So we had a mouse in our house. I can't stand it. I'm deathly afraid of mice. Horrified, mortified. That old line about they're more afraid of you than you are of them is a just a load of hooey. For the most part, seeing a mouse isn't how you know you have one.
Our Beagle Boy Cletus turned 11 in October and has been with us for eight years now. And he seems to be channeling the ghost of our boy Duke more and more all the time. The two boys never met, Dukie died about six months before Cletus came to live with us.
It started out like any other Friday morning. The clock went off, I hit the snooze button until it was time I had to get up and off we went. Sort of. I checked to make sure the alarm was actually off so it didn’t scare the bejeezus out of our Beagle Boy Cletus if it went off and the lights were off on the clock.
The mattress on our bed is from the turn of the century — we got it in 2000. A king-size pillow top for our California King waterbed frame. We’d have still been using our full-wave waterbed if it hadn’t been for moving into a house that was built close to the turn of the last century.
Thankfully, leaf season is pretty well over for this year. The only thing we’re still playing with is the tree in front of our garage. It hasn’t completely changed yet. It didn’t even start turning until the beginning of November. The rest of them are all done. Yay.
I’m embarrassed to say we’ve had our new windows for 10 months now and I’ve yet to clean them. Literally, the fancy way they tip in so you can clean top and bottom, inside and out, was the reason we chose these windows.
So I ended up way out of my comfort zone this summer when my friend invited me to go kayaking with her and a few other ladies at the lake where we all have campers. The very thought of me doing that seemed absurd to me. Of course, I had to decline the invitation.
Just like everyone else in Northeastern Ohio, we got caught up in the storms a few weeks ago. Dave and I and our Beagle Boy Cletus went downstairs and waited out the storm watching DVR because, of course, the cable was out. We kept tabs on the storm’s progress on our phones and when it had pretty well played itself out, we went back to bed.
Dave and I ran into a little car trouble lately. We affectionately refer to our 2010 Ford Escape as the “Jitney” because we had a Jeep for about 10 years. It took like eight of those years to get out of the habit of referring to every vehicle in the driveway as the truck, because mostly they were.
I saw the telltale scraps of grass and straw on the back porch, along with a feather. Oh no, not another nest! But then I didn’t see anything else for a few days, so I assumed the birds had found a better location.
Since Dave and I moved to this house 27 years ago, we’ve tried to replace any trees that we took down or that came down on their own. I don’t want to mow around a forest, but we don’t want to desecrate the land, either.
So I was in the upstairs bathroom, which is kind of under construction at the moment. There is a slight leak in the roof that the roofer has heretofore been unable to fix because of the weather. Nobody told Mother Nature it’s spring and we need to be sunny and 75 right now.