Of Mice and Men...and Cats and Rabbits

A few weeks ago we started noticing a bad smell whenever we used the oven. Although the oven and broiler appeared clean, I wiped them down. I flipped up the stovetop and scrubbed underneath all the burners. Nothing I did seemed to help. Finally Dan got in on the act and was able to pull the oven away from the wall.

A hole! We concluded that a mouse was getting into the house, but if it was in our oven, where was it?

Dan got out his tools and went about the unpleasant business of taking the oven apart. What he found was a little mouse nest in the insulation between the oven and the panel underneath the stove burners. Fortunately he found no actual damage, and no dead mice - only droppings and urine. But he also found a little stash of acorns.

So...is my cooking not good enough for a mouse, that it felt compelled to bring its own food? Or are toasted acorns a rodent delicacy? (They had cracked and cooked in the heat.)

Anyway, the hole is now repaired, the oven insulation pored through and interior surfaces scrubbed with baking soda, so I should be able to resume baking as usual. All of this, however, calls into question the usefulness of our cat.

Pixel is eighteen years old and has long considered himself "retired" from such bothersome duties as chasing vermin, but we suspect our rodent visitor may also have been eating his food. Poor old gato. In his youth he would slip outside and catch squirrels and now he can't even be bothered to defend his food bowl.

Interestingly, it was Cadbury who alerted us with a thump two nights ago that the mouse had chewed through Dan's first attempt at blocking the mouse hole. Now if only Cadbury could catch mice...

Congratulations to My Husband!

The big news around here is that Dan finally graduated with his bachelor’s degree!

He went back to school twelve years ago but was never very good at carrying a lot of courses and working full time, so it took him forever. For the last several years, he’s been just taking one class per semester, which at least had the advantage of being cheap since it was always fully covered by the university’s staff scholarship, which pays $1,500 per semester to any benefits-eligible staff member taking a class. So he graduates much later than I did, but with a considerably smaller debt load.

Those who believe in a life script with strict age-delimited timelines for doing certain things will of course say he should’ve gotten his degree decades ago. We don’t think much about scripts around here, though. Dan’s background is the kind from which young people, especially young men, are actively discouraged from seeking higher education. For an inner-city barrio boy who has roped cows from horseback in the mountains of New Mexico, lived at an ashram chanting and eating chapattis, and roadied for punk bands, to become a technology professional with a bachelor’s degree was the ultimate act of rebellion.

And now he’s talking grad school. I say take a little time off first and make sure you really want to make that kind of commitment. Ultimately, of course, it’s his road, his decision. He has one of the qualities I most admire when I find it in others—an openness to new ideas and the courage to reinvent himself when he finds the road he’s on has grown too dull or too narrow to hold him.

Congratulations, Dan!