a conversation with my father

Me: Hi, Daddy.
Dad: Hey, Sarah B., I just got your message.
Me: Yeah, um...what do I do?
Dad: Well, how bad is it? Did it chew through the whole wire?
Me: Hang on, checking...yeah, it chewed through an entire wire. So the speaker only has one wire intact.
Dad: Well...hm...it's a little hard for me to walk you through it step-by-step...
Me: I know, you can't even see the damage. But there are little bits of copper strewn everywhere and the speaker is definitely not working.
Dad: Do you know anyone you could take it to?
Me: Yeah, my boss's husband is good with this kind of stuff. You think that'll do it?
Dad: Yeah, I think so. Hey, what did you mean when you said the mouse is currently freezing to death?
Me: I mean I put it in the freezer.

So yes, I had a mouse this past week. Monday evening I was sitting on the couch watching TV when a furry black thing scuttled across the baseboard and disappeared behind the entertainment center. I shrieked (wondering if it was perhaps the biggest cockroach on the planet), grabbed a stool, and climbed on it to peer behind the entertainment center. There it was, terrified by the volume of my yell, and there I was, paralyzed. I put in a call to my mother and then to my landlord, who happened to be at Target at that very moment buying mousetraps for his own house. So he brought me some flat glue traps, the kind that catch but don't kill (grr, I hate doing the dirty work myself), and Wednesday afternoon I came home to find it lodged in a corner, its back legs caught in the trap and the glue full of copper wire pieces from the stereo speaker next to which it was lying.

My massive guilt trip evaporated then and there. I had decided in advance that freezing to death was the most humane way of disposing of the mouse (as opposed to smashing it or doing as my landlord suggested, which was to throw the whole thing in the trash: "You'll hear it moving around for awhile, but it'll die eventually" -- what?! -- and the glue prevents you from freeing the mouse in one piece, so I couldn't drive it twenty miles to a field and let it go) and so I lifted the trap with a spatula into a disposable Gladware container, covered it in plastic wrap, and popped it in on top of the icebox.

It's too bad mice are vermin. This particular little mouse was very very cute -- a long, alert face and bright eyes and dark brown fur, much more preferable than the nasty boorish sluggish smelly "domesticated" variety -- and if I had found his little poops in my toilet instead of my pantry, I believe we could have set up a tidy, peaceable coexistence. Instead he crapped on my flour and ate one of my speaker wires. Sorry, little buddy; time to go.

So I'm listening to George Winston with one speaker, which is adequate but one-dimensional. Boss Meg's husband Phillip will fix the devastated speaker for me, so I'm taking it to work with me tomorrow.