May 10–13, 2002 — Refuge

For the last month, I’ve been hearing a mouse scurrying around in my room. He rustles papers and plastic bags and scrapes his nails against the floor. He doesn’t seem to make any attempt at all to be quiet, but I could never figure out which area of the room he was making noise in because by the time I made it to the light switch, he would be gone.

So I devised a plan: I would use the fluorescent light under my bed, quietly sliding it out and turning it on, and then hop out of bed to catch him in the act.

The problem with this plan is that the fluorescent light under my bed takes several minutes to warm up, and the mouse would often be gone before I could get to the hop-out-of-bed part.

After five or six tries, though, everything worked: the room lit up, I hopped out of bed, and I moved as quickly as I could to find the source of the noise.

Then I noticed papers on my desk moving around.

It was at or around this point that I realized I’d forgotten an important step in my plan: what to do if I actually did catch the mouse in the act.

I ended up making a lot of noise, just trying to get him to leave the desk on his own. He eventually got the hint and shot across the surface of the desk, leaping down the back of the couch to complete his escape. I lifted the papers that the mouse had been under and found the remains of a chocolate bar with almonds that I’d been given at Easter. The mouse had eaten almost half of it, several times his own body weight in chocolate.

I threw out the chocolate bar and started devising plans to block the hole in the floor that the mouse continues to enter my room through. I’m under the impression that mice don’t chew through steel wool...

Meanwhile, in addition to mice and the ongoing ant infestation, Andrew had to chase a pair of dog-sized raccoons off the fire escape yesterday, the squirrel shit on the fire escape has yet to be washed away by rain, and I still occasionally find mysterious pools of urine on the kitchen floor.

Our house is turning into a wildlife refuge.

But I guess that’s not all that’s happened to me over the last four days.

On Friday, the server hosting this site (or that used to host this site, more specifically) stopped working without warning or explanation. I noticed this less than an hour before I left to visit Kerry in Guelph, so there wasn’t much I could do beyond hoping that the host would have the problem fixed sometime that afternoon.

As it turns out, my site was still down when I arrived home three days later.

Then, almost 100 hours later, my site was on a new server. The old site was still down; no one replied to my emails asking what was wrong, so I sent my old host another, angrier email. It will be promptly ignored and deleted along with my help request, but it’s nice to know that I tried.

I felt so horrible when I arrived home on Sunday because of all of this: knowing that all email to me had been returned to sender for three days made me feel a bit sick.

I’m probably taking the importance of an existence on the internet a bit too seriously. But it’s hard to tell for sure anymore.

Dead servers aside, my five days off went very well. I got a lot of work done, made a sizeable dent in my efforts to clean my room, and spent a few days with Kerry in Guelph.

Guelph was fun enough. We went grocery, book, and movie shopping (though I didn’t buy anything) and watched the occasional DVD. I’m starting to take for granted the fact that I’ll be able to see Kerry more than once every six weeks again, which probably isn’t a bad thing — now that we both mostly have our weekends free, things are much, much easier.

And then I had to go back to work.

Yesterday was Amy’s birthday, so she dropped by for a smoothie after seeing Spider-Man with Jeff. She found Spider-Man to be a lot sadder than she’d expected, which I guess I can understand (although she was much more prone than Jeff and me because she didn’t know most of the story from reading the comic books before seeing the movie). I can remember having a bound reprint of the first several issues of Spider-Man shipped to the Richmond Public Library on interlibrary loan back when I was a kid, and I loved every page. That was probably the year that I dressed up as Spider-Man for Hallowe’en. (Or one of the years, anyway...)

But yes. Work was alright. There are some new rules and new smoothie weights and things. That I have to wear my hat again is the only rule that really affects me.

I realized when I got to work that my arms hadn’t really hurt at all on my five days off. They quickly started to hurt again. I don’t know what I’m going to do about this. At one point a few weeks ago, it was painful to use the paper towel dispenser.

Sometimes I think I should be more worried about this.

While I was mopping the floors and getting ready to leave, Nathan’s friend Trisha walked by, knocked on the window, and waved.

I’d met Trisha a couple of weeks ago, a night or two before Nathan left for home. She visited with Nathan and watched us play videogames while Johnston studied for an exam a room over. I wasn’t sure if she qualified as my guest or Nathan’s, so I couldn’t decide if I should have felt guilty for her boredom.

And now I’ve run into her three times since. Toronto gets to be a smaller place once you actually know a few people who live here, I find.

I have to leave for work now, though. I’ll be late if I don’t. Sorry. I guess there’s still more catching up to do...