Mickey 4.0

So I'm sitting here watching a movie, and Medley goes crazy, and starts head-butting (or so it seems) the baseboard heater again.

Yep, same old story: she comes out with a mouse.

This makes for mouse #4, coming to the close of my first year in this apartment. I'm not too content with that statistic: I'm not particularly happy with averaging one mouse every three months. I suppose at least if the cat was killing them, I could live with that.

But she's not. Truth be told, I really want to nickname her Deadly Medley, but she's just not living up to that label.

As was the case last time, she decided that the mouse was going to be her new toy. She dropped it in the middle of the floor and started batting it around. At least this time I was coherent enough that I ran to the kitchen to find something to trap the thing under. First I grabbed the lid to a sauce pan, and then paused, looked at it, and thought "Ewww! Gross!" I put it down, grabbed a coffee can instead, and popped back into the other room.

Medley was still playing. I tried to get her to drop the mouse in a place where I could scoop it up. Instead she dropped it next to my dresser, and it scurried underneath, where it got cornered between a storage bin and the wall, and it just sat there. I retrieved a pair of pliers from a drawer. Holding Medley back with one hand, I used the pliers to pick the mouse up by the tail, dropped him into the can and closed the lid. I cut a couple little air holes in it with a utility knife.

But now what? Am I supposed ot kill it? Do I release it, set it free to continue to infest the city? It is a pest, right? Not like I can keep it as a pet. But how do I dispose of it? And how do I get to my coffee with the mouse in there? (Okay, I'm kidding about that last thing.)

But really, what do I do?

Medley: 2, Mice: 1

It was a post-party morning at my place in Harlem, and this little story demonstrates just how incapacitated I was after the guests left after 1 AM.

After some very basic cleaning up, and switching the futon back into bed mode, I laid down "for just a minute" I told myself. I woke up at 4 AM, still loaded. I hobbled to the bathroom, peeled off the contacts, brushed my teeth, undressed and went back to sleep after downing a bottle of water.

The bottle of water was too little too late, I must report, and restless hangover sleep ensued. At about half six, Medley awakened me with a start; she was banging away in the corner, under the baseboard heater. My head was pounding. Everything for the two minutes following seemed to happen in slow motion.

Wham! Wham! She was throwing herself into the heater. I'd only seen her do this with such intensity once before. This was a different part of the apartment, but like the first time, she was acting much too violently for her to be just batting around one of her toys.

Christ, my throbbing brain thought. Not again.

But sure enough, she emerged with something that looked like one of her toy foam balls in her mouth, but even without my glasses on I could tell it had a tail.

I need to get up, I told myself, lying on my side, watching as she trotted heroically toward the foot of the futon. But my body wouldn't budge.

Please, god, don't let her bring a mouse corpse to me in bed. I wouldn't put it past her. Maybe she'll actually eat this one, I hoped.

She paused in the middle of the room. I concocted a plan: if she dropped the carcass, I could eventually pry my aching skull off the pillow, grab a napkin from the nearby table, pick it up and drop it in the garbage. Dead mouse in trash until morning wasn't such a disgusting idea for now, as long as I could get back to bed for recovery. I thought it was a good plan, one that I could manage, even in my current state. Medley complied with her end of the deal and dropped the mouse. The mouse, unfortunately, wouldn't buy into it. The mouse wasn't dead.

Mickey hit the floor and bounced as if made of that space-age superball rubber material, and Medley shot after it. I couldn't move. Medley pursued the vermin as it shot out of site into the bathroom. I heard scrambling; a BANG! against the bathtub, and then, nothing. I thought I really need to get up and take care of this, not even knowing who won in Medley vs. Mickey, round two.

Apparently Medley did. She came trotting out, victorious, and sat under the dining table, mouse tail sticking out off to the right side of her face like half of a big mustache, or in this case, mousetache.

Through all this, my skull was pounding. Ok, so I really need to get up. But brain... so heavy. Head... can't lift it. Only know horizontal. Just need to get up! I figured at least this time she would've killed the mouse. She had done it before, right? But again, I was dead wrong. Oh shit.

She dropped the body and again it sprang to life. It scurried away to the right, under the table, towards a corner, and discovering it had no place to go, turned right again towards my futon. Then for what ever reason, it made another right, so that it basically did a circle around the cat as she tried to pursue it. By the time she wheeled around, the mouse was headed back to the same corner that Medley extracted it from minutes ago. But Medley got a swat in, connected, and batted it towards the kitchen.

No, not the kitchen, I thought, but it was too late. Mickey's trajectory was perfect, and he found refuge in the fortress known as Gap-Under-the-Refrigerator. Medley peered around the large appliance for a while, and realised that the mouse had won not only this round, but for the moment, the battle. She climbed onto her blanket next to me. I reached over and petted her a bit, cursed myself for doing nothing, and fell back to sleep.

This is my and Medley's third mouse. I blogged about the first one in September. The second one was laying dead on the floor when I returned from Montreal a month ago, apparently not a suitable opponent for the cat.

This episode was kind of surreal and bizarre to watch. While I may have done nothing, it all happened so fast that I wonder what I could've done if I had in fact been able-bodied anyway. Oh well. My ideal hope is that this one was injured and crawled out of the apartment to die somewhere. In the meantime, I just hope it didn't get injured and die in the apartment somewhere, because rotting-mouse-corpse smell isn't the best for entertaining guests. It doesn't go well with chicken, anyway. I'll move the fridge tonight to see if I find anything.

Oh yeah, and my hangover subsided enough that I finally got out of bed at 1 PM. Yuck.

More about Medley

I don't have much to say today, so I thought I'd post about Medley. Here's a photo:



Medley is the only one on my blog who doesn't go under an alias of some sort. She doesn't try to hide who she is. A fine domestic shorthair; a tortie (tortoise shell) in colouring. Note the mottled orange on black. I swear she's got the blood of a tiger running through those viens!

I've had Medley for almost three years now. I had made a new year's resolution in 2004 to get a cat (I try to make three fairly manageable resolutions each year, but I'll save that discussion for another post). I got her from a shelter in West Orange, NJ on January 9th. Apparently, during the previous September, there was a guy in a supermarket parking lot with a box of four kittens, trying to give them away, and a woman from the local shelter picked them all up. At the shelter, they were named Peace, Hope, Faith and Charity (I know -- puke!). They all looked pretty much the same, they were all torties and subsequently were all females. I picked up Faith at first, but she was squirmy and didn't want me to hold her. Charity was just cool as a cucumber, laying down and kickin' back in the cage. I picked her up and she purred when I held her. That was good enough for me.

It took me two days to come up with a name for her. I wanted something to reflect her patchy colouring. An online thesaurus brought me loads of words, among them "mosiac," "puzzle," "mixture," and "medley." And that was that.

Anyway, she's been protecting me against rodents, bugs, and other vermin ever since. Note how, even in her seemingly relaxed state, her claws protrude slightly, ready to extend in defense or attack mode. Truly, she is a powerful force to be reckoned with in the apartment!

And c'mon - you have to admit she's also really cute!

Medley the Mighty.

Medley's proved that she's worth her weight in gold. Mind you, if that were really true, I'd had taken all twelve pounds of her to the jeweler, got the cash, and picked up another, albeit lazier cat from a shelter. Unless she was laying golden eggs. I'm cold-hearted, but not stupid.

As it is, Medley actually demonstrated her worth to me back in July, on the first morning in the new apartment. Stepping out of the shower, she had set down a big cockroach offering on the floor in front of me. Nice. I imagined that had it been a mouse, Medley would have killed it quickly. But with all that cockroach body armor, of course the thing was still alive, and each time she'd put it down it would try to scurry away, and she'd pounce on it again. Finally, I got the Raid and something with which to grab it, executed the thing, and flushed it away.

Thankfully, I haven't had many pests since. That is, until last night. It was about 1:30 AM and I was on the computer when I heard a BANG! over in the corner of the apartment. Medley was hammering away at the baseboard heater. I figured she was just playing extra-violently with one of her toys, and ignored it. A few seconds later, BANG! again!, and I got up thinking this is getting a little to violent to be just a toy. She was way to serious now. And I was right. She trotted over with a mouthful of prey and I though Man, not another roach. But I was wrong. She dropped it in front of me.

I know of a few other people that have had mice in New York, like her, him, and her. The process usually involves seeing a mouse or evidence of, running out to get a trap, trapping said mouse at one point over the next couple of days, and thus ridding said mouse from apartment, usually with terrible guilt involved over contributing to the death of another mammal. I guess as human-mammals, we filled our quota long ago with killing, and now I feel kinda bad if I have to kill other types of animals -- mammals particularly. However, in the natural scheme of things, cat killing mouse somehow seems okay with me, and adding this third party (cat) to the equation to rid me of any potential guilt is a pretty good solution. And so it was that Medley dropped in front of me a still-twitching mouse, barely still in one piece. The only thing I could think was: Ick, why can't you just eat it, like cats are supposed to?

Oh well. I did appreciate the fact that I didn't have to fret over having a rodent in my apartment. I cleaned the mouse blood and mouse innards off the floor, put the dead vermin in a plastic bag, and threw it outside in the garbage. When I came inside, I fed Medley, brushed her a bit, and went to bed. Medley sleeps on the left side, by the way.

Lead Paint, Dead Bolts, and Beer Gardens

I ran this morning and caught part of the Long Training Run in Central Park. I saw lots of Flyers, but I don't think many saw me. In fact one almost spit on me, so I'd really like to think she didn't see me. It's a weird thing - being injured, I'm tending to wear grey a lot and try to not be noticed.

I'd have loved to have been able to stick around and cheer on the runners, but I had to get back to the apartment. Today our building is having a lead paint inspection between 9 and 5 PM. I'm not sure why this is necessary. . . doees anyone use lead paint anymore? Supposedly, this is a one time thing, and the inspectors need access to the suites.

That being the case, Medley's been put in solitary confinement. I smuggled her out of the building and back to my old apartment, which is sitting empty for the month. I feel a little guilty about this, but being an illegal alien in the building, she can deal with being alone in an empty room for a day. It's not like I'm making her sleep in her own feces or anything. I did put her litter box out with her food. She didn't like the subway ride, though, which is why I feel a tad guilty about carting her back to the old place.

Returning from my aforementioned run, I met Crazy-lady-down-the-hall again. She was friendly this time, asked me how I liked the building, and told me that it was a good building except for the drug dealer that lived across from me. She told me to make sure I complain to the management company about her, but I'm really not sure how to do that ("Hi, the chick across the hall sells drugs and I'd like to complain that she charges too much."). Crazy then was nice enough to reintroduce herself to me, and asked my name again. I told her and she responded with a smile: "Oh, just like my brother." This is a sharp contrast to her calling me "white-boy" the other day and telling me I don't belong there, but then, in her defence, she's crazy.

While Lead-paint-guy was usng his geiger-counter-like device to check my apartment, I installed a new deadbolt on my door. Ted, who lived in the apartment before, had one on the door but the management company removed it when he moved out. I guessed that they must not have had a key to that lock, and removed it accordingly. The lock I bought was similar to the previous one, but apparently a slightly different model or make. I was able to use some of the same holes in the door and the jamb, but had to drill others. Both Lead-paint-guy and Crazy-lady-down-the-hall, who came out while I was drilling through my door, were in awe, and couldn't believe that I was attempting to install this monumental security device in my apartment. Seeing that I was all for security devices, Crazy actually said "It's so good to have you here." Then she just kept asking me questions about what I did ("Are you a locksmith?") and how I learned to do what I was doing with locks. She just gave me the creeps, so while I was putting the guard plate on, I pretended that I needed to go back inside to check the other side of the lock, and shut the door with her still standing there. Lead-paint-guy was just as amazed by the whole locksmithing process, but I found his comments far less irritating, probably because I was also asking him about lead paint and the "gun" he was figuratively shooting at my walls.

Last night I had a little backyard bbq and drinks with a running club friend of mine whom I hadn't seen in a while. He's the only guy I know in Manhattan with a real backyard. We talked work, (his) grad school, running (or lack thereof for both of us), (my) frustrations with the dating scene, and general gossip and guy-stuff.

The previous evening I went to one of my favourite NYC venues, Bohemian Hall, with my coworkers. Had a great time, as usual. As far as being a landscape architect and, well, a lover of beer goes, there's no place more fitting then a beer garden. One of my coworkers invited a friend that she wanted to set me up with. Upon the woman's arrival, it became duly apparent that my coworker really has no clue what my preferences are as far as women are concerned, and will thus be relinquished of her setting-up priveleges. That is, unless her future descriptions of possible women to set me up with come with adjectives like "amazing", "fabulous", or "sexiest woman on earth". Because then we'd probably make a good couple, no? Hee.