Lost In Footnotes

A little before seven o’clock this morning Alex turned to me and said “I don’t want you to freak out but……”. This had my alarm bells ringing for a number of reasons, mainly because Alex is not particularly communicative this early in the morning. The most I can generally expect at this time is a grunt, that can be translated to mean “You have all the covers and for my last few minutes in bed, before I have to go to my proper job in the city that pays the bills and buys you glittery nail polish, I am going to have my share of the covers and the bed”. So, I think to myself if he is starting a conversation this early it must be big news….. divorce, redundancy, maybe he has been masquerading as a trekkie all these years and it’s a LIE….. Nope, he qualified his opening remark with, “there was a rustling in the kitchen and I went to check it out and I saw…” before he even finished I had jumped in with a mouse!!!!! It turned out that we have both heard a scratching every now and again and it looks like the little bugger, hereafter referred to as Edmond, had broken through. Since we are on the fifth floor, I am assuming he is either a roof dwelling mouse or a fourth floor fella trying to move up in the world.

This could have been a lot worse; ants or cockroaches or a Republican president lurking under the sink. My OCD kicked in and I furiously attached the kitchen throwing out all the open packets in the cupboards (which didn’t result in much). Of course nothing in the cupboards had been nibbled, just the loaf of bread that Edmond had munched on in the wee hours which I had shamelessly left on the counter. In hindsight of course this was a smart move. So now our landlord is sending over a guy next week and I bought some sticky pads to put down in the mean time (an Alex job I think).

Now my beloved has just called to ask if I have seen Edmond upon my return from work and that we had to get this problem sorted as mice breed like tribbles. Sometimes I wonder which reality we are operating in…..