There’s a Mouse in the House

I was minding my own business.

Well, not really. 

I was in the middle of frenzied dinner preparations, pots boiling on four out of five burners. I opened the drawer next to the stovetop to pull out an oven mitt.

The drawer was full of dog food.

I took a quick, giant, and entirely horrified step back. I may have screamed. When the rest of the family saw, we all had a laugh. Surely one of us was suffering a mental break or some sort of dog feeding malfunction. I immediately worried about myself. Was my mental state quite all right?

My daughter had the presence of mind to consult the Internet. She arrived at the conclusion that we had a mouse.

Full disclosure, we’d seen a mouse in our basement a few months before. Our method of removing that mouse clearly left something to be desired. Our strategy was to leave the garage door open on a mild fall day and assume that the mouse went back out again. We don’t have mouse smarts as you’ll see as this story progresses.

After accepting that the garage mouse had become a house mouse, I undertook to procure a trap. I couldn’t bring myself to get one of those lethal traps though. The thought of seeing the sweet mouse’s skull crushed or scraping its writhing body from a glue trap just didn’t sit well. So I bought a two pack of humane traps from Amazon.

We lived with the mouse for several days until we had the right circumstances (motivation, flexible morning plans for the release, ample time to steel our emotions for the task) to catch him. I put the dog food away at night and was able to keep my pot holder drawer free of its mouse hoard.

We captured our guest on a Friday night and released him into the cold of a below average temperature Saturday morning. My husband took him to the edge of our yard and gave permission for the mouse to take up residence in my daughter's old playhouse.

Mice aren’t highly suggestible as it turns out.

On a windy night in February, I saw something run from the basement door into the kitchen. My husband said, oh no, the mouse couldn’t be back. Your eyes are playing tricks on you. And for the second mouse related time, I wondered if I was quite well.

Early March found me back at the stove. Every night I’m at the stove, but apparently, I don’t always open the pot holder drawer to the fullest. I reached in to grab an oven mitt and again found a pile of dog food.

“Son of a b—,” I yelled.

This time, the drawer was also full of poo.

That night we trapped our little buddy again. On an unseasonably cold March morning, we released him at a park three miles away. It was nine degrees.

This rodent revival hit on laundry day. It seems the mouse was testing out a new spot in the clothes hamper. Unfortunately, I didn’t discover this until I’d unwittingly dumped several kibbles into the washer. It took three loads to work the dog food through the system.

The next weekend, our furnace stopped working. More accurately, it spent Saturday morning working really hard. The fan blew full blast and I said, something isn't right. My husband agreed with me and spent a good amount of time trying to diagnose the problem. We had plans to go see Captain Marvel at a far away theater that has open captioned shows, so we left our heatless house and did that. By Sunday the furnace wouldn't run at all.

The service tech came to us mid-morning on Monday. Within minutes he'd located the problem, a baby mouse in the condensate drain. Not just in the drain pipe, but several feet up in the drain pipe having navigated two bends in the 1" diameter pipe that leads to nowhere a mouse should want to go.

"I've never seen that one before!" said the tech.

We trapped three more mice after the furnace incident. Idiotically, we drove them to the park and released them. So they could be with their friends.

I’ve no one to blame for this but myself but you should know it’s been hard on me. Cold nights without heat and finding kibbles in odd areas of my kitchen. I’m fairly certain the mouse stashed kibbles in pants pockets, an added bonus for me to discover in a few months. 

I do not look forward to that.

Pinterest Creates a Deodorant Dilemma

I was in sixth grade when I started using deodorant and from the word go, I used way too much. My family had gone over the hill to feed stale bread to the fish in our pond on a summer day. I was hauling myself back up near my mom when she exclaimed, “you stink!” This prompted the rest of the family to have a sniff. My father, never one for subtlety, roared about my B.O. His laughter followed me as I beat a path to the shower.

In those days, I wore a Milwaukee brace to treat scoliosis. Hygiene was complicated by the leather, metal, and plastic casing around my torso. I relied heavily on the Ban roll-on that mom kept in the house. It turned out I was a profuse sweater though and I soon switched to powder fresh solid, applying it heavily three or four times a day.

I caked on so much antiperspirant that it would congeal into little white balls that looked like bunches of grapes growing in my pits. Layer after layer of product went on and did nothing to stymie the sweat.

My seventh-grade history teacher went on a riff one day about the dangers of aluminum. We’re all going to have Alzheimer’s from our deodorant he said. His warning stuck with me and as I swiped or sometimes sprayed, I’d think how an elderly me would pay for it someday. But I didn’t stop.

Fast forward nearly thirty years and it’s not Alzheimer’s but a more credible worry about breast cancer and a closet full of shirts with pits stained powdery white. The planet is dying and I’ve personally populated landfills with empty pomegranate Dove deodorant sticks. In early 2019, I swiped the last bits of a stick and decided not to buy any more.

But I'm still a stinky girl.

I took to Pinterest for a solution and quickly found a homemade recipe sure to curb any unwanted APO. I measured and mixed just four ingredients and congratulated myself on saving the earth.

My mixture cooled and it didn't look like the Pinterest picture. It wasn't the consistency described in the post. In fact, my homemade deo seemed to have separated. Undeterred, I smoothed the top layer into my pits and went on about life.

And I didn't stink for weeks. Even better, without the constant reapplication of powdery solids that transferred to my clothes, most of the white pit stains washed out. I was sporting a wardrobe that looked nearly new.

Eventually, I worked my way down through that top layer and found that I couldn't scrape out enough to paste my pits. I took my mini ball jar back to the kitchen and hacked out chunks with a butter knife.

Now I had these cakes of solid deodorant that I could apply much like a storebought product but without the plastic holder. 

I was super pleased with myself at this point. 

Right up until the burning. Oh, my underarms felt like they were on fire a few days into my solid cake phase. I began asking the Google about the ingredients in the DIY wonder deodorant. 

Can lavender irritate skin? I asked.

Yes.

Can baking soda make skin burn?

Oh, yes.

Is corn starch irritating to skin?

No.

How about coconut oil?

No. Go ahead and put as much coconut oil and corn starch on your body as you want.

At this point, my armpits were bright red and puffy. The internet painted a dreary picture of thick brown skin created by repeated exposure to baking soda. It appeared that I was a few uses away from teenage Groot underarms. Not pretty.

After a few days of NO DEODORANT, the burning stopped and my skin returned to its usual pitty pallor. Fun fact about me: I don't sweat that much when my skin is inflamed and burning like the fires of Mordor. So the post-burn part of this wasn't even the worst of it.

Pinterest will gladly tell you that baking soda bad, if you ask. Suddenly, my feed was full of recipes without baking soda. I even found the corner of the internet where people use plain coconut oil and nothing else. Of course, I tried that.

Nope.

Coconut oil is just fine until the sweating starts and though there isn't much sweating during a Pittsburgh winter, there's too much sweating for coconut oil.

And now I'm left with a deodorant dilemma. I don't want to go back to those over-packaged plastic tubes full of aluminum and whatever else. I don't want to ruin all of my shirts. I also don't want to stink. So I think I'm going to have to try my own recipe, figure out what was in that top layer of the first Pinterest fail. 

Perhaps coconut oil, corn starch, and less lavender will do the trick. I'm starting to sweat just thinking about it.

Postpartum Psychosis on NPR

Quite likely lost in your news feed last week was an NPR story about postpartum psychosis. It was heartening to see the article called She Wanted To Be The Perfect Mom, Then Landed In A Psychiatric Unit because the mania that is possible after childbirth so rarely breaks into the national news cycle. 

NPR respectfully told the story of a California mother's 2014 psychosis. It went further and outlined improvements to mental healthcare that would improve outcomes for postpartum psychosis. "The gold standard is to admit the mother and the baby into the hospital together, on a specialized mother-baby unit, where they're treated as a pair," NPR reported based on research dating back to the 1940s.

This isn't the first I've read about mother-baby psychiatric units. They exist in Europe along with postpartum mental health seminars and support groups and what seems to be more abundant open dialogue about mental health. But rather than shame America, NPR pointed out several programs here in the states that are working within our mixed up health insurance system to provide that gold standard care to women.

When I was hospitalized in 2005, I was permitted daily 20-minute visits with my infant daughter. It's distressing that nine years later, the mom featured in NPR's article had to negotiate for hour-long staff supervised visits with her baby. Nothing makes you feel less like the "perfect mom" than spending weeks away from your newborn baby. So any psychiatric unit making progress toward keeping mother and child together for the duration of inpatient care is a good thing.

And having moms share their stories will eventually make an impact on the care that's available. Read the NPR article and share it to help new moms with mental health disorders.

The 1000 Words a Day Diet

I’m trying to finish another novel. This one is about a seventh-grade language arts teacher that is not good at her job. (Any resemblance to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental.) It’s really an exploration of the mechanics of being really bad at your job. I’ve always imagined it goes deeper than what goes on in the workplace. So, that’s the new book.

It’s really hard to write it. Or perhaps it’s very easy to procrastinate writing it. At any rate, I got a few thousand words in and then felt accomplished because I thought about the story every day. I’d forgive myself for skimping on the actual work because I was pre-planning.

Aware that my pace was going to result in another five-year effort, I put myself on a 1,000 word a day plan two weeks ago. Monday through Friday I write 1,000 words per day. I do not edit. I do not get credit for thinking. I make a little note each day of my word total so I know how far I have to go before stopping.

It’s been working most days. Yesterday I wrote 400 words, but today I went beyond my requirement. All in all, it’s producing a first draft that’s moving in the direction of being finished. During this decade.

Do you have any motivational strategies for keeping your work in progress going?