This is my 250th post, and there is a mouse living in my car.

Let me repeat: THERE IS A MOUSE. LIVING. IN MY CAR. Is that both horrifying and disgusting? Yep, that’s what I was afraid of.

There is a mouse living in my car. And this dirty, disgusting little imposing mouse has a squeaky clean mouth (sorry for the pun).

I know both these things because this morning, when Jim and I were commuting to work, I reached into a little coin tray where I keep change and gum in my car for a stick of delicious Orbitz gum, and when I pulled out a stick, it had teeny tiny little bites taken out of it.

A goddamn MOUSE broke into my goddamn CAR and ate my goddamn ORBITZ. For the record, this did not give me a good clean feeling no matter what, as advertised.

“Oh…my…god…” I held one of the evidential sticks out to Jim, while not at all maintaining the 10 and 2 position with my hands on the wheel and only partially paying attention to the road.

“Looks like you have a mouse,” he said with utter disgust. “Eeew.” (Yes, Jim said “eew”. Priceless.)

“I do not have a mouse! There just IS a mouse! How did he even get IN here?”

I was immediately indignant. Nevermind that I have gone though periods where I could have been mistaken for living in my car, having someone bear witness to the fact that there was/is/had been a mouse living in there was a thousand times worse. Because mice are, well, icky. And I have it on good authority that mice only like really disgusting, dirty places. So that meant, in my head, that “my” mouse said something not at all flattering about me and my ability to maintain a car.

Just after I processed that thought, shaking my head and muttering, the next terrible one hit me:

“Oh shit! Do you think he’s still in here?!”

(As you can imagine, I was paying even less attention to my free right turn and the 5 key rules for safely operating a vehicle while processing this thought than I was before, because I was at that moment increasingly certain that there was a mouse – no, MANY mice, maybe hundreds – scurrying around under my seat, next to my feet, across my headrest, along the backseat. I was utterly convinced that they were everywhere.)

I couldn’t get us parked and out of the car fast enough. I scrambled to the elevator, imagining a torrent of rodents racing frantically behind me, worked to ditch the heebie jeebies and formulated my Rodent War battle plan:

1. Get car detailed, by a professional. Do not opt for the cheapie where they just vaccum your carpet, bite the bullet and request the full-on shampoo treatment, complete with bonus search for dead, dying or (eeew eeew eeew) alive rodents.

2. Lay a food booby-trap shortly after detail mission is complete.

2.a. At first sign of teethmarks, purchase 6 mousetraps – the kind that catch and squish the mice. (NOTE: Do not poison, as you have heard too many stories about people poisoning car-mice and then suffering through dead-mouse scent for weeks when they’re unable to find the body).

2.b. Have a nice strong drink. Consider setting up a hidden night-vision motion-detection camera with which to catch the mice in the act and determine their mode of entry.

2.c. Have another drink and reconsider motion-camera tactic, as it sounds like a lot of work.

3. Rely on the traps to catch and squish the mice.

3.a. Throw bodies away as needed, screeching "eeeeeEEEEEEWWWWWWWW!" the whole way to the garbage can.

4. Repeat as necessary until they wave the white flag or someone gives me a better idea.

5. Go shopping.

I do anticipate some problems. For one, I apparently live in the rodent capital of the universe. Mice have been a problem for some of my neighbors and even the previous renters of the house I currently live in (which, for the record, is VERY CLEAN AT ALL TIMES) and is so far free of mouse-sightings.

Secondly, mice breed like rabbits. Or cockroaches. Or something. I think they can have like a hundred babies in 10 minutes flat. Which means I may have to dip into the 401K to afford all the mousetraps this war may require.

Third, the irony: I have a cat, but she has no claws and lives indoors and poops in a little sandbox and owns a pink bedazzled shirt with the word "bitch" on it.

Finally, I don’t like killing things.

This is perhaps my biggest weakness as a person. It’s so GIRLY it’s unforgivable. I don’t even kill spiders – I make my cat do that (you don’t need claws to kill spiders). Hell, I go fishing and am happy to snag the fish and reel them up, but you will never get me to be the person with the bat who whacks that poor fish on the head to kill it. Nope, I’d rather put it in the cooler and know it’s slowly, painfully dying than just end it myself. I used to pluck and clean like 50 chickens every spring with my family growing up and I loved looking at all the guts, but I could NEVER handle that axe. So IF I get to step 2 and have to buy the horrible old fashioned mousetraps and I actually catch a mouse and find it in the trap the next day, squished and dead or worse—squished and not yet dead, I’m in trouble. Because there is NO WAY I’ll be able to a) open the door to the car in order to b) pick up and dispose of that trap.

Which may mean I’ll have to just give up and turn the car over to the mice and start jogging to work.

Wish me luck. And please, if you have any advice, I’m all ears. But not Mickey ears, because he’s the Enemy.

This is not a poop joke...

But it could be.

Click here for a seriously unbelievable story including a toilet seat, a 2 year relationship, and the word "atrophy".

Work safe... I promise.

Five blades or die.

I apologize for being so damn lazy lately, it's just that I've been altogether uninspired, super busy at work, and totally lacking creative juices (unless you consider a return to crock-pot cooking creative...). And it's not that I'm even that short on interesting stuff happening in my life. I mean, I've had a roommate go completely off her pogo stick, I've gone to (and drank black russians after) a funeral with my totally insane family, and my neighbor caught me watching TV while painting my nails, fully naked. These are all good stories, or at least moderately entertaining, but I've just got zero capacity to tell them at the moment.

So sit tight. But in the meantime, and in the interest of keeping you even somewhat entertained, I encourage you to read my favorite Onion post of all time: click here.

It's old, but every time I go back to it I find myself hysterical.

I mean, five blades? Five blades? C'mon. That's just crazy.

I've done a lot of stupid things while drunk...

Including but not limited to:

- initiating a giant cake fight in a house that wasn't mine, with cake that wasn't mine
- missing the cup and instead pouring a drink into a friend's lap
- getting lost on a beach
- sending mass-texts to everyone I know and then not remembering the next day
- drunk-dialing (shocker, I know)
- drunk-MySpacing (worse, I assure you)
- bar-fighting (that's a really good story, actually)
- locking myself out of my house
- ordering $100 bottles of wine when what I really needed was gatorade and a cheeseburger
- buying a shirt of a large black man's back
- dancing with a transient
- etc.

...but I've never threatened to blow up a city with a TV remote.

And that's something.

Happy Friday!

Can I be your pet?

Click here for the article this post relates to.

I think I'm a pretty open minded individual, but I gotta admit, this makes me a little uncomfortable. Either this girl is completely diabolical and about as lazy as a couch, having worked out a way to, like, never have to do anything of any substance again, or she's disturbed.

I mean, it doesn't sound so bad if you are the laziest individual on earth - she gets to basically loll around all day, eating and making waste and sleeping and whatever in her house. She doesn't have to hold a job or do chores or cook or run errands... she's a completely unproductive member of a household, just like a cat.

But the tradeoff is she can't leave the house without her significant other, and if she does leave the house with him, she has to wear a collar and a leash.

Huh.

First, no thanks.
Second, how long can this possibly last? I mean, at some point, isn't the gimmick going to be over and isn't this guy going to want a significant other he can take to an "off-leash" company Christmas party? And isn't she at some point gonna be like "Hey, dude, I don't like meatloaf. I'm making a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich, and that's that!"?

i can has cheezburger?

I found this site today on the random recommendation of a business associate and within moments of discovering it, it was up on the top bar of my browser as a bookmarked and much-loved site.

That position is reserved for very few sites, as space there is limited (I have probably 100 total bookmarks in my list, but only about 10-12 can fit as icons in the top bar of my browser). Among the best are wired.com, a couple industry blogs I monitor closely, Techcrunch, a link to my 401k planning site, 2 internal company links, a stock photo site for my creative work, theonion.com and, now, i can has cheezburger.

I don't know what it is, the anthropromorphizing of animals just gets me every time. Esepcially when they are animals who pronounce things funny, have a poor grasp of the english language, and are so completely self-obsessed as these ones.

And it's like a fun little treat -- you can check it 5 times a day and usually there's a new post every time! I might trade in my chocolate fix for cheezburger.

(by the way, the above image is the one I created of Akeelah -- watch for it to appear on the site!)

resolutions? maybe next year...

I always make a good effort at resolutions at the beginning of a new year. There is something about them that appeals to me, to my idealism. I like the thought of looking at your life, promising to make changes, and having a timeline in which to see those changes take place (a year, to be precise).

But the follow through is where I find myself occasionally lacking. Not always -- I often make great headway on a number of my resolutions -- but generally speaking, resolving has actually turned out to be more of a "thinking out loud about how I would like to be if I had any will power whatsoever, then forgetting about it, renting a movie, and eating two bags of microwave popcorn in one sitting."

So much for idealism.

But it's worked out so far; 2007 was one for the books:

I removed myself, once and for all, from a bad relationship. I nurtured new relationships and some old ones, too. I saw my mother through a nasty divorce. I lost, then regained my sense of family. I fell in love -- the real kind. I skydived. I challenged myself. I hired employees (yes, this girl is someone's boss. Isn't that scary?).

I went on a road trip. I went fishing. I had surgery. I recovered. I surprised myself. I accidentally ate pot cookies (that's a whole 'nother story).

I got a raise, reconnected with old friends, and made new ones.

I figured out what I stand for, I think.

I got more patient, less confrontational, and stopped yelling so much.

I learned how to negotiate.

I folded my clothes after they were done drying much more frequently. I did not run out of gas one time.

I performed random acts of kindness. I helped friends in need. I got more comfortable being a friend in need, too.

And I realized for the umpteenth time that nothing's easy, and I know even less than I thought I did, and that sometimes people aren't who they say they are, but sometimes they are.

Oh, and I discovered that one should not drive around with expired tabs, that alternators are easily replaced by car-savvy friends, and that weiner dogs and small cats have the same size poo.

And that no matter what, one should always say yes to topless pools in Vegas and no to eating chips in the shower.

Maybe I don't need resolutions after all.