Born Free

At 5:30 one night I came home from work to find two of my roommates (there are 7 of us total in the house I'm living in) standing on the couch screaming and pointing. This is only slightly unusual so I asked them what was going on. More screaming in high pitches only dogs can hear followed, but I was able to decipher one word..."mouse." I laughed and wondered why on earth two grown females would be scared of a little mouse. A horrible tale of a demon attack mouse followed. While I was standing there the little thing ran out of the living room and into the kitchen. More screaming, more high pitches and pleas for help. So I went downstairs and got the broom. I figured I'd just sweep the thing outside..no big deal. This however proved harder than I originally thought because I had to sweep the mouse down a few stairs first and then out the back door. My roommates moved from the couches to standing on chairs in the kitchen cheering me on. I tried to guide the mouse to freedom using two different styles of manuevering...one was the croquet method...where you scoot the mouse as far as possible across the floor to the door...and the hurling method (you know the olympic ice sport) where you guide the mouse from the front to the place where you want it. After about 30 minutes of this I was finally able to set the mouse free, and there was much rejoicing in the house. About an hour later my other roommate came home. She went into her room and then about ten minutes later came out and asked, "Hey have you guys seen Penny?" All of us wondered who Penny was. "My new mouse. " You see my roommate has a unique affinity to rodents and her rat had died a few weeks prior and apparently she had just bought a new mouse that morning. Good thing my roommate has a sense of humor...we bought her a new mouse upon the condition that she make sure the cage is escape proof....and we promised not to play croquet with the new one.

Chair Suicide

So I had a little incident last night...I was outside talking on my cell phone...I was talking outside because I live in a dungeon/nuclear bomb shelter that gets absolutely no reception...just sitting on my "front porch"...maybe I should explain what Utah deems a front porch....its a concrete slab about 30 cm by 1 yard with what can only be described as football turf covering it...I think the Barbie dreamhouse had a bigger porch than we do (my roommates and I)...anyway I'm sitting in one of those camp chairs talking away when suddenly my chair decides it can't take being stuck on this poor excuse for a forest and throws itself down the stairs....now these aren't your regular stairs I think they were made out of very sharp metal and then covered with spikes and this wasn't a nice fall by any means...you know the type where you can catch yourself and then play it off as if you meant to do that...like all of a sudden you had the overwhelming desire to make sure the floor of the porch really was there or something...anyway as I'm flying through the air...actually it was more like tumbling down the three stairs I'm thinking to myself...Ow this hurts. Now I know what you're all thinking...it was only three stairs right...it couldn't have been all that bad...but remember the sharp metal and spikes so falling down those stairs was the equivilent of falling about two stories. So I get up, brush myself off, and off course look around to see if anybody had seen the what could only have been a hilarious sight. Nobody was there...so I picked up the cell phone and started talking again like nothing happened....but this time I just sat in the grass...it was a lot safer.