Of mice and men...

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You ever feel like you're being pulled in all directions and end up going nowhere?

I've got things piling up in the studio, my work plus tracks for Brando and Pseudo. I'm spending time familiarising myself with new music and re-familiarising myself with old(er) music for my radio show. Most of the new music from independent artists nowadays is in the form of digital download only, so I have to convert mp3s to wavs and burn them onto a CD before I can play them in the show too. And if that wasn't time consuming enough, I've spent the last couple of weeks trying to free my house of mice!

Now don't get me wrong, I don't have to change my name to Willard quite yet. We're not overrun with the little guys, but because they're so small and fast it's been difficult trying to catch them. Meanwhile, my wife being the girly-girl that she is, was getting more and more frustrated and upset with the whole situation.

It didn't help that our cat actually brought a live mouse into the house with him one evening. Bud (the cat) found it highly amusing to let the poor bugger go just so that he could chase and re-catch it. Eventually I was able to grab the mouse from Bud and release it in our garden (actually next door's garden, but shush don't tell them) but not before Mrs Spy spotted the two of them (cat and mouse) and almost had a heart attack.

Naturally, Mrs Spy figured that all the mice in the house were brought in by the cat, which put him in the dog house. Probably just as well that we don't have a dog because I'm pretty sure that it would be me that would be displaced by the dog for bringing the cat to the house in the first place. Let's just say that I wasn't Mrs Spy's favourite person that night.

Anyway, we started putting down these so-called humane traps. Basically, they are small plastic boxes with a little ridge protruding from the middle of the bottom of the trap. The idea is that one baits the trap with cheese, chocolate, peanut butter or whatever and puts it down on a flat surface so that the baited end of the trap is touching the surface while the end with the door is up off the surface due to the little ridge (kind of like a seesaw). Once the mouse crawls in to eat the bait, its weight shifts the trap closing the door behind it.

Of course, theory and practise are often at odds and this is one of those situations where they totally missed each other. You guessed it, when we checked the traps, neither bait nor mouse were anywhere to be seen. By this time I was developing a grudging respect for the little creatures (or at least their ingenuity). So it was with heavy heart that I finally succumbed to Mrs Spy's wishes and put down some sticky traps.

The sticky traps are much more effective at their intended purpose, so I spent the last couple of days removing dead mice from the house instead of live ones. This saddened me greatly. After all, the poor little blighters were disturbed from their underground dwellings by recent local roadworks and, just as we would, sought warmth and shelter elsewhere. They're not trying to bother us or take over the yard, just stay safe and warm in this increasingly cold winter.

Now, I'm no member of any animal rights group or anything like that, but I admit that it irks me to see the arrogance of us humans sometimes and the way we've turned our backs on (or noses up at) the natural world as if we're not a part of it. It's that same arrogance that's fucking up the world for our future generations.

So, personally, I'm going to spend less time trying to kill 'pests' and more time doing what I'm supposed to be doing in the studio.

One Love, Spy!