Yet Another Clanger!

I hope you have had a great relaxing break and I’d like to wish you a Happy New Year.   It is very mild here in England and nothing at all like last year when we had so much snow and freezing cold temperatures.

I am feeling absolutely awful and ancient too!  What has happened to my memory lately?  I bought my grandson a 7^th birthday card and yet it was his 8^th birthday – how bad is that!!!  What’s worse is that I usually buy a Grandson card but when I bought it before Christmas they had hardly any Grandson cards as all the Christmas  cards were filling the shelves and the only ones they had out were for men really rather than children, so I opted for an age card.  I never do that normally and the only time I do decide to get one I get the age wrong!  I just don’t know how I did it – I don’t normally think of his age I suppose but it’s not even like I stood there thinking “em how old is he this year?” to myself.  I just looked for a “7” card!  I normally get the birthday cards for the Christmas period earlier in the year as I have 3 to buy and I know there is no good looking when the Christmas cards come out on the shelves and leave very little choice of other cards.

I am keeping my fingers and toes crossed and don’t really want to mention it too soon so “touch wood” but I think the mice are gone.  I think they must have it built into their ancestry that when they see the “blue stuff” it is time to move on.  We were going to buy some of the electrical sonic devices but when we read the instructions it said that they wont transmit through curtains, furniture, doors etc.  so we decided they would be no use in the garage or loft which are both full of “stuff” and even under the floorboards the joists would be in the way.  That is if we could even pry the floorboards up because they aren’t floorboards so much as big panel boards which go under some of the walls.  So anyway, we decided by buy even more mousetraps and buy some poison instead as where the mice were meant that the pets wouldn’t have any risk of getting near it.  So we dutifully parted with our well earned cash and bought 3 different types of the poison in sachet form and in block form.  We put the blue poison in the places where we had the traps and one sachet seemed to have disappeared altogether rather than just nibbled at but the blocks don’t seem to have been touched.  Since then we have caught 2 mice in the traps but that is all and it appears to be very quiet under the floorboards now.

You would have laughed though, that is if you could while holding your nose, because for the last couple of days we have had a horrible smell in the bathroom and kitchen mainly (but in the pipe area is another place we heard a lot of mice activity) and so we weren’t sure if it was rotting dead mice or the drains.  He didn’t have chance to check the manhole cover yesterday as he was out in daylight but as the smell was even worse today he checked them out and it was the drains – well we will definitely know if it was that by tomorrow morning I suppose as it could have been both.  You hear about scorned ex-girlfriends putting dead fish in curtain poles so we were really wondering if it was the mice rotting away as that is one of the reasons we didn’t want to use poison in the first place – at least if you catch them in the traps in is instant and they are disposable.

Here’s today’s trivia snipped:

"Rhythm" is the longest English word without a vowel.

Lastly today’s chuckle as always:

Here’s some more of those actual things said in courts

Q: How old is your son, the one living with you.
A: Thirty-eight or thirty-five, I can't remember which.
Q: How long has he lived with you?
A: Forty-five years.

Q: What was the first thing your husband said to you when he woke that morning?
A: He said, "Where am I, Cathy?"
Q: And why did that upset you?
A: My name is Susan.

Q: Where was the location of the accident?
A: Approximately milepost 499.
Q: And where is milepost 499?
A: Probably between milepost 498 and 500.