Tuesday, December 21, 2010

The Boxes in the Garage...


...are no longer in the garage. They have been expurgated to my front room... and my bedroom... and my kitchen (which is pretty much my whole house).

These are not just the boxes of kitchen gadgets and linens from when I moved home before my mission, either. These are ALL my boxes from my parents' garage, even the ones containing the relics (and I have a LOT of relics) from my childhood.

Methinks I see a major purging and trip to DI on the horizon.

Friday, December 10, 2010

Mouse

The good news: Anya caught her first mouse ever.

The bad news: It was in my bedroom.

More good: Anya is fed well enough that she did not feel the need to eat any part of the mouse (which gets gross, let me tell you).

I'm increasingly grateful for my childhood pet experiences, as I actually bred and raised hordes of mice (well over 100, maybe over 200--they had big litters of 8-13 mice each time, so they multiplied pretty quickly, and we had fun raising the cute tiny baby mice). Thus I don't freak out when I see a dead rodent, and I'm not too worried, because I haven't seen any other signs of mice around my house. Granted, I haven't been looking, but usually when I'm in a place with mice (I haven't been in many, but I have been in some, mostly cabins) I can hear them scurrying around at night and I see their droppings and things they've chewed, but I've experienced none of that so far, so maybe this was just a stray little girl who came in from the cold. Poor thing.

Besides that, my downstairs neighbors have 2 or 3 cats, and I have Anya, so if there are more mice, they'll hopefully get caught (but I'm still telling my landlord, don't worry).

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

My Money Talks


...and it says, "You spent HOW much on smashed coins at Disneyland?"

I will tell you:

  • 17 smashed quarters at $1.25 each (one dollar for the smashing, plus the quarter to be smashed)
  • 3 smashed dimes at 85¢ each (75¢ for the smashing, plus the dime to be smashed)
  • 7 smashed nickels at 80¢ each (75¢ for the yadda yadda, you get the picture)
  • 78 smashed pennies at 51¢ each (50¢ + 1¢)
= $67.18
(you guys can do the math to double check me if you want, because I did it mostly without a calculator).

The good thing about collecting smashed coins is that they are an inexpensive souvenir compared to everything else sold at Disneyland. The bad thing is that once I start collecting things, I like to have a well-developed collection. Besides that, buying the smashed coins never actually suffices as a souvenir; I usually get something else too, even if it's only one of the delicious chocolate-covered peanut butter graham cracker sandwiches. Okay, I guess food isn't actually a souvenir, but the point is that the spending never stops with just the coins.

All the same, it is kind of fun to have some sort of quest when I go to Disneyland. It's like a game, a very slow blackout game that I'll never get blackout on because they'll always keep changing the machines.

It's Disneyland. It's a diversion. What else can I say?