Our vacation was about 50% of the above, which is pretty good. The wine was lovely, every single one that we picked, shopping with my sister (who loved her new green shrug) went extremely well, the children were moderately well-behaved, the weather was good half the time, and acceptable the rest of the time. We had five days of this:
when we hung out at my dad's condo near Inveremere, BC. He bought it before Intrawest bought Panorama and before prices went mental. He threatens to sell it every once in a while, but thus far the haunting cries of "Noooooooo.....!!!!" have deterred him. That, and the fact that my stepmother loves it, keep him from putting it on the block. He wouldn't have to look far to find some buyers.
We returned home to the disaster area that this house was when we left it ... why didn't the cleaning fairies descend upon us in our hour of need .... and back to all the other regular life that we left behind. Except it isn't regular life, and all the funeral photo montages are still at the front door, and all of the thank-you cards still to do and the lawyer to visit and the fallout from that to deal with. Nothing negative, just many things to do.
In some respects, being unemployed at this time isn't such a bad thing. It gives me time to offer other people some help, and gives me time to think about what I'd like to keep doing as the time continues to roll along. I am feeling some motivation to consider another career if nothing happens with the job that I'm waiting to hear about (it's not like the region is littered with academic postings, and the longer I'm away the less I want to go back) then I've got some ideas of what I'd like to do.
What I don't want to do is clean up after mice! Besides coming home to a messy house, I find that we have new tenants, and they are highly annoying. I like creatures that live in the wild, and in the wild I leave them alone. I don't kill bugs outside unless they bite me, and I don't bug the squirrels or any other creatures. Inside my house it's another matter: things that are not humans or domesticated animals that are in my abode will be mortified at my earliest convenience if not sooner. (Very long aside: When I was an undergrad I took a course in Radiotracer Methodology, and the students in the course were from the three major areas of science: biology, chemistry and physics. Each lab team of three had one of each scientist, so that when we had to do things with animals or animal parts, the biologist would be in charge, the chemist was in charge of making solutions of the correct concentrations and the physicist was in charge of supergeekdom. We had to inject a rat with iodine-131 and then dissect it and find where the tracer had gone -- three guesses -- but prior to dissection the instruction in the lab manual was: Mortify the rat. The biologist, a lovely girl named Karen, had mortified several rats in her time, and injected the thing with whatever stuff it was that would send the little ratty to rat heaven. There were two repercussions to this, one being that a twisted mind would think of something else when told to mortify a rat--perhaps something along the lines of choke the chicken--and the second being that I had never considered the word mortify in that way before. Generally we refrain from the Middle English usage of words and tend toward the modern, being told all the time that language is a fluid thing, that we shouldn't hold on to previous definitions of words, the times, they are a'changin' after all. Still, I have retained a fascination for the use of the word mortify in such a manner, especially in a lab manual.)
I do not want the mousie in the house and thus a trap has been set, and I am waiting for the snap. I spent all day yesterday cleaning cupboards and throwing out food that the mousie might have touched, and washing everything down with a strong antiseptic solution, and generally being very put out and disgusted. By the end of the day I was really angry. I had a garden full of ripe red tomatoes after all, waiting to become tomato sauce, and lots and lots of things to do that were not cleaning cupboards.
So now I'm a day behind with everything, although my cupboards are now totally spotless. Mousie was there in the night but didn't trip the trap we had set, because we made it too easy for her. She will not be so successful with the next trap though, because I rigged it differently and she won't be able to get the stuff off it without a tug or other movement. I am not fond of the mousie and do not want to clean up after her any more, ever. We can't hear her in the walls or anything like that, so I don't know where she's living right now. With luck, she'll not be living there for long.
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