent)
Baldurbear: how does one boil a mattress?
RassleBear: one uses a can of Lysol ®
RassleBear: or you could rent a steam cleaner, i guess.
Baldurbear: there has not been enough lysol made yet
Baldurbear: and of course it's a cute little grey mouse with little beady black eyes
RassleBear: so you'll be buying a new mattress?
Baldurbear: I wonder if they're on sale
Baldurbear: I'm eating the last third of the cherry pie leftover from the potluck before the mouse gets in the refrigerator. One must be practical
RassleBear: he was already in there this morning before the grand chase
Baldurbear: no doubt, he looked well fed
Baldurbear: I've let the cats out of the bathroom now
Baldurbear: and I can't find the mouse

Baldur

Michelangelo is born (1475)
Cyrano de Bergerac is born (1619)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning is born (1806)
The Alamo falls to Mexican forces (1836)
Oscar Straus is born (1870)
Louisa May Alcott dies (1888)
John Philip Sousa dies (1932)
Kiri Te Kanawa is born (1944)
David Gilmour is born (1946)
Margaret Dumont dies (1965)
Shaqille O'Neal is born (1972)
Walter Cronkite retires from the CBS Evening News (1981)
Georgia O'Keefe dies (1986)
Ernest Gallo dies (2007)

mdawrcn

Great story Baldur! I have been having similar happenings, though not as interesting, at my house. With three cats in residence, one would think the last thing I would have to worry about is mice, but I have been seeing signs of them and hearing scuffling noises in the night. Ugh.

Lizzi

LOL, I am not alone! It hasn't happened recently, but that brings back memories. Mice, birds, grasshoppers, butterflies. It's the young ones who have to go hunting. My oldies are retired. Thanks for the morning smile, Baldur.

Baldur

The followup is that the mouse decided to take refuge in the metal canopy that covers the baseboard heater fins.
I shut the door and left him in there until Robert woke up.
Robert got out the 'ketch-em-live' trap and baited it with a Ritz cracker smeared with peanut butter.
When we returned home from our errands the mouse was not in the trap but just sitting on the bathroom floor looking rather traumatized. We had kept the door closed so that cats could not harass it, but I am guessing the whole experience was just too much for it.
Robert walked over, picked up Mr. Mouse and carried him outside.
He was placed in an opening in the pile of firewood.

One would think that mice should know better than to risk a foray into a house that has 4 cats.

Baldur

We often hear scuffling sounds in the walls here at Boughbreak. It still amazes me that a mouse would not smell cat and just stay away.

Baldur

Baldur heard on the radio that today is the 100th birthday of the Oreo Cookie.
How could I have missed posting that this morning?

Baldur

St. Thomas Aquinas dies (1274)
John Herschel is born (1792)
Luther Burbank is born (1849)
Tammy Faye Bakker is born (1942)
Peter Wolf is born (1946)
Lynn Swann is born (1952)
Bloody Sunday, Selma, Alabama (1965)
Alice B. Toklas dies (1967)
Divine dies (1988)
The Kepler spave observatory is launched (2009)

Today is the Fast of Esther, Purim begins at sunset; Shalom

Baldur

spave - v + c = space

marius

For heaven's sake ... I need to go back and read. It appears the Baron of Boughbreak had a birthday. Happy BDay, a tad late.

Hope this link works. If you don't like spiders, don't click.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/thousands-spiders-blanket-australian-farm-escaping-flood- 165958059.html

marius

Okay, trying another link.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2111390/Australia-floods-Spiders-cover-fields-cobwebs- flee-rising-water.html

Baldur

and a belated thank you marius.

Do you think there are gazillions of subterranean spiders everywhere?
What a thought!

marius

... tee hee for the belated thank you. : )

And, yes, I do think there are gazillions of spiders everywhere. In former days as a naturalist I learned that, in general, there is a spider within three feet of a any one person at all times. Is that true? I don’t know but since I’m particularly fond of spiders, seems like a good idea … as long as they are non-poisonous. : )

Here’s a bit of info about spider distribution:
“Because they are usually so abundant, spiders are among the most important predators in many ecosystems. Numbers often exceed 100 per square meter, which equates to 1 million spiders per hectare (Coleman and Crossley, 1996). Although spiders are relatively small (body length from 1 mm to several cm), their combined weight in a habitat often exceeds that of the larger, but more rare, vertebrates such as birds.“

http://www.uwgb.edu/biodiversity/biota/arthropods/Arachnids/spidersilk.htm

marius

… and one more idea in favor of spiders. Many years ago I volunteered at a small nature preserve and so did a retired nurse. She had grown up on a Kansas farm and began her nursing career in the same locale. So one day we were working at the preserve, which was open for public hiking and enjoyment, when a family ran up to us, carrying a small child. I forget what the child had done to his foot, but it was bleeding pretty badly. Evelyn told me to gather as much spider silk as I could, which I did, and then she wrapped that around the child’s foot. It was the cleverest bandage job I’d ever seen.

Evelyn said every farmer knows about spider silk, that in her old farm clinic people were always showing up with wounds bandaged in spider silk. I thought that about the most charming thing I’d ever heard. Still do.

Baldur

I had read about spider silk being used that way. In the case of a large open wound it gives a framework or matrix for blood cells to clot on to, when otherwise they would flow away.

Baldur

Thanks to wikipedia Baldur has just learned that he has Heterochromia iridum. The featured photograph on their main page today shows it (the image is not of my eye).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eye_Central_Heterochromia_crop_and_lighter.jpg

Baldur 's iris is a grey color with flashes of light blue centered by and orangish corona. It's good knowing there is a name for this.

Baldur

and - d + an