so it goes

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Originally uploaded by evilnick.

The first book I read by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was "The Breakfast of Champions." I read it at a time when I was in sort of a reading drought. When I was little, I read like crazy. Of course, back then it was all Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein. It stuck with me for the most part, but there was a stretch after maybe the 10th grade when reading had become more of a chore than it used to be.

Vonnegut sort of broke that trance and brought me back to being a little kid again. With a unique mix of cynicism and gratitude, he exposed the lunacy of being normal in the modern world. He was like an anthropologist from another planet who seemed to try so hard to understand the peculiar behavior of our species.

He was near the top of my list of people I would like to meet. I won't be able to do that now, but at least he left us an armload of great books.

sniffles

Remember What The Dormouse Said
Originally uploaded by Greg McElhatton.

Sometime last week this started. *sniff* My chief defense against cold and flu is denial *cough*. Before you criticize, I should mention that sometimes it seems to work. Somehow, pretending that I don't have a cold can allow me to carry on normally for a while and sometimes the cold goes away before it hits the radar.

If denial doesn't work, I start dropping zinc lozenges. On the back of the box, it says that zinc shortens the duration of colds. It tastes kind of bad, so this is believable.

At the third stage, I start the heavier drugs. Dayquil (pictured above) is a fav. I'll also take a puff or two of albuterol if I get congestion in my chest. It seems to do a pretty good job of clearing that up for a while. I worry about over-doing the albuterol, but since I don't actually get many asthma attacks, I have added it to my upper-respiratory infection arsenal.

Once the coughing starts, I have to get serious. Hard, sugar-free candy usually keeps it at bay along with the zinc I'm still sucking on. Of course, judging from the soreness of my abs, I should re-think the hard-candy strategy and go for a regular cough suppressant.

See you when I'm back on line.

little bones

little bones
Originally uploaded by MancaLaura.

There is a small mouse problem at work. The mouse depicted above is actually part of someone else's problem, or at least it used to be. Mice are generally good about not being seen, but they do leave evidence of their activity. It is sort of shocking to find signs that your sterile cubicle is actually a part of a world that is alive in spite of the steel, glass and concrete humans use to keep separate from it.

The first time I actually saw a live mouse at work was late at night putting in a few extra hours. I heard a sound sort of like someone tapping on metal. I looked around, and at the bottom of my steel bookshelf, I saw a yellow peanut M&M just spinning in place on the surface of the shelf. I assumed that the M&M had fallen and landed there. A minute later, I looked back and there was an actual mouse holding the M&M and eating it.

This discovery led to a long battle that ended (or so I thought) with me getting a live trap and capturing my little friend so I could release him outside.

The day after I set the trap, I caught my first mouse.

My luck was only half good because it was the coldest day of the year and when I called my wife to tell her of the glorious success, she didn't think I should let the mouse go outside because it would freeze. I knew this would be crazy, but I eventually brought the mouse home to wait for a few days until things heated up outside.

To be safe, I put the little creature in a 20 gallon fish tank and left an old towel on the top to keep it from escaping, which it did anyway. The next day, the mouse (named Lau Shu by then) was gone. Now it was somewhere in our house.

Fortunately, I knew what he liked. That night, I set the trap again. I baited it with a yellow peanut M&M. The next morning, Lau Shu was caught and I was able to release him in an orderly fashion with no further incident.

I ended up trapping three mice and the office administrator was pleased with the effectiveness of the live trap. I didn't discuss the possibility that I may have caught the same mouse a couple of those times. At any rate, more traps were purchased and left along the baseboards.

For a long time, nobody caught anything. Eventually, the traps were forgotten.

Fast forward maybe six months. I was cleaning up an upper bookshelf and guess what I found.

There were clear signs that the problem had returned. I spent several hours cleaning my cube, and suddenly a sick feeling came over me. I remembered that our office administrator left the company several months earlier and probably had never checked any of those traps.

When I found the first scene, it was quite sad. There was a semi-mummified tail still visible with the rest of the body hidden under the counter-balanced ramp that provided the deadly secret of the trap.

I emptied the device outside and pondered that fate. I haven't had the heart to set another one of those traps yet.