poplar road

Yesterday morning I was eating my breakfast in front of the kitchen windows when I noticed two black birds (sparrows? starlings?) come fluttering around under my eaves. They spooked when they saw me through the glass. I saw twigs and thought, oh no, they're going to nest under my eaves. In a second I was out my back door to check, but there wasn't any sign of a nest. Back inside, I moved to a different vantage point where I suddenly noticed more twigs, sticking out the back corner of my barbecue. Hm. My slow brain goes back to Tuesday, when I cleaned a few strands of garden debris out of the BBQ when I made lunch, and believing the only openings were slits too small even for rodents, had chalked it up to the last windstorm. I went outside again to pull the twigs from the back just as the birds arrived again and aborted a BBQ landing! I opened the lid, and saw this....

I snapped this pic with my iPhone and sent it off to Richard, because my text message didn't do it justice. He was so shocked he phoned me back. When I got home at lunch, I had to take the grills, pans and elements out in order to get several dustpans worth of dried leaves, twigs, and some construction waste from my yard out of my barbecue! And then I fired it up to 600 degrees to bake off the bird poop for 15 minutes before I made lunch. God I hope that was long enough. Ew.

I left the lid up so it doesn't look so appealing as a nest, and I cooked meat on it so the smell might deter them (does pork and bell peppers grilled with chili powder, cumin and garlic smell like predator or food to a small bird, do you think?) but I know, as soon as I have to put that lid down - assuming we FINALLY get some rain this spring - they're moving in. If it's not field mice in my house and pocket gophers in my flower beds, it's birds. Sigh. I prefer Llamavision. Or if it has to be birds, give me hawks and owls. Those horned owls that nested across the street in 2005 just love cocky little birds and rodents. We never had these problems when the owls lived in the neighbourhood, but with all the trees dying and being chopped down, where's a bird to go? My yard, great. But don't mess with my BBQ!

I love language, as you can probably tell. The play of sound as well as the play of meaning. It's the reason I studied poetry, the intense pleasure of finding words with many levels of meaning, reinforced by their sound. English is especially wonderful, I think, because we blithely absorb any words from other languages that take our fancy – why say silk dressing gown, such a mouthful, when kimono is so easy to borrow from Japan – and we create new meanings for the words we already have. With today's "global community" the dialogue is endless and new meanings and implications, denotative and connotative, arise so quickly it's hard to keep up.

Take Thursday's activities, for example. Would you say, from this entry's title, that we were eating, or exercising? "Dip" describes a sort of circular motion of dropping down and coming back up, which in turn is what we aptly call the food that we dip veggies or chips into. "Kick" is of course the movement of one's leg outward by bending the knee. Or, Richard's favourite word to describe his latest food fixation. Schnitzel is breaded veal, at least if you're eating it Vienna (Wiener) style. Since Richard makes it with pork (much cheaper) we debated whether or not it's really Wiener Schnitzel. In any case Thursday morning as Richard was driving home from a meeting in Quesnel, he began to think about schnitzel, because Thursday night is belly dance night for me, and his night alone in the kitchen.

I, meanwhile, was practicing my dips and kicks. I bought a set of DVDs for a bhangra workout, which as I mentioned in an earlier post is a folk dance from India which has been popularized in Bollywood movies. Some of the moves have been incorporated into what's called "tribal" belly dance, which just means a fusion of folk dance moves and music from anywhere around the globe. (Back to the global community.) The Gidda Dip is one of the first moves on the first DVD which I could actually do, most involving so much bouncing and kicking I nearly melted into a puddle. Today's bhangra arose from a men's folk dance celebrating the wheat harvest, so it's very exhuberant and athletic, just as the name sounds. Another poetic element, irony: me practicing a dance celebrating wheat on the day Richard gets to cook dinner alone and make all those wheat-covered foods I can't eat because I'm allergic to it. Only I was indulging in them last year to the tune of 40 pounds weight gain, which is one reason why I've chosen bhangra to work out to. Really, really good cardio. And lots of fun at Tribal Night, which is every other Tuesday.

But back to Thursday, I went off to my regular belly dance class in town, my girl's night out to celebrate the female body and work all those stomach muscles that are supposedly in there somewhere, and Richard started his schnitzel kick. I say started because once wasn't enough; he made it again last night while I was outside visiting with the llamas. His other once-in-a-while fixation are wontons and walla wallas, and I'm grateful that I've never been fond of onions, wontons or schnitzel because although the kick may start on a belly dance night, he often has to make them a couple more times to get the craving out of his system. I get the same way about cheese. For the llamas, it's compressed alfalfa cubes, which they weren't familiar with when they came here from their grazing land up the mountain. Buddy finally buried his nose in the loose fragments left from the bottom of the bag the other day, and he's hooked. (Should I feel guilty about that?) He can't seem to chew the cubes, I guess because he's still young and his teeth aren't hard enough yet, but on Thursday when I held up the bucket of alfalfa dust, he was so absorbed he let me scratch him behind the ears for the first time. It always comes back to food, doesn't it.

I think it's because most of us, whether we accept it or not, actually desire change, and the easiest way to make a change is to change what you eat. A change in perspective is a little harder, because you get used to seeing things a certain way. I took the photo above the other day as I was snapping shots of the llamas in the yard, and when I opened it on the computer later, the view surprised me. I don't often look at our house from that angle. I still see all the things we want to change, but in this view, I forget the strange pseudo-Spanish shape and ill-planned plantings. I see home. It's got potential, doesn't it?

It's hard to make a drastic change that the body is resisting. Richard and I have decided to eat healthier and try to lose some of this extra baggage. I've added daily exercise and am trying to eat more healthy veggies and cut out the rice noodles and mashed potatoes in addition to sticking to my allergen and yeast diet restrictions. Richard has put away his deep-frying pot and oil and has been stopping at the grocery store close to work frequently to pick up pot roasts and pork roasts when they're on sale. We're enjoying my mother's recipe for orange-ginger-glazed BBQ chicken. I've even been thinking about where to start a compost and a vegetable garden for next year. When Richard is travelling for work, which has been often this summer, he doesn't have as many options to eat properly, and the man gets no exercise, but he's changing. We're trying to focus on where we want to be, and how to get there. Even the biggest plans require the tiniest of steps these days, but luckily even the small things like the sounds and ironies of bhangra and schnitzel can be hugely satisfying.

Some of you may have heard me talk about a very exciting job I applied for two weeks ago. Well, you can uncross your fingers now. Once again, not even shortlisted, although this time someone in the HR department was kind enough to let me know the hiring was over and done with. That was just before 9 on Friday morning. Needless to say, I spent the rest of the morning sadly job-searching in the comfort of my favourite pair of flannel pyjamas and a very well worn in T-shirt.

Why am I sharing this with you? Because a few hours after the bad news about the job, I was sitting in my tiny bathroom, wishing I could land a decent job so we could afford to finish our glorious master bathroom, when there was a knock on the door. No time to even put a sweatshirt on over the pjs, and anyway it's usually just a neighbour. Only this time it wasn't Jonathan, it was a security system salesman. I got my polite face on, about to tell him not interested, when he said the funniest thing. "I guess your folks aren't home?"

I gaped at him in astonishment. Me, thirty-three years old, no makeup on, only needs to put on flannel pyjama bottoms to be mistaken for a teenager? "I am 'the folks'," I said. He looked surprised, and I cut his spiel short to send him away. When you've got a neighbour like Jonathan keeping an eye on the street, why get video surveillance and motion sensors? (There's a reason Bud calls him the "Mayor".) Anyway, when I got back to my computer I sat there thinking. How old is thirty-three, really? I obviously don't look a day over 20 – gotta love unintended flattery – and I'm still young enough to roll with the punches and keep up with a learning curve, while educated and experienced enough to provide an employer with more than some fresh-faced eager young thing can offer. Right?

Right. So I got out a very short list I made a few months ago, of all the event coordination companies in town. All four of them. Now, I have no credentials as an event coordinator. Nor even as an administrator, for that matter, a BFA being highly irrelevant to employers looking for Business Administration on a job application; but experience should count for something. I'm neither patient enough nor can we afford for me to start over at minimum wage, let's be realistic, but I have to look at every job option, and event coordination has been a huge part of my work for the last 5 years. (And privately, too – Pam's wedding was a crash course in how to pull off a wedding at the last minute without the bride worrying about a thing. She could write me a reference: "I don't know how she did it because I hardly saw her the whole day, but the wedding went just fine.") So I made a mental list of my accomplishments, and called the first number on the list.

The owner/event coordinator answered the phone, which surprised me, and she chatted very openly with me for a few minutes before suggesting I call back Monday re setting up an informational interview. That's all I'm going for at the moment – I need to know more about the potential for the work here, no point shifting gears mid-career if there isn't a market in this town. The woman was friendly and I was reassured by her statement that she values experience and the ability to think on your feet more than a credential from an event coordinator program. Ten years ago when she started her business, there wasn't such a thing anyway. She didn't say if she was looking for staff, and I didn't ask. I'm sure it will come up on Monday, but what I want to start off with is to talk to someone about the business. They're a catering company, so it's a much different viewpoint than my experience as a project administrator, where coordinating meetings, workshops and conferences was just part of my workload, not 100% of my time all year. Does one even get a salary, or is it almost like a comission structure? I have lots of questions, and movies like the Wedding Planner just get in the way of really understanding what the full-time nitty gritty of the job is like. I'm hoping it's the right job to meld my design and writing skills with my customer service and marketing skills, not to mention my love of entertaining; but right now it's just one more place to look in this lousy job market.

Before I talked to the event planner I was kicking myself for not taking myself seriously back in grade 12, when for thirty seconds I considered a career in carpentry. Number of carpentry jobs advertised in Kamloops this month: over a dozen. Number of administrative jobs advertised: one. Trades wages: $3 an hour more than my last salary, and up. Local admin wages: $10 an hour less than my last salary, or lower. (Writing jobs of any sort: nil or unpaid.)

But now that I've taken the leap to make my first real cold call, perhaps I'll get somewhere. If nobody will speak to me after looking at my resume, then I'd better speak first and hand over the credentials later. On that note, a conference centre on my list said call back today, but doesn't have an answering machine so I have to try calling again. When was the last time you dialed a number and it rang ten times? Extraordinary. Then there are two or three other places to call. Ever feel so lucky once that you think it couldn't possibly turn out well if you try again? Maybe that's just me. I'm more intimidated to call the other places since the first gal was so nice about it. I haven't been in that position for a while, but I'd say right now I'd be less terrified asking a guy out on a date than asking someone to talk to me about a job. We'll see how it goes next week. At least I got from moping in my pjs to getting on the phone. It's a start.

Sometimes there is an odd timing to unlucky happenings. In the case of happy coincidences, I've always liked the term "serendipity". My New Shorter Oxford gave me this definition: the origins of the word are the name Sarendip, a former name of Sri Lanka or Ceylon, to which Horace Walpole added "ity", based on a fairy tale called "Three Princes of Sarendip", "the heroes of which 'were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of'. (A supposed talent for) the making of happy and unexpected discoveries by accident or when looking for something else; such a discovery" is the correct definition. More loosely, "good luck, good fortune". Hm. I saw an animated children's story as a kid in which a dragon named Serendipity causes many happy coincidences, so I expected coincidence to be part of the definition, but it's not coincidence, it's "talent". While I would agree that there's no such thing as coincidence, replacing that with talent is kind of awful in the context of what I'm about to relate. So you could say finding this definition was itself an unexpected – but not necessarily happy – discovery.

The definition of "serendipitous" is "1, Of people: having a supposed talent for making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident". I guess Gary Oldman's character of Guildenstern – or at least, I always thought he was Guildenstern – was serendipitous in his scientific discoveries as they were wandering about Hamlet's castle. (If you haven't seen Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, go rent it, it's the perfect foil for Hamlet, and I think all the main players gave remarkable performances.) Or, "2, Of an event, discovery, meeting, etc.: occurring by (especially fortunate) chance; fortuitous." That seems to fit with my usage of the term up 'til now: when a series of happy events occurred which seemed unrelated, coincidental, my belief that things happen for a cosmic reason rather than mere chance or "accident" made me label it serendipitous. As in, the universe has conspired in my favour. But if it's down to a human talent for causing happy events, what do you call it when there's a confluence of un-happy occurrences? Is there an antonym for serendipity? I hope not. In this case, I prefer bad luck.

With all the people one knows in life all going about their business day in and day out – even without the six degrees of separation – it shouldn't be surprising that at certain times it will seem like good luck falls on everyone simultaneously. For example, in the past six month period, 5 healthy babies have been born to our friends and family, two friends extricated themselves from poisonous relationships and started their lives over at new jobs, Richard and I both made breakthroughs in getting help for our health, and although two people experienced serious heart attacks, both are recovering. One could see some serendipity in those good things all happening so close together. (Or maybe there was a long power outage in the Lower Mainland a year or so ago?) Anyway. Those are happy things which have much more to do with hard work by good people than with serendipity except in their timing. But when you turn that on its head and look at bad things happening to good people, you have to wonder if the universe is ticked for some reason, or is there a rogue dragon with less childish charm and more unassuaged rage galloping around burning holes in the normal weave of people's lives?

Take Tuesday, for instance. Allyson was having what she considered a good day, despite the fact that her workplace is a construction zone and she's trying to churn out Napoleons (Allyson, what is a Napoleon?) while tradesmen use air tools all around her. Unfortunately, a tradesman lost his grip on a large sheet of plywood just as she was loading her Napoleons into a display case nearby. Wham, right on her bent neck.

Aside from a nasty lump and a headache she'll be all right. Just bad luck. Could have been worse. He could have dropped his air nailer on her head instead of the plywood, or something. As a writer, always aware of cause and effect, and conspiring to worsen the conditions we put our characters in, I could trace backward from that situation and claim the cause was the business owner's choice to run his shop in the midst of such chaotic renovations, or trace a slightly different series of events in which Allyson might have ended up in hospital. But, since Allyson merely took the afternoon off, it will be shrugged off as an isolated incident for which the contractor is suitably apologetic.

What gets me thinking, however, is the fact that about the same time that Allyson's boss was applying ice to her neck, I was getting out of my three quarter tonne pickup (a.k.a. the tank) to examine the damage my rear passenger side fender and mudflap had just done – with an alarming sound like a bicycle being crushed – to the nose of a small black Cavalier driven by a 20-year-old boy. Whether it was all my doing as I moved over to the right turn lane, or the boy had picked up enough speed behind me approaching the light that as he tried to pass me to enter the right turning lane he couldn't avoid wedging his car into my wheel well, I'll probably never know. Given that he'd just had another accident a couple of weeks ago, I doubt he'll be entirely honest in his claim report. I had to be: with the canopy on my truck, I have a blind spot the size of a cow, and this guy's car was no taller than my fenders. He was three car lengths behind me, and then he was a black blot on my side mirror as I put the truck in park. I apologized profusely – he did not, now that I think of it – and the bill will probably be in the mail to me in a couple of months. The second bill, since back in February on another visit to Vancouver I put a crack in a parked car's bumper while navigating the wilds of Granville Island in a torrential downpour, trying to deliver my five-year-old niece to dance class. Sigh. As with the last time, there was hardly any damage to my truck, just a bend in the metal flange coming out from the wheel well where it scraped the paint off the car (mostly as I was moving the truck forward after the accident, rather than during it). Paint was the only casualty, no injuries – there wasn't even a bang, just the scraping noise. Again, could have been worse. I could have been travelling at road speed rather than slowed to a crawl for the light, in which case my tank would have crushed his car like a little black ant and him with it. So causally it was my fault, but the universe was still smiling on me because I thankfully did no worse than scrape some paint?

I guess what I'm mulling over is, does "serendipity" have an opposite? Do we have a word for people to whom bad luck gravitates as if they have a talent for it? Or days on which the bad luck concentrates in ripples? I wonder if I asked around, whether anything unexpected and "bad" (whether an injury as in Allyson's case, or merely an unfortunate expense as in mine) happened to the rest of our circle of friends around lunch hour this Tuesday? Or is it me, and the accidents are just part of this slump I'm in, where being unemployed could be said to be the root cause of the accident, since I wouldn't have been in Vancouver either time if I was busy at home with work? Then again, the worst luck Richard and I have had was just under a year ago when we headed south to California on that very expensive road trip from hell, so perhaps I should be blaming our truck! (I love my truck. Sat in a Smart Car at the auto show last Friday and felt like I was trapped in a Campbell's soup can with windows.) I guess, to go back to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, we rely on chance to be unexpected, unpredictable. When Guildenstern flips a coin, over and over, and the litany "heads… heads… heads…" has gone on so long that even preoccupied Rosencrantz takes notice, we're not amazed, we're disturbed. We can take the bad luck because we know there's an equal chance of good luck; even if we believe fate is the result of choice, we must believe our luck can simply change, for the better. And we console ourselves that it could always be worse. My stance is to work hard at getting the choices right, but to ask the universe for a little help, like with my job hunt. And to you I say, wish me luck.

Anyone who's shared a meal with me or other members of my family lately knows that we take the phrase "you are what you eat" very seriously. Food allergies were something my middle sister investigated since her teens, when she developed eczema and began looking for other options besides just treating the skin flare-ups. She found when she stopped eating tomatoes and garlic, among other things, the skin condition calmed down. Since then she's been seeing a talented naturopath, and her vast improvement in health convinced my mother, who like myself has struggled with a weight problem all her life, to pay Dr. Hal a visit. To her astonishment my mother found out she also has food allergies, though she had neither the skin problems of my sister, nor my digestive issues. Taking away the wheat and dairy from her diet, along with alleviation of imbalances to her thyroid and adrenals among other treatments, have made a huge difference to her health. I've been certain for several years that I have a wheat allergy, and avoid it most of the time, so to find that both my mother and sister are allergic to it didn't suprise me. But I wanted to know for sure just what I'm allergic to, especially since beginning naturopathic treatment for my digestive ailments. A couple of weeks ago I had a test done called an "IgG Food Antibody Assessment".

This morning I saw my naturopath to go over the IgG results. I'm very surprised, and it explains a lot about how inexplicably sick I've been feeling since starting a very restrictive "anti-candida" diet (to get rid of a severe digestive yeast problem). The things I thought were allergens are low on the list or not allergens at all, and the most extreme allergen is one I never would have guessed. I thought I'd make a few lists to highlight the irony of all this.

Some of My Favourite Foods:

sushi

lasagna

cheesecake

blueberry muffins

yoghurt

French toast

ice cream

calamari

taco salad

cheese

kahlua

gomae (spinach-sesame salad)

peanut butter

pizza

hummous

prime rib & caesar salad

Richard's mashed potatoes

...and lots of other things of course.

For 2 months while on the Anti-Candida restrictions I haven't had:

yeast

wheat

all dairy except butter and cream

sugar or other sweetening additives like honey or dextrose

anything with vinegar in it, ie ketchup

fermented foods, ie soy sauce

mushrooms

oranges

blueberries

cantaloupe

grapes

dried fruit

black or green tea

peanuts

...and to make up for not having cheese or mushrooms or peanut butter, I added:

oatmeal

corn tortilla chips

popcorn (Richard even bought me an air popper)

more seasonings, especially garlic

and what I now know are harmless things like black beans, peas, and butternut squash...

...and after two and a half months I was still having symptoms which could be attributed to the yeast state, to allergies, or to a mild lingering flu. Hmmm...

...so I handed over $450 and two vials of blood for this very thorough antibody test, and here are the things I'm allergic to, from most severe at the top to mildest at the bottom:

corn gluten (which is in everything from corn on the cob to condiments)

coffee

sesame seeds & oil

oats

yeast

wheat

oysters

alfalfa (the closest I ever get to that stuff is the llama's treats so no loss there)

cottage cheese & ricotta (key ingredient of killer lasagna)

cane sugar

blueberries

peanuts

lactalbumin (a.k.a."milk ingredients" or "whey")

olives

garlic

and egg yolks.

The only extreme allergy, the thing I must never ever eat again if I know what's good for me, is corn gluten. I'm three times as allergic to that as to wheat. Also in the no-no list is oats. And what significant change to my diet did I make after ruling out the yeast and wheat and dairy (which was toughest!) this past two months? I added corn and oats. Figures. It had begun to feel "normal" to have to stock every room in the house and every jacket pocket with tissue for my stuffy nose, but now I know better. No more oatmeal or popcorn, no more tortilla chips with my guacamole, and I should feel a hell of a lot better.

I already feel somewhat better knowing I will be able to eat dairy again (other than additives and ricotta). As soon as this yeast flush is finished, I'm going for ice cream to celebrate! But no lasagna for me any more - even with my pasta-free recipe, I still can't get away with it unless I leave out my favourite parts, the ricotta, basil & egg yolk layer and the heavy dose of garlic and olives in the meat sauce. It just wouldn't be the same.

The silver lining in all of this may come in a couple of months or so. When the anti-candida diet is over, and I've removed all the allergens from my diet for 30 days, I can start experimenting. That is, I can add one thing on the mild end of the allergen list (the last 6 items) to my diet, wait a week, and see if I reacted to it (apparently it usually takes up to 4 days for the antibodies to react). Since I've been eating egg yolks and garlic almost daily for years, it's more than likely I can still eat them - occasionally - without affect. Things I haven't had while on the yeast diet, like blueberries and peanuts, could turn out to be more serious offenders than the test could pick up, so again I have to introduce them one at a time and observe. The egg yolk thing has blown me away - I scramble two farm-fresh eggs for breakfast almost every morning - but that's balanced out by soon being able to eat my favourite Italian parmesan and Tilamook 7 year cheddar again. Not to mention my awesome cheesecake, once in a while. Woo-hoo, as Allyson would say. And the corn thing may be a bit difficult for eating out, much as the wheat has been, but hey, unlike my sister I'm NOT allergic to chocolate! So how bad is it, really? Oh... except that there's dairy in chocolate, so I'll have to stick to the good stuff like Purdy's, that actually lists skim milk powder instead of a vague description like "milk ingredients" that could have lactalbumin in it. I think. Grr. Oh, and since cornstarch is commonly added to cocoa, I'm glad I didn't buy the giant Coscto can of Fry's. There's an additive-free brand that my mother buys which I will have to track down in Kamloops.

The rest of March, while I'm still on the anti-candida regime, will continue to be hellish because in addition to losing my routine meals which contain things like cheddar and vinegar, now I have to pass on the oatmeal AND the whole eggs for breakfast, resist when Richard makes popcorn, use god-knows-what-else to season my beef instead of Montreal steak spice which contains garlic, and just stay home because eating out is out of the question. I'm going to have to find a good cookbook devoted to homemade condiments and sauces, too. Caesar salad is still off the menu but so far that's just made me more creative with salads, which is a good thing. It could be worse.

It's going to take some care and a lot of will power, but once I'm not eating the things that make me sick, I may finally be able to eat more of the things I've avoided for years out of concern for my weight. Like high carb foods such as rice (sushi!!), potatoes, beans, bananas, mangoes, cherries, yoghurt, and regular rather than sugar-free chocolate. We have three apple trees, an apricot tree, one mature and two growing cherry trees, crabapples, grape vines, raspberry bushes, red and black currants, and space for a vegetable patch, so it's a relief to me that I'm not allergic to any of my favourite fruits and vegetables (except blueberries) and may be able to eat all of those things to my heart's content this summer. On top of a big bowl of homemade ice cream! Don't I have a one track mind.

So that's the scoop (ha ha). Next order of business: figure out what I can make for dinner. All this talk of food is making me hungry.

Warning: the following story is not suitable for young readers or anyone with a sentimental attachment to rodents (or chocolates, for that matter).

After Allyson sent me a link to blogger Lindsey Mitchell's rodent rant this morning, I felt inspired to relate the latest in our little Nutcracker battle, which began, appropriately, just after Christmas. The onset of the warm weather must have encouraged a new mouse dynasty to move into the neighbourhood, because we hadn't been plagued with them for quite a while and thinking them vanquished, I'd forgotten to be vigilant. The first sign that while we were away for Christmas, creatures were, in fact, stirring quite boldly, came when we arrived home on the 27th.

Relaxing on the couch and enjoying our Christmas tree that evening, my eye naturally strayed to the wrapped boxes of Purdy's truffles which were all that we had bought each other for Christmas (aside from our "new" 1987 Toyota Cressida, but more on that later). In the midst of suggesting we open our gifts, I noticed tiny shards of paper on the floor next to my box. Having to wait until after Christmas to open my gift was bad enough. The thought that a mouse might have eaten a single one of my hedgehogs, each as big as it was, had me fuming. We ran to the tree, grabbed our gifts and inspected the damage. Hurrah for Purdy's, their heavy gold gift wrap and thick boxes had foiled even this mighty mouse. The only damage was three spots of chewed wrapping on mine, and no attempts at all on Richard's box. Relieved, we quit grumbling and returned to the couch to watch a movie and indulge. After the movie, I very carefully put the lid on my box and placed it on the highest shelf of our metal shelving unit housing the TV. I didn't notice where Richard left his smaller, plastic-lidded box. We retired for the night, first Richard, then myself quite late, and having been away for several days, fell asleep quite soundly in our own bed at last.

But a good night's sleep was not to be. I awoke just before 6am to the awareness of empty air where Richard had been, and a noise in the kitchen. I ran down the hall as my eyes adjusted to the sight of a large naked man chasing a tiny mouse across the great room floor. He thought the mouse (which runs like a racehorse on those tiny legs, how is that possible?) had run past me to the stairwell and down to the basement, so he ran down there barefoot (no mean feat with our unfinished steps and cluttered concrete floors). While he was looking for it in the rafters below the fireplace, I stood still and listened. Sure enough, the sound of something rolling came from the door to my office. Rolling is the key – we sometimes leave wolferin, a dessicating blood thinner poison – in chunks in mouse-ridden spots, where the little bugger chews the edges round, and rolls it to its cache location of choice (ie a plant pot, a box of electrical equipment, Richard's old shoes). So I wasn't surprised it was rolling something. But when I surprised it and it fled through the crack between the drywall and the brick fireplace, the ball of poison it left on my office step turned out not to be poison at all. "Richard!" I called.

He came running up the stairs, having given up trying to locate the mouse's route upward. I presented him with the mouse's booty. The hoarse inward gasp and look of horror on Richard's face is hard to describe. He dashed to the tall end table behind the couch, on which I had an arrangement of greenery, golden pear ornaments and fresh pomegranates, on top of which he'd left his box of Purdy's. The mouse hadn't touched the pomegranates while we were away, and as far as we knew had not ventured at all up the side of the couch to the tabletop before this. But the little bugger must have a fine-tuned chocolate-loving nose, because it had only taken it four hours, from my 2 am bedtime until Richard woke to its noises just before 6:00, for it to map the potentially uncharted wilds of the top of the couch (prior residents knew the interior of the couch well, sad to say), find its way to the box of Purdy's, pry up the fitted plastic lid, and steal the pecan-topped truffle (Richard's favourite), rolling it back down the couch, onto the floor (probably the noise which woke Richard), and under the other couch. Which is where it must have been hiding until I stood still long enough. We wouldn't even have known, if the chocolate wasn't a bit too big for the mouse to squeeze along after itself through the gap in the wall. Had I gone to bed when Richard did at 10, who knows how many the thief might have stolen. Richard inspected the remains of his Christmas present, found only the one missing, and put the rest up on the shelf with mine. He was already padding back down the hall to bed when I heard the mouse again, in the kitchen this time. I spooked it and it ran, first to the hallway, where Richard shouted and blocked its path to the stairwell. It swerved and ran towards the hall closet. I grabbed a pair of boots out of the way and opened the front door, shrieking. It ran out at lightning speed, its little heart probably beating half out of its chest. I slammed the door. "It's out," I said, and collapsed in massive giggles. Naked man and giggly girl went back to bed.

You could say we won that battle, having deprived the thief of its sugar fix. And being cautious, I kept the kitchen spotless – with extra Windex – for the remainder of the week, also replacing the stashes of mouse poison we'd so foolishly stopped using after a mouse-free summer. All seemed quiet. No telltale rolling noises, no poop in the sink (the poison makes the mouse thirsty). Until New Year's Eve, when Richard cooked the turkey we hadn't had for Christmas. A big meal with all the trimmings meant counters full of dishes, gravy and cheese sauce splashes, bits of cranberry-pecan stuffing (it must have been the pecans), and the pervasive scent of turkey. Too much cleanup for me on a New Year's Eve. Too much food for a wise mouse to resist. On New Year's day, surveying the massive cleanup job ahead of me, I found a chunk of poison moved from its spot on the counter to the stovetop next to the front right element. Ugh. I also found poop – black, not green, which meant the bugger hadn't eaten enough poison to kill it – in the sink beneath the dishes. "Bleach", Richard said. This was war.

I just wanted to know how the mouse was getting onto the counter top. I bleached the face of the cabinets, especially the drawers, thinking this mighty mouse might be climbing straight up like the grandfather clock in Hickory Dickory Dock (which I had always thought was impossible, but I was starting to change my mind). I pulled the hand towels from the drawer handles at the thought that mice might be using them to reach my counters. I made sure there were no other easy paths upward from the kitchen floor. A few days into the New Year, I solved the mystery. That morning, the poison wasn't just next to the element on the stove, it was jammed part way underneath it. I stared. The metal trays beneath our elements are tin-foil free: Richard feels that lining the trays changes heat distribution. So looking beneath the element, you see a metal tray with a large hole in the centre. This leads, Richard explained, to a cavity between the oven and the range for insulation, going around the back and underneath. I suddenly remembered the oven drawer, which had been empty since I discovered that mice had chewed up my oven mitts and made a disgusting mess on top of the roasting pans. I opened it to find a mouse dropping dungheap. There it was, the perfect countertop access: the new hole in the floor behind the oven for the gas line Chris added last summer, an undisturbed drawer, and a pathway complete with mouse-sized entrance to our stovetop. The only solution for now is more poison, and more bleach.

The battle continues, the chunk of poison always near the front element, and poop regularly in my sink, which was particularly awful when I'd left the clean dishes to drain and the poop appeared underneath AFTER I'd put all the dishes away. I dry them off and put them away before bed every night now. A good day is when the poison appears chewed and the droppings are green. I usually get a morning off if I bleached throroughly the night before. But each time the green and the quiet convince me I've gotten rid of the menace, the next day there's new evidence. Reading Lindsey Mitchell's blog, I am suddenly feeling a) guilty for using poison instead of humane traps and b) certain that my mice are close relatives of hers because they are also displaying NIMH-like tendencies, always moving and storing the damn poison but never eating enough of it, thus escaping certain extermination. (Except for the one that made a nest in our Christmas decorations box using the Santa hat and the basket of thread-wrapped ball ornaments, in which it died and turned into a perfect skeleton with a grey fur boa.) That said, I may have solved the not-eating-enough problem; instead of a chunk which can be rounded and rolled, I left a mound of loose shards in the oven drawer hangout. I sat reading on Friday morning, trying at first to tune out a bizarre noise which I finally realized was the echoing-on-metal sound of it chewing like mad in the oven drawer. Then it had the gall (at 8:30 in the morning!) to run across my kitchen floor, under the main couch I was seated on, pause there while listening to me pull my feet onto the couch in instinctive fright, and then scurry in a smoky grey blur (how do the bloody little things move so fast!?) to the smaller couch and down into my office where it again squeezed through one of the gaps between the drywall and the brick fireplace. I have restocked the drawer in the hopes of imminent mummification, but when cousin Greg and Richard have finished their work on their Mogs for the weekend, I'm going to get Richard to go crazy with his bottle of expanding foam in every last nook and cranny, even the ones that appear too small for a 2 inch long critter to fit through. Because this has got to end soon or my nightmares are going to feature me in a nightgown and Richard in a brass-buttoned tin soldier jacket, doing battle with 6 foot tall sword-bearing rodents. I'm glad I didn't watch the Nutcracker Ballet this Christmas. All this angst over just one mouse. At least I'm not alone.