In which I discover a limit
Oct. 5th, 2008 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radegundI'm not a squeamish person. Compost delights me. I'll cheerfully clear out a blocked drain. As an emo teenager I once lay in bed and watched as ants devoured a dead woodlouse on my bedroom carpet. More recently, I developed the conviction that childbirth and early parenthood had cauterised whatever vestiges of perturbability remained to me (though I'll admit I have been known to scream at surprise poo).
Turns out I was wrong. For lo, I can be squicked. Yesterday lunchtime, I encountered a circumstance so grim that it left me gasping and retching and needing a sit-down all on my own before I could function again.
I had sliced a bagel and brought it to the toaster, which is in the corner of the counter. I reached over to stick the bagel halves into the slots, and as I withdrew my hand, one finger brushed against something. For a few seconds I couldn't even parse the sensation - it was so utterly out of place. But then I did, and I looked, and I lost it.
What I had felt was fur - fine, soft, silky fur. The fur of a tiny mouse, who had, it seemed, climbed into the bowels of the toaster looking for crumbs and met its grisly fate as it climbed out again.
There was no visible injury, so either it somehow electrocuted itself, or - and this is what really turns my stomach - it was in there when Niall made toast first thing in the morning, and died trying to escape the heat.
This brings the autumn's body count to two (or possibly three, if a suspicious smell is what we think it is), plus two caught in humane traps and released well away from the house. We usually get a few mice when the weather turns cold, because our ramshackle, lean-to kitchen is full of holes. (Did you know mice have amazingly flexible skeletons? Apparently they can get through a gap the thickness of a biro.) But this definitely wins the prize for most outré method of dispatch.
We have bought a new toaster.
Turns out I was wrong. For lo, I can be squicked. Yesterday lunchtime, I encountered a circumstance so grim that it left me gasping and retching and needing a sit-down all on my own before I could function again.
I had sliced a bagel and brought it to the toaster, which is in the corner of the counter. I reached over to stick the bagel halves into the slots, and as I withdrew my hand, one finger brushed against something. For a few seconds I couldn't even parse the sensation - it was so utterly out of place. But then I did, and I looked, and I lost it.
What I had felt was fur - fine, soft, silky fur. The fur of a tiny mouse, who had, it seemed, climbed into the bowels of the toaster looking for crumbs and met its grisly fate as it climbed out again.
There was no visible injury, so either it somehow electrocuted itself, or - and this is what really turns my stomach - it was in there when Niall made toast first thing in the morning, and died trying to escape the heat.
This brings the autumn's body count to two (or possibly three, if a suspicious smell is what we think it is), plus two caught in humane traps and released well away from the house. We usually get a few mice when the weather turns cold, because our ramshackle, lean-to kitchen is full of holes. (Did you know mice have amazingly flexible skeletons? Apparently they can get through a gap the thickness of a biro.) But this definitely wins the prize for most outré method of dispatch.
We have bought a new toaster.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-06 02:00 pm (UTC)Will you have a nanny ga doh?