I will dream of mice tonight

I saw the black dash dart across my front wall out of the corner of my eye. I paused CJ’s press conference on the West Wing and glanced over at my cat. He was asleep on the chair next to me.

It was not my cat.

I was staring directly at the wall the second time it scampered across the room.

My cat was still asleep. So I got my neighbor.

She came with her two sons, one brandishing his dad’s plastic athletic sandal.

We searched the entire room and as one tends to do in these situations, we hoped we couldn’t find it because the mouse had already escaped the way it came in.

Her parting words were, “Well, it won’t do anything. If Dora sees it, he’ll kill it.” She had not seen the way he had batted my hand away when I woke him up earlier to try to incite him to hunt the mouse.

I stood guard for the next 10 minutes. Armed with a plastic bucket under which to trap the mouse, I used my flashlight to search my front room. A mouse did not turn up.

Almost half, if not a majority of the time, things tend to end up here not as I expected. Or I’m put in a situation that I never in my previous life thought I would willingly place myself.

When this happens, I laugh. Because if I thought too much into what I’ve given up in order to live in a house with a mouse and lazy cat on the other side of the world from the people who know me the best, I wouldn’t be able to cope.

I laugh. And then I send a text to another volunteer to see if this has happened to her yet.

I spend the majority of my days laughing and sending text messages.

Author’s note, because I know my parents will ask me about it: as I was typing this blog (and listening to a Modest Mouse-Broken Bells-Deadmau5 playlist) the mouse reappeared, and I’m pretty sure it crawled out under my front door. I’m still disappointed in Dora’s lack of enthusiasm.