No More Mice?

Since October, I have told everyone about the problem I have had with mice infesting my Connecticut apartment.  So far I have caught four of them, when they fell into the large plastic bucket next to the stove.  Now, surprisingly, it looks like there aren’t any more.

Over the past weekend, I baited the “trap” by dropping two peanuts into the bucket.  Not long after that I heard something jumping in the bucket, but when I went to investigate, there was no mouse in the bucket.  And one of the peanuts was missing, too.  Later on, the other peanut disappeared the same way.  Evidently I was dealing with a supermouse this time.  Not only could it jump out of the bucket, something the other mice could not do, it was also strong enough to take a big Virginia peanut with it, shell and all.

When I replaced the bait on Monday, I propped the lid on one side of the bucket.  I figured that if the opening was half covered and the mouse returned, unless it could aim where it jumped, the lid would keep it from getting out until I arrived and snapped the lid firmly on.  However, nobody went for the peanuts.  On Wednesday, I did another test, by dropping another peanut on the floor nearby.  In the past, when I did that, the peanut was always gone within two or three hours, but as I write this, it’s still there.

According to the locals, it has been an unusually mild winter.  We had temperatures in the 50s last Monday, and the forecast has it going to 56 degrees today; we have also had more rain than snow.  Perhaps the supermouse went outside and never came back; an owl or a cat could have caught it.  I’m crossing my fingers in the hope that my pest problem is over.

The Real Winter Has Begun

Okay, now that the first winter storm of the season is over, I can tell you the whole story.  Fortunately we had plenty of warning.  Also, we didn’t have tree limbs coming down or thousands of people losing power, the way we did with last October’s storm.

The snow started falling late Friday night.  By the time it stopped, on Saturday afternoon, we had six or seven inches of the stuff, a heavy snowfall by Kentucky standards.  For a while I wondered if I was going to be able to go out that weekend, because the driveway was full of snow and my landlady was in the hospital with a broken ankle.  Luckily, her son called a snowplow service, and they cleared out the driveway at 2 PM.

The snowfall hadn’t completely stopped by then, but now I was motivated to go out and shovel the sidewalks around the house and my apartment.  A month ago I made  a deal with the landlady:  if I could put my car in her garage when the weather was bad, and when I was out of town for Christmas, I would shovel the sidewalks for the winter.  Because this winter has been so mild, I definitely got the better part of the deal until Saturday.  Well, when I went to fulfill my part of the bargain, I got some help from the tenant in the other apartment, so it wasn’t as bad as I expected; he shoveled the sidewalks in front while I did the ones in back.

At 5 PM I went out to pick up my prescriptions from Wal-Mart, and do a week’s worth of laundry.  The laundromat is in the same shopping center where I mailed that letter on Friday, and what a difference a day made!  Instead of the bumper-to-bumper traffic I faced on Friday, there was hardly any traffic at all, because nobody wanted to be on the roads, even if they were treated for ice and snow.  I was alone for much of the time I was in the laundromat; on the weekend that’s unheard of.

On Sunday I went out again to attend church, but otherwise it was a quiet day.  On Monday morning we got a form of precipitation the weatherman called “ice pellets.”  To me it looked the same as sleet back in Kentucky, so I don’t know why they give it a different name in Connecticut.  That was followed by rain for the rest of the day.  In addition, the temperature stayed in the 40s all day and night, so most of the snow was gone by this morning.

On the other side of the parking lot from where I work, there is a small swamp.  A sign gives it the politically correct name of “wetland,” but it’s the same thing, a place full of trees and standing water where rain and melted snow go after they fall on us.  In the summer I heard frogs croaking from there, but otherwise didn’t think about it until today, when I saw three deer walk out of there at the end of my workday.  I thought deer didn’t like coming this far into town.  Let the record show that Connecticut has wildlife after all.

Auto Tags From A Distance

I forgot to mention last week that Monday, January 16, marked the fifth birthday of this blog.  Wow, who’d have thought I would have enough to say to keep active here for five years?

Every year in January I have to renew the license plates of the family cars.  In Kentucky it was only a big deal in the first year when I went for each car (2007 for the Buick, 2009 for the Nissan).  I gave Leive instructions on how to do it for the Nissan, but with both the Buick and I out of state this time, I had to come up with a different plan for the Buick.

At first I considered getting a Connecticut plate, but when I went on the website listing instructions for CT, ouch!  If I get my tag here, they will nickel and dime me to death!  Instead of listing the total cost upfront, they listed a whole bunch of fees which I might need to pay.  For instance, they will charge $10 to check my VIN number, to make sure the car hasn’t been reported as stolen.  I’m not sure, but it looks like around here, I would pay no less than $80 to get registered.  By contrast, the cost for a new tag for either of my cars in Kentucky is in the 30s.

Because of that sticker shock, I called the county government back home to see if I could just mail the required paperwork and a check to Kentucky.  They told me yes, as long as I have a Kentucky address, so I prepared an envelope to send them last Friday.  That was the easy part; the hard part proved to be getting to a mailbox, which I did after work.  Oh!  Why is the traffic always worse at 5 PM on Friday than at any other time of the week?  Are there really that many more people working on Fridays?  There certainly aren’t where I work.  For most of the trip, the cars and trucks barely moved at all, and it seemed that the traffic lights I met were short-cycling, only staying green long enough to let three vehicles pass through in each lane.  After I got to the mailbox, I chose to take a detour that went a couple of miles out of my way, to get to some streets that weren’t so busy.  In all it took me a whole hour to get home from work, when normally it takes me half an hour.  And even half an hour seems too slow, when I can get to work in 10-15 minutes during the morning rush.

The good news is that the auto tag laws aren’t enforced here in Danbury.  For months I have noticed cars driving in front of me with very expired tags.  Usually the sticker on the plate gives a date in 2007 or 2008.  Why don’t the cops stop drivers who have been going that long without renewing?  It seems to me that there are enough violators to fund the police department, just with fines from traffic tickets.

The Snow Came and Went

The other day I asked where the snow was, because so far we have gotten so little of it this winter, in both Connecticut and Kentucky.  Well, it arrived Monday evening.  I don’t know exactly when, because snow doesn’t make a sound when it falls, except when it is in an avalanche.  I just happened to look outside at 10:30 PM, and there was an inch of it on the ground.

I didn’t have time to shovel it off the sidewalk around the apartment before I went to work on Tuesday, so I was planning to do it as soon as I got home that evening.  The snow didn’t even last that long.  The temperature got up into the 40s, so it rained all day and washed the snow away, except for a few drifts.

Last night and today, there was neither rain or snow, but there were high winds:  20-30 MPH, with gusts in the 40-50 range.  It was loud enough to keep me awake for part of last night, so I hope it doesn’t blow again tonight.

I told you about getting diagnosed with diabetes three weeks ago, when I visited my doctor in Kentucky.  Since then I’ve been doing the required blood tests every two or three days, and they showed my blood sugar level going down, though not as fast as I would like.  With today’s test I finally got it down in the safe zone, hooray!  I will still have to see an endocrinologist in Connecticut soon, because the testing supplies will run out before long, but it looks like this ailment won’t be as bad as I thought.

KV64

Speaking of objects more than three thousand years old (see the previous message), it was reported yesterday that another tomb was discovered in Egypt, at the famous Valley of the Kings.  This is the 64th tomb discovered in the valley so far, hence the name KV64 that archaeologists have given it.  It is the second tomb found there since the discovery of Tutankhamen’s burial place, 90 years ago.

Not everyone buried in the valley was a king; among the non-royal people buried there was Maiherpre (KV36), and Yuya and Tuya (KV46).  Now it looks like the occupant of this tomb was also non-royal.  The tomb was very small by the valley’s standards, just a vertical shaft and one room, but it contains a sarcophagus that appears to be undisturbed.  The name on the sarcophagus is Nehmes-Bastet, a singer in the great Temple of Karnak during the XXII dynasty, and the daughter of the high priest of Amen.  That means her family was probably the same one that rescued and relocated most of the royal mummies near the end of the XXI dynasty, after their tombs were robbed.  It also appears the tomb was reused; some artifacts in it suggest that it was originally carved out 400 years earlier, during the XVIII dynasty.

One of the blogs I read said that the tomb was probably discovered last spring, but it was kept secret because of all the unrest in Egypt at the time (remember the looting at other sites and in the Cairo Museum).  Now the Swiss archaeologists who excavated the tomb have announced their discovery because they plan to open the sarcophagus at the end of this week.  Here are some links if you want to read more:

New Archaeological Discovery at the Valley of the Kings

KV64 is the Tomb of Ni Hms Bastet

We Lost a Friend in Florida!

No, not a human friend, or even an animal friend, but a tree – the largest tree in Florida.  If you go to Longwood, about seven miles from where we used to live, you will come to the Big Tree Park, which was the site of a 118-foot-tall cypress tree named “The Senator.”  Not only is it the biggest tree in the state, I hear it may be the biggest tree east of the Mississippi River.  My family visited it more than once, and in 2004-2005 I worked less than a mile from there.  Well, today The Senator caught fire, burned from the inside out, and collapsed, despite the best efforts of firefighters to save it.  They are now saying lightning is the probable cause; I sure hope it’s that, and not arson.  Here are some links to the story:

3,500-Year-Old Tree “The Senator” Collapses in Fire

Arsonists Burn Down World’s Fifth Oldest Tree

The second article comes from a British news site, showing that this story is getting international attention.  What puzzles me is that they’re saying the tree was 3,500 years old.  The last time I visited, I could have sworn the estimated age was 1,700.  When was the tree’s age doubled?

White Halloween, Green Winter

Where’s the snow?  Here it is, the middle of January, and except for a few snowflakes the night after I came back from Kentucky, we have not had any snow in this part of Connecticut since the freak snowstorm last October.  And it has certainly been cold enough for snow.  This morning, for instance, it was only 9 degrees when I woke up, and the highest it got today was 19.  Add to that an out-of-season March wind, and all day it really felt like the temperature was only in single-digit figures.

Some of my co-workers have told me that the last winter in New England was a killer one, with more snow than anyone would want to experience.  If that’s true, then it is only fair that a brutal winter be followed by a mild one, to even up the score.  In that case, I lucked out; I first applied for this job in January 2011, and I could have gotten caught in the bad winter, if I had been accepted that early.

Meanwhile, back home in Kentucky, the weather is acting more predictable.  I remember past winters, like the one of 2006-2007, where conditions were relatively mild at first (hardly any snow, temperatures in the 30s and 40s), and then in the third week of January, the really bad weather began.  That seems to be happening this year, right on schedule.  Our home got almost no snow until last Thursday, and now according to Leive, there’s at least an inch of snow on the ground.  On Friday she tried to go grocery shopping, but a block from home the car skidded on the ice and snow, and hit a recycling bin.  At that point she went back home and called our in-laws in town, Gene and Rezia, to hitch a ride from them.  I remember I was in a similar situation in 2007, when winter conditions forced me to learn how to drive all over again; forty years in Florida taught us nothing about dealing with this!

Aside from the wind, it has been a quiet weekend in the apartment.  I wasn’t called in to work overtime on Saturday, as has happened so often in the past seven months.  Thus, the main events of the past two days were meals, going to the laundromat on Saturday, and going to church on Sunday.  On Saturday I also went to Wal-Mart and picked up a second pair of reading glasses, because I realized that the first pair was good for looking at a computer monitor, but not for reading a book.  That was an awkward experience; the new glasses had a price tag attached with a plastic loop, and I had to wait until I got home to remove it, because I couldn’t see what I was doing.  Thus I will now be carrying two pairs of glasses for seeing things up close; everything farther away than my arm is still clearly visible.

At 5:30 on Saturday morning, I caught another mouse.  This was the fourth captured since I moved into the apartment, and the first in 2012.  I thought I had caught the last mouse in December, and until last Friday I had not seen or heard evidence of any more.  Then I found mouse droppings on a paper napkin, so I did the test I tried before; I left a peanut on the floor, and it disappeared before I went to bed.  That prompted me to take the lid off the bucket that had captured the other mice, and that night, just like the other times, a mouse fell in and couldn’t jump out.  Because it was before dawn, I took the bucket downstairs, threw the mouse outside, and went back to bed, only this time I threw the mouse over the neighbor’s fence, so it is more likely to go to another house than come back here.  Now time will tell if I have seen the last of the mice.

Chapter 3, A New World No More

After seven months of work, the third chapter in my Latin American history series is now available!  Going from 1650 to 1830, this chapter covers the second half of the colonial era, culminating with the struggles in the early nineteenth century that freed Latin America from Spain and Portugal.

This history paper is divided into three parts, with the following subheadings:

Part I
  • A Hollow Empire
  • The Jesuit Experiment
  • Caribbean Contention, Part 1
  • The Golden Age of Piracy
  • The Darien Scheme
  • Caribbean Contention, Part 2
  • The Settlement of Mexico’s Northern Frontier
  • The Seven Years War and the American Revolution In Latin America

Part II

  • Growing Trouble between Spain And Her Colonies
  • Brazil: Movement Inland, and to the South
  • The Haitian Revolution
  • The Liberation of Latin America Begins
  • Bolivar and San Martin
  • The Haitian Monarchy

Part III

  • Bolivar’s Campaigns
  • Early Paraguay: Marxism Before Marx
  • Over the Andes
  • Gran Columbia
  • The First Mexican Empire
  • Brazil: Independent By Accident
  • All Roads End At Ayacucho
  • The Falklands Dispute Begins
  • The Shattered Dream

 

If you haven’t read the first two chapters of this series and would like to check them out, click here.  Like I have said before, read and enjoy!