We’ve had a house guest for the last couple of weeks. I first became aware of him when I came downstairs in the morning and I saw Ollie and Beck posed like a couple of German shorthairs on a grouse, staring at the base of the refrigerator. It didn’t take a genius (I am of course a genius but it didn’t take one) to guess that we had a mouse. Like most problems we face we tacitly decided to ignore it and hope that it went away. Maybe we figured it was Ollie’s job to handle small rodent issues. After all he is a cat, sort of. Ollie’s concept of his job description was to stand guard and make sure he didn’t get out of the kitchen. He took up a position in the entry to the kitchen and stared at the cupboard below the sink for hours. I’m not sure he’d know what to do if the mouse ever came out.

Beck doesn’t work on Mondays, a situation that I’m wildly jealous of, but that’s another blog. So on her day off she went shopping and brought home a mouse trap. When I got home from work she excitedly called me up to the kitchen and opened the cupboard so I could see an empty mouse trap. “He’s gone!”

Apparently she’d trapped the little bastard but he’d managed to get out. “There he is!” He must have been injured and stunned because he was sitting on top of the plumbing under the sink, not making any effort to get away. I got my work gloves reached in and grabbed the little pest and took him out to the garbage can. He will either die out there, chew his way out and move back in or since they pick up today, be transported to a landfill and think he’s gone straight to heaven.

I’m looking out my window watching a fox just outside the fence. She’s stalking something.. Boom just pounced. It’s a beautiful little one, all bushy tailed and thick coated. Not the mangy ones you see sometimes. She just trotted away. I love foxes. Four years ago our area had a bad problem with rabbits. I’d have a half dozen in my yard methodically destroying my garden. And then the foxes moved in. You see them all over now. And you rarely see a rabbit. I love foxes.

Speaking of fox trots, I danced my ass off last night. My wife’s company had their Winter Solstice Party. It was held in the old Milwaukee Road Depot in downtown Minneapolis. Just a beautiful turn of the century Renaissance Revival building that was closed in ’71 and sat empty until a couple of years ago. They’ve restored it and put an ice rink where the trains used to come in. Great place for a party.

Rebecca has worked a Martin/Williams Advertising for 28 years. Longer than anyone. Steve Collins, the retiring president was giving the traditional toast before the dinner, toasting the fifteen people who’d been there more than twenty years, saying that he’d been there longer than almost anyone, anyone except for one woman….”the Grande Dame of the agency.” I about fell out of my chair. That’s going to be good for so much teasing. She wouldn’t even stand up and acknowledge the toast. The thing is I’m sure that the hordes of youngsters that work there were shocked. They must think she started when she was five. She really looked hot last night. A glittery top with tight black pants…the woman has an amazing ass for fifty. And her skin, her amazing skin….which is like velvet, completely void of wrinkles. She was almost forty when she stopped getting carded in bars.

Now I’ve been kind of a curmudgeon at these things in the past, I sometimes have a hard time being around a lot of drinking people, but last night I overcame my natural grumpiness and had a great time. One thing that contributed to my fun was the fact that you will rarely run into such a concentration of truly beautiful women. If you like tall blondes, you might just have a heart attack. Tall blondes that weren’t afraid to wear heels. Don’t think I’ve ever had to look up to make eye contact with that many women in one room before. And it wasn’t just tall blondes either. There were women who could have passed for Tinkerbell and pretty much everything in between.

OK, OK I’m an incredibly shallow sexist pig. I’ll cop to that.

Great basketball movie.

It’s a little known fact that car manufacturers the world over have entered into collusion with the banking industry in an effort to keep the world’s population in debt. Chips have been installed or retrofitted into all automobiles, directly connecting them to your bank account so that as soon as you’re feeling a little flush, bang, something vital to the car’s functioning goes kaput. Last week, just when I thought I was getting a little ahead of the financial eight ball, Quinn’s car started acting like it had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. Nothing a new Alternator and $400 couldn’t cure. Bah humbug.

And then of course there’s the magical malfunction, thrown in just to embarrass you, add insult to injury. When she got the car back, the heater fan wouldn’t work. A problem when the temperature is hovering around zero. After checking the fuses, I called the mechanic and said that I thought maybe they disconnected something in the process of re-alternation. I drove the car over without the benefit of heat and they took it in for a look, five minutes later John, the mechanic, came back to tell me that the fan was working just fine. He did a good job of hiding it, but I could sense his contempt, his pity for the crazy office monkey that couldn’t figure out how to get a heater fan to work.

Today we were reminded that smokers can’t light up in the garage on the lower level. I knew that. I understand that. I can also understand that when the wind chill is -5, one might want to puff in the comfort an enclosed structure. Yet I have no problem with this decree. It’s just the reason they gave. They said that there were vent in the garage and smoke was getting into the building. Excuse me? A couple of cigarettes compared to thirty cars going in and out??? WTF

Weird atmospheric phenomenon Saturday night. When I first saw it I thought it was the Northern Lights. But they were in the west, and in fact all around, and the sky was overcast. Everywhere in the city columns of light were shooting vertically into the sky, like lasers. It must have been the combination of ice crystals in the air and the stiill night that was causing any bright light on the ground to project itself straight up.

I’m sitting at my computer watching a squirrel spin around on the suet feeder we have suspended in space from the tree. He jumps from the trunk to the feeder and grabs onto the cage that holds the suet. He’s hanging upside down enjoying a nice meal. Bushy tailed tree rat.

Well what to write about.

Fishing on the Crow Wing River at the end of a busy artillary range?

Massive software hose-up at work?

New computer?

Daughters no longer being little girls, but definitely young women?

The boys who are in my house waiting for my girls to show up?

Discovering that my new nieghbor grew up in the same town that I did?

What a sorry Xangan I am for not posting or commenting?

None of the above?

Just checked the FedEx site and my computer is on the truck. Now if the truck doesn’t get washed away in the storm that seems to be moving in, I should have it today. Then I should be able to Xangafy without going downstairs to the Q-cave and using her computer, or sneaking a Xanga fix at work, like I am now.

This weekend I played golf for the first time in about forty years. I broke 100…on almost every hole.
I was playing with Mountain Man and his wife, they are patient and forgiving, and he has three five gallon buckets of balls that he’s found, so it really didn’t matter that I failed to clear any of the water hazzards. I am however not about to join the Republican Party. But I might get some plaid pants.

We saw a nasty front coming in on about the 14th hole so we raced back to the clubhouse. We got to the car in just as the torrential downpour started, I was fumbling with some equipment or clothing for about 30 seconds before I got in the car and got fairly wet. So there we sat in the car, it’s raining about as hard as it can rain and the cart is parked behind the car. At first we decided to wait til it eased up before putting the cart away and then Mrs. Mountain, We’ll call her Collette, because that’s her name, said she was going to move the cart and we should drive over to pick her after she parked it. Well I couldn’t let her do that, since they had been nice enough to take me along, so I jumped out of the car and into the cart and drove it back to where it belonged. It was amazing, the rain was almost horizontal, with huge drops densly packed. I felt like I was on the deck of the HMS surprise in a typhoon of the coast of Chile. I was completely soaked, and I wasn’t out there for more than two minutes.

On Saturday I dragged my ’63 Fender Mustang out of the basement and cleaned it up, removed the homemade decal from the body without messing up the finish, restrung it and made it pretty and playable. I even replaced a tension spring on one of the saddles that holds the strings in place at the bridge, pretty amazing for someone as unhandy as me. And cleaned thirty years worth of finger skin of the fretboard. I’d forgotten how good that old piece of plywood sounds, even if (or because) it has ancient technology and design.

Well I put in the order for the iMac. Couldn’t sell B on the bigger screen but I did manage to get the one with the DVD burner. B got a discount from her agency and another one from the parent company, a couple of hundred bucks. The one from the corporation was about 90 bucks and you have to order through Apple. I wanted to give the business to the local reseller that has my old machine in the shop, I told the sales guy that I would buy from him if he gave me some kind of deal from the repair bill (diagnostic fee and file transfer) and he never even called me back. I ordered online. Go figure.

Big day yesterday. Worked in the yard all day putting wood chips down in the garden. It looks much better now, the lighter chips make the green stand out more. Not much is blooming right now, the tulips are done, but they were pretty spectacular. Some are pastel pink and yellow and there’s another bed of bright red and yellow. They probably would have lasted longer but they took a beating in the storms this week.

The big news is on the birding front. We had an indigo bunting at our feeder! It was there all day, I hope that means it’s nesting near by. I’m wondering if they are making some kind of comeback. I used to see them pretty frequently up in Moorhead where I grew up, but until last summer I’d only had a couple of sightings over the last forty some years. Last summer I saw all kinds of them up on the Crow Wing River on a fishing trip and now I have one at my feeder. They are so beautiful.

The week before last I also saw a goshawk in the back yard. He was swooping through the trees and perching on our fence, looking for the unsuspecting chipmunk or sparrow. At first I thought it was a coopers; they have the same basic shape and wing configuration, and I see them pretty often back there. But this one didn’t have any stiping on it’s breast, just a pale grey, lightly mottled. I thought that goshawks were much larger though. After checking the books, I found that males are much smaller than females and that they were about the size of a black crowned night heron. It couldn’t have been anything else. So two new entries into my long list of birds seen from my backyard.