Monday: Day Off and Murder

And we were Halloweened out this morning.  Ivan was a quivering lump of sobs this morning.  It took a good half hour to quiet him down once he woke up.  My sleep last night was deeply disturbed, and it just worked out that today was a good day to take off.  Ivan and I watched a bit of The Cat in the Hat and the time warp dance from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  We made breakfast and ironed and painted and it was just a day of house chores and dullness.

I taught Ivan a new skill today:  Picking up dead mice that are killed by "The Beast" with kitchen tongs, placing the dead mice on a tray, and dumping them over the fence.  I cannot even tell you how excited he was about his role in our chores.  Ivan typically needs a new challenge, and he had become bored with putting away the clean silverware in the dishwasher.  I am really onto something with this mouse disposal.

Anyway, on the way home this evening I was driving a particularly dark portion of Hillsboro road: no streetlights and no homes.  It is always very dark, and I always drive it safely.  Tonight, however, I was driving along when all of a sudden a huge deer head loomed directly in front of my face.  It had huge eyes, and it looked right at me in an eerie time stood still sort of way, before it crumpled into the side of my car with a huge thud.  It was just terrifying, and I behaved like I do in all emergencies.  I squealed unintelligibly for several minutes.  If you met me, I don't know that you would think that I would react so badly in scary emergency situations.  Whenever something like this evening's deer situation happens, I realize that I will never be called upon to command any military operation or lead a grass roots revolution.  I am no Abraham Lincoln.