Of Men and Mice

We are finally insulating the house we live in this fall

Wow, we had more than 6,000 blog posts visits in the last month, we normally have 2,500, so hello new readers, whoever you are. Strangely, 80% of our readers in the last week and month are American, so I guess its not the result of our important Canadian visitors last month!

Garry had a health problem back in July that I did not write about (I just checked to see) while we were teaching English. He toughed it out, only missing a half day of teaching while in a lot of pain with a week on antibiotics and several painful doctor visits to get rid of an infected boil. Last week he realized he had another one and as a real man, tried to avoid going to the doctor. For the last two days he  rejected the idea of going to get it lanced again, because it was so painful.

Sunday he almost cancelled his normal day, after driving the milk into Dnepro, because he was feeling so bad. But he toughed it out, sitting through the sermon, and teaching his English classes, and even going to another village to breed some lady's cow when we got home (she had phoned him while we were driving to church that morning). He came home, collapsed on the couch under a pile of blankets, and didn't even get up to find out out why someone came to talk to him about a problem in the barn. I looked at his leg and said he should go to the doctors, since the redness was expanding but he was optimistic that the hot compresses he'd been applying were working.

 Early Monday morning- like three am- he was awake and watching the World Series on television and the football game over the internet, with the computer sitting in the middle of the bed when I woke up. Monday morning at seven am he went over to the barn to find out what the problem had been the night before. It turns out a cow had fallen in the barn, and they didn't know what to do. He came home after getting things under control (he helped get the cow up), took his temperature (100.6 F) got a shower and spent the rest of the day flat on his back in bed, while I told various people (students, workers) that he was sick and was sleeping... they would look sad and leave. It seemed like every time I would get started crocheting, I'd have to answer the door, so I was getting very little done on my latest project. I am trying to get things made for all the grand kids for Christmas.

Is that snow?

Tuesday morning at four am I woke up and Garry was watching the Raptors game on television and he told me that he was going to the doctors in the morning. By seven thirty am Garry was using the wipers to clear some little balls of snowy stuff off the window before we drove in to the city. He called Victor to meet us at the clinic (Garry was worried he'd end up in hospital otherwise, like I did in February 2015) after we stopped for breakfast at Mc Donalds. Garry had McMuffins and orange juice, it was his second day in a row without drinking coffee, he was really feeling bad. Normally he makes and drinks a pot every morning.

They pumped him full of Novocain and cut his leg open to get the infection out, gave him several prescriptions for painkillers and antibiotics, and scheduled a return visit for tomorrow. The doctor told him to spend the rest of the day in bed and drink lots of fluids. Which he did after he drove home, with a stop at a grocery store so I could run in and buy some liter boxes of juices and Pepsi.
 He tells me that his leg feels better than he thought it would, after his nap, but he's worried about them cleaning it out with alcohol like they did on his return visits in July. It was extremely painful and why he didn't want to go there again, I think.

Meanwhile, less door answering for me today, although I did enjoy another skype video chat with my daughter and baby, and caught a photo of the snow flurries falling while Garry was sleeping.

We are having our annual battle with the mice who are looking for a warm place to stay with the weather getting colder. I brought back a couple of easy emptying traps from Manitoba, and last week I finally found them. I had put them away when the ambassador was coming, they were on a shelf, behind the jam jars. I have caught a half dozen so far, most of them in a drawer in the bathroom cabinet. I have washed the drawers out twice now, but it seems that there is a large family of mice, because they are smallish mice dead in the trap.

Napping after a hard night's work

Box has been doing her part in catching mice, but she doesn't eat them. Last week Sunday we found a dead mouse in the middle of the living room carpet. She's caught a couple and killed a few of them. However, she likes to play with them for a while, so sometimes they get away.

Last spring she had a mouse in the living room and we watched her pull the sleeve of my sweater that was on the carpet over the mouse to hide it! Then she'd wait for it to make a break for it before catching it again. She lost that one.
One morning last week, Garry had a box of unshelled walnuts on the floor in the living room and watched Box put the little mouse she'd caught in the box and use her paw to pull some nuts over the mouse, wait for it to move, and then jump in the box to catch it!

She keeps busy stalking them, racing around to check out suspicious noises all night long. One night Garry got up in the middle of the night and there she was, playing with a mouse right in front of the toilet. It was on the rug so he lifted the rug and dropped the mouse in the toilet and flushed it.

 Needles tends to sleep and eat when he comes inside, although he has caught some at times. He will eat his when he get them, but is not good at seeing them, as the vet students found out when we saw a mouse in a cupboard in the arch room... Needles jumped inside and caught the ball of yarn instead of the mouse hiding there.

Update! Garry is feeling "better than he has in a week" this morning (the next day) and being a man, he's been outside "getting everyone working" and working himself. Not sure how he will shower before heading to the doctors this afternoon with that giant bandage wrapped around his leg.
 He tells me when he got up this morning there was a mouse dragging my trap around in the drawer in the bathroom, it had somehow been caught by the leg instead of the head as the rest have been, so he released it outside. It won't be back, with the cows moving to the other barn, the cats don't get milk now, so they wait for me to feed them by the back door.