Disadvent and Disepiphany 2
Jan. 15th, 2025 09:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraII. The Mouse
We got home from California and discovered that a mouse had left Mouse Evidence on my bed, meaning that in addition to washing all of the bedding and pillows (adding seven loads of laundry to the six or seven loads of trip laundry and just-before-we-left laundry I already had to do that week) I had to pull absolutely everything out from under/around the bed to see whether, for instance, mice were nesting in the giant stuffed-animal brontosaurus banished there for its leaking of styrofoam pellets. (They were not.)
My room is also the storage room/living room overflow so the stuff I pulled out completely filled the living room. I hadn't planned to go through all of that stuff for disepiphany, but thanks to the mouse, there I was. And there was so much random stuff in there. A bag of old Amazon padded mailers. A bag of flattened boxes from Lego kits. A bag of the frames left when you punch out cardboard board game pieces, which I had thought we might use in some craft project. (Which we did used to use in craft projects, occasionally, five or ten years ago, but are now some years past the point where anyone really wants to fingerpaint different colors in the different hexagons or build a doll gazebo.) Quite a bit of it could be designated for recycling, although I am still trying to actually get it all put out for recycling since our regular recycling nearly fills up the can we use every week. We are trying out the extra paid recycling program we can buy into through our compost service, although we are paying what feels like a ridiculous amount to recycle one bag of some other bags and bubble wrap (it feels forbidden to get rid of bubble wrap but I had like three bags of it? maybe I could get by with two?) so I don't think we'll want to do that very often. (I don't mind having done it once, it supports the service and lots of things are worth trying once...)
There were also a bunch of boxes of stuff back there like dollhouse parts and wooden toy building blocks that we do want kept long-term but nobody needs access to short-term, that I was able to offsite to the storage unit. The storage unit is not really *for* that, it is for emptying the basement so we can address the basement problem, but if I wasn't emptying the basement I might have considered moving those things down *into* the basement, and if they had been there already, then they would have been leaving for the storage unit, so, really, it was just a different order of events, right? That's my excuse anyways. And it turned out to be really nice to have done that cleaning and reorganization of the space when Jh got covid, we immediately went into "the isolation of all from all" mode, and I more or less spent the next week living in there when I wasn't actively cooking/cleaning while masked in the kitchen (minus some use of the living room while Q was at school). Maximum isolation seems to have worked, in that none of the rest of us had caught it as of Jh getting her second negative test yesterday morning, so I guess the mouse may have had a net positive contribution to the health of the household, by kicking off events that supported my isolation?
(And it's probably not terrible to wash that duvet once a millenium or so, although the day I took it and the mattress pad to the laundromat to use the big machines, parked as close as I could, walked around the corner to the laundromat, confirmed that the big machines were all available and there was only one guy in there with laundry already in progress in another machine, walked back around the corner, and struggled back to the laundromat with the duvet and mattress pad, only to find a new guy putting, like, socks and underwear into two out of the three big washers, was a little frustrating. (I lugged everything back to the car and drove to a different, completely empty laundromat, where I managed to park right in front via the best parallel-parking job I've pulled off in years, so, you know, all was well, past that moment of "where did you even appear from sir and why did it have to be now".))
We got home from California and discovered that a mouse had left Mouse Evidence on my bed, meaning that in addition to washing all of the bedding and pillows (adding seven loads of laundry to the six or seven loads of trip laundry and just-before-we-left laundry I already had to do that week) I had to pull absolutely everything out from under/around the bed to see whether, for instance, mice were nesting in the giant stuffed-animal brontosaurus banished there for its leaking of styrofoam pellets. (They were not.)
My room is also the storage room/living room overflow so the stuff I pulled out completely filled the living room. I hadn't planned to go through all of that stuff for disepiphany, but thanks to the mouse, there I was. And there was so much random stuff in there. A bag of old Amazon padded mailers. A bag of flattened boxes from Lego kits. A bag of the frames left when you punch out cardboard board game pieces, which I had thought we might use in some craft project. (Which we did used to use in craft projects, occasionally, five or ten years ago, but are now some years past the point where anyone really wants to fingerpaint different colors in the different hexagons or build a doll gazebo.) Quite a bit of it could be designated for recycling, although I am still trying to actually get it all put out for recycling since our regular recycling nearly fills up the can we use every week. We are trying out the extra paid recycling program we can buy into through our compost service, although we are paying what feels like a ridiculous amount to recycle one bag of some other bags and bubble wrap (it feels forbidden to get rid of bubble wrap but I had like three bags of it? maybe I could get by with two?) so I don't think we'll want to do that very often. (I don't mind having done it once, it supports the service and lots of things are worth trying once...)
There were also a bunch of boxes of stuff back there like dollhouse parts and wooden toy building blocks that we do want kept long-term but nobody needs access to short-term, that I was able to offsite to the storage unit. The storage unit is not really *for* that, it is for emptying the basement so we can address the basement problem, but if I wasn't emptying the basement I might have considered moving those things down *into* the basement, and if they had been there already, then they would have been leaving for the storage unit, so, really, it was just a different order of events, right? That's my excuse anyways. And it turned out to be really nice to have done that cleaning and reorganization of the space when Jh got covid, we immediately went into "the isolation of all from all" mode, and I more or less spent the next week living in there when I wasn't actively cooking/cleaning while masked in the kitchen (minus some use of the living room while Q was at school). Maximum isolation seems to have worked, in that none of the rest of us had caught it as of Jh getting her second negative test yesterday morning, so I guess the mouse may have had a net positive contribution to the health of the household, by kicking off events that supported my isolation?
(And it's probably not terrible to wash that duvet once a millenium or so, although the day I took it and the mattress pad to the laundromat to use the big machines, parked as close as I could, walked around the corner to the laundromat, confirmed that the big machines were all available and there was only one guy in there with laundry already in progress in another machine, walked back around the corner, and struggled back to the laundromat with the duvet and mattress pad, only to find a new guy putting, like, socks and underwear into two out of the three big washers, was a little frustrating. (I lugged everything back to the car and drove to a different, completely empty laundromat, where I managed to park right in front via the best parallel-parking job I've pulled off in years, so, you know, all was well, past that moment of "where did you even appear from sir and why did it have to be now".))
