... but then I do look pretty darn rediculous.
Some fun and interesting events of the past couple weeks to give an idea of whats been going on:
I have been observing classes at my primary school, often roped into helping out in unexpected ways. Besides the general sitting and doing nothing, I have been asked to draw things on the board for the students to copy down. These include, a prehistoric man's axe, an airplane, a drum and a banana. Also I have helped teach one little french song which now some of the children sing whenever they see me.
i have done a big village survey, household by household trying to start up a latrine project. So far it is still just getting off the ground, hoping to find some super funding source, or to scale back the project in a way that does not upset people.
Have been helping to peel bissap 'fruit' for drying with my moms and aunts most nights after dinner. Has made for some good bonding time, some interesting disagreements, and my sore caloused fingers. Nearly all that bissap then has been deposited into my back yard to sit in the sun, then taken to town to sell.
Have been helping out in my dads garden. Mostly I have just been the official water puller, filling up my younger brothers watering cans. I did do some weeding and they planted a bunch of eggplant where i had cleared a space. I talked to them about how good it is to water these plants regularly, and cause there are so many of them, trees and okra and eggplant and mango and guava trees, they have certain days where they water certain things, and drag me along when there is a lot of water to be pulled. Usually we all end up tired, wet and caked in silty mud, fun fun.
Walked to a far part of the village to see the chief among other people, a couple little boys, probably 6ish, ran out to walk with me. One had on shorts that were generally clean and only had one hole, only that hole was really big and right at the crotch of his pants. Pantless children are not unusual in my village, it genuinely seems to be more fun to run around, do cartwheels and generally be a kid when such stuffy adult worries are not on them. He didnt seem concerened and I didnt say anything about it. As we walked, we picked up more and more kids into our group, for no real reason, and they all followed me around, facinated whenever I would say something in Serere. Eventually they all wandered off and I brought the two kids back home. When his mom saw him, she started yelling at him for walking around with those shorts on. Other women standing around tried not to chuckle. She asked him where he had walked and when he told her, she yelled 'what?! you went to Ngodagen and back dressed in THAT?' then he ran away and everyone started laughing. Not sure if i was about to get blame passed to me i slowly backed away and went home.
One afternoon a man asked me about Canada, he wants to move there. It is cold, I tell him. Yes, he says, isnt that great! He also asks about Boston and says he has a relative working there, and asks where I am from and how far all of these places are from one another. Do I live near Celine Dion or Michael Jackson? That is too bad, they are great singers. Is it also cold in the US or is it just cold in Canada? Do I own a car? How much was my plane ticket? Lots of lots of questions. It was cool though cause he spoke in a way that made it pretty easy to understand and explained several words and expressions. Cool, just.. odd.
My dad asks me if I am buying a sheep for Tabaski. No, yeah, they are expensive. Getting a new outfit? No, yeah, that is expensive too. Are you going to the little building to pray? No? What, you are not Muslim? I think we have been over this before, like a million times, but it always seems to strike them as new information when i tell them i am not, in fact, Muslim.
And finally, there was one rediculous day where we ate lunch at like 4:40. That did not make any sence to me and since I do not know any serere word for 'late' i was left confused. 'why are we eating now?' - 'it is lunch, we are hungry' duh, of course, oh well.
There should be a Tabaski post at some point, what a crazy holiday that was...
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
How to Kill a Mouse
Ndiouma Diom's first in a series of how-tos for living in Senegal
-be sure to take notes, this will be on the final
-appologies to animal lovers, Ndiouma is usually not this crazy, and this is the longest post ever
-also, sorry, I really am ok, I just wrote this all out in the middle of the night one night and needed to make a post out of it
-also, i really am only half as crazy as I sound
+Step one- live in a hut with one or more mice. You dont need to go out and find them, they will find you.
+Next, allow yourself to be slowly and helplessly deprived of sleep for several months...
+Despite the small size of the intruders, they will delight in the great amounts of noise they can make frolicking about your room, mere feet from your annoyed head. They will cleverly gather up debris from outside and all your untidy bits you leave carelessly about inside: bottle caps, loose change, bits of metal, glass or shell, scraps of paper, clothespins, keys, thumbtacks and even nail clippers. Once collected, they will wait until you are at the very threshold of sleep, where sounds become nearly surreal and lost in your own head, when even the crickets (who have also moved in,) have almost been turned into the white-noise of night. When you are discovered in this state, they will chew on and bang these items together in one of the corners of the thatch where they nest. There favorite used to be right over your head, but graciously they have moved much of their oporation to the corner at your feet. Still, this does not amuse you.
+A few, seemingly inconsequential details: As it happens, you filled up the little plastic trash bag outside and have not had time to find another to stuff your sticky jolly rancher wrappers into and instead you choose to stuff them in a tin can. It is a chilly evening and likely to be a cold night so you get your sweater out of your clothes trunk. It is the bottom one of your two trunks, the clothes one is a lighter, tin box with thin wooden slats on the bottom. Your food trunk is heavier, sitting on top of the other one, made of thick cast metal with a good seal as to keep out bugs. After two recent care-packages and a trip to the grocery, it is briming with deliciousness.
+The mouse chews a chunk out of the eye-dropper you use to bleach your drinking water. Luckily you happen to have a spare and the bottle is relocated inside your dresser. The dresser has a single-piece plywood back and should rest flush with the walls in the corner it is in. Heat, humidity, age or maybe just poor craftmanship have made the back warped such that there is a permenent space between it and the wall. A perfect hideout for all sorts of hut critters. Push on the top front of the dresser and it will rock back and forth again, annoying, but not squashing, what hides behind. The little can of candy trash is put on the floor next to the trunks.
+You are generally a lover of all things nature. In fact, you cannot think of a time when you directly caused the death of anything above the arthropod kingdom. Maybe a few fish on various summer trips with grandpa camping. Keep you awake countless times for countless nights, leave poop on everything left in the open, chew your stuff, hide your stuff and screw with your ability to purify water, then soon someone will indeed find themselves in a world of pain.
+Nearly a month ago, your host dad bought you some poison for the mouse problem. You had entertained guests for nearly a week and the mice had not entertained them in the slightest. You were all kept awake by frequent and noisy late-night shenanigans. The poison came in the form of a few small white capsuels. Your dad put them in a little cup of water, broke each one open, stirred it and put it on the floor in the corner by the dresser. 'Soon it will die,' he said confidently. That was nearly a month ago. While it may have killed some deserving roaches the size of band-aids, there has been no evidence that it made any impact on the local rodentia.
+You wake up numerous times a night, every night, to the mouse doing his best impression of a marching band around the top of the walls of your hut below the thatch. Shine your flashlight, make noise, slap the walls in the hopes of scaring it away so you can get a little more sleep without having to get up and untuck your mosquito net. The mouse seems to know your threats are empty when made from under the net and you are lucky if it even gives the mouse pause. Inevitably, you wind up draging yourself up and out of the net, reaching for the blunted stick you keep over the door for mouse pumeling, stomping angerly to the area of noise and beating, scrapeing and stabing at the gap over the wall. The mouse scampers away, presumably unharmed, its nest disturbed, You find your keys and go back to bed. The room is quiet untill the mouse calls your blugg, finds a plastic bottle cap and goes back to his fun. Rince and repeat.
+Mice have other enemies here besides you. The former volunteer had a few cats. At the mention or sight of the cats, your family will lament 'he should have taken them to America.' Your family, in fact, seems to generally despise them. They do have some advocates. When she was cleaning up leftovers from a lunch bowl, you asked your aunt what she would do with the remaining fish bones and scraps of vegetables (who eats eggplant anyway?). She said she was throwing them to the cats and they sat nearby, eagerly awaiting their turn. Other than leftovers, it is unclear what they eat on a daily basis. They are all quite thin yet have defined taught muscles and seem constantly on the prowl. You once saw one pounce on something near your hut one day. Trying to stay casual, you snuck a look at what the cat was playing with between its paws, letting go briefly and pouncing again. You hoped so much it was a mouse, your mouse, give the other mice something to think about. It was a lizard. A stupid, bug eating, sleeps all night quietly lizard. Stupid cat. There are also snakes out and about. From your amateur estimation, most are the non-threatening kind in and around the compound. While other types have been seen in the fields, nearby you have only seen thin brown and yellow ones, usually two or three feet long. The perfect size for eating a mouse. One even probed through your thatch one day but only found you eating lunch. Confused or bored it went back from wherever it came. Of the dozen or so that you have seen, they seem to generally only be interested in frogs. Perhaps now that the rains have been long over and 'frog season' is closing, their appitites will adjust.
+On this night the mouse is doing his darndest to keep you up. Your hand is sore from beating the stick against cement, your knuckles are red and irritated from repeatedly tucking and retucking the mosquito net. Around 4am you hear a leap to the floor. Note: his first mistake. The plastic floor covering on cement makes a sound one would expect from, say, a stampeding racoon or perhaps a very excited and rather confused baby sealion that found its way into your room and is desperately looking for a glass of water or a sardine. This is not the most amusing sound.
+When down from the roof, under my bed is an obvious hudung place: away from my flashlight, it is close but then out of your easy reach. Not much down there, but some cardboard and paper are always fun to play with. Behind the dresser is always a good base, with a few crawls and leaps one can scale to the top and be out over the thatch in no time. You have been keeping your trunks pushed up against the wall and the side of the dresser to discourage further hiding places and avenues of escape. This night though, when you got your sweater out, you left the trunks about an inch from the wall. You concider pushing them back on one of your trips in the night to the bathroom or to play tag with the mouse, but part of a plan forms in your head instead.
+The water in the cup of poison had evaporated, actually it had nearly evaporated twice. You figure the potent chemical part probably should still be in there so you refilled it again with water, twice. You place it in various high traffic areas, on the corner of the dresser and above the doors. You have seen no sign that it has ever done anything, hopefully it did not aerate and imbed in your lungs.
+At 5am, the judgement hour. The mouse is playing with the edge of the tin can with the candy wrappers. You slowly sit up, not sure between him and the malaria meds if you had closed your eyes for more than ten seconds that night. You flip on the flashlight and in the time it takes for your eyes to adjust, he scurries a little and is out of sight. You sit and wait, the wind-up flashlight getting dimmer by the second, your eye lids heavy and you are fed up. You stare out, still and quiet. Then, the mouse makes his second mistake. His nose pops out from behind the trunk, then his whole head as he peaks at you, then back to his nose again. Your cue.
+You had texted your friend, another volunteer in Mbour, about taking care of such things in the week before your dad bought the poison. She listed many avaliable options: poisons, glues, traps for both live capture or the traditional kind, all avaliable in various styles, colors and (for the posisons) various killing intensities. As you prefer not to deal with bodies, live or dead... or stuck, you thought poison would be best. While you do swing the stick with intention of bodily harm in the dark of night, in the light of day you like to think of yourself as not one who would smash the life out of something in cold blood. After innumerable sleepless nights, you think you are allowed a little licence.
+With all the stealth that you can muster at 5am, you pull up the net and step out onto the floor in one motion. In one stride you are out across the room and in a crouch before the trunks. You left the flashlight on lying on the bed. Light through the net gives you an odd large shadow against the wall. All that is left is mistake number three.
+Rodents you have had in my hut come in a variety of fun flavors. The legendary Scampers came into your room at least once, through the back door you had left open because of the heat that suffocated even at night. He is likely too big to come in otherwise. Scampers, in fact, has his own exciting and dramatic story you meant to have posted here months ago. To give an idea of his size, when you first caught a glipse of him, your mind jumped to opposomn or maybe a fat housecat. You have also had a bats in your hut on a few occasions, the small, bug catching kind, probably mid-size when it comes to the bat population on the whole. Most of the time though, your hut is occupied with mice of the tiny kind, fieldmice, like brown furry ping-pong balls. How it is possible for things so small to make so much noise, you will never understand.
+At this point, all the mouse has to do is move. It can either dart to the trash, not a great move, but it could hide temporarily behind the other empty cans there or the bricks holding up my water filter; Or, its safest bet, it can run the few feet across the back of the trunk and behind the dresser. You hope it is too smug to do either and place your hands low on either side of the front of the clothes trunk. And shove, hard. Remember to breath.
+Stand up, verify that it is flush with the wall on both sides with a few prods and a kick. Lay back down in bed, fairly sure you have accomplished nothing.
+Did I mention the mephloquine? For nearly nine months now you have been on a once a week malaria prophylaxis. The most noteworthy complaint is that it causes some insomnia, just what you need, and also vivid dreams, that while often facinating, lead to rather unrestful sleep. It is often worse on the night after taking the pill, which, as it happens, is tonight, and now thirteen or fourteen hours later you know further sleep is out of the question. While you think you are spared any other symptoms, for the record, they include mild hallucinations, anxiety and feeling generally like you are flipping out.
+When you lie down you dont even bother with the mosquito net, you know you are getting back up, you just want a little air. Seconds go by and you begin to hear irregular scratches against the floor and side of the tin box. It is possible, you think, if this mouse is small enough, it could be squeezing into the centemeter of space under the trunk. You stand again, slowly winding your flashlight, crossing the room. You click it on, quickly drag one corner of the trunk a few inches from the wall. Mouse. Slam it back again against the wall. You stand for a moment, then examine the trunk, both back corners are indeed nearly flush with the wall. You straighten up again awkwardly in the middle of the room. You concider attempting to capture it somehow, in a can or under a bucket to deal with it in the morning, but you realize it is probably fairly stuck where it is. Together the trunks surely weigh mroe than 30kg. Then you notice that he frantic scratching has stopped. For a moment your feet forget which way they should go, the bed is so close but now you are curious. You slide the trunk forward again a few inches. The mouse is slightly longer than your palm, not including the tail, larger than the usual mice. It is flat up against the wall, sideways, legs stretched out. Gravity slowly peals its back off the wall. You think, something better saved for the morning.
+The room is unusually quiet as you lie down again. Even the crickets seem to be taking a refrain. Quiet, but then, of course, you still cant sleep. You try reading but come to realize that the paragraph you are reading over and over is the same paragraph you read over and over last night. The wind is stirring up a surprising number of large dead leaves outside and the horse has an itch or else is repeatedly dozing off and sliping against the stick fence outside your back door.
+Morning does come and you do feel as rested as you ever are here. You show off the dead mouse to your younger brother who says yes, it is very nice, now kindly throw it away. You should have taken a picture, but thinking clearly is not one of your finest morning qualities.
+The next night is beautifully silent, as is the night after that. The third night, some other mice in the neighborhood noticed the vacancy and couldnt stand that such good real estate go to waste. Perhaps you can refine and build off this method... or just get yourself a real mousetrap from Mbour. You hope your friends can forgive you for haveing gone completely crazy...
-be sure to take notes, this will be on the final
-appologies to animal lovers, Ndiouma is usually not this crazy, and this is the longest post ever
-also, sorry, I really am ok, I just wrote this all out in the middle of the night one night and needed to make a post out of it
-also, i really am only half as crazy as I sound
+Step one- live in a hut with one or more mice. You dont need to go out and find them, they will find you.
+Next, allow yourself to be slowly and helplessly deprived of sleep for several months...
+Despite the small size of the intruders, they will delight in the great amounts of noise they can make frolicking about your room, mere feet from your annoyed head. They will cleverly gather up debris from outside and all your untidy bits you leave carelessly about inside: bottle caps, loose change, bits of metal, glass or shell, scraps of paper, clothespins, keys, thumbtacks and even nail clippers. Once collected, they will wait until you are at the very threshold of sleep, where sounds become nearly surreal and lost in your own head, when even the crickets (who have also moved in,) have almost been turned into the white-noise of night. When you are discovered in this state, they will chew on and bang these items together in one of the corners of the thatch where they nest. There favorite used to be right over your head, but graciously they have moved much of their oporation to the corner at your feet. Still, this does not amuse you.
+A few, seemingly inconsequential details: As it happens, you filled up the little plastic trash bag outside and have not had time to find another to stuff your sticky jolly rancher wrappers into and instead you choose to stuff them in a tin can. It is a chilly evening and likely to be a cold night so you get your sweater out of your clothes trunk. It is the bottom one of your two trunks, the clothes one is a lighter, tin box with thin wooden slats on the bottom. Your food trunk is heavier, sitting on top of the other one, made of thick cast metal with a good seal as to keep out bugs. After two recent care-packages and a trip to the grocery, it is briming with deliciousness.
+The mouse chews a chunk out of the eye-dropper you use to bleach your drinking water. Luckily you happen to have a spare and the bottle is relocated inside your dresser. The dresser has a single-piece plywood back and should rest flush with the walls in the corner it is in. Heat, humidity, age or maybe just poor craftmanship have made the back warped such that there is a permenent space between it and the wall. A perfect hideout for all sorts of hut critters. Push on the top front of the dresser and it will rock back and forth again, annoying, but not squashing, what hides behind. The little can of candy trash is put on the floor next to the trunks.
+You are generally a lover of all things nature. In fact, you cannot think of a time when you directly caused the death of anything above the arthropod kingdom. Maybe a few fish on various summer trips with grandpa camping. Keep you awake countless times for countless nights, leave poop on everything left in the open, chew your stuff, hide your stuff and screw with your ability to purify water, then soon someone will indeed find themselves in a world of pain.
+Nearly a month ago, your host dad bought you some poison for the mouse problem. You had entertained guests for nearly a week and the mice had not entertained them in the slightest. You were all kept awake by frequent and noisy late-night shenanigans. The poison came in the form of a few small white capsuels. Your dad put them in a little cup of water, broke each one open, stirred it and put it on the floor in the corner by the dresser. 'Soon it will die,' he said confidently. That was nearly a month ago. While it may have killed some deserving roaches the size of band-aids, there has been no evidence that it made any impact on the local rodentia.
+You wake up numerous times a night, every night, to the mouse doing his best impression of a marching band around the top of the walls of your hut below the thatch. Shine your flashlight, make noise, slap the walls in the hopes of scaring it away so you can get a little more sleep without having to get up and untuck your mosquito net. The mouse seems to know your threats are empty when made from under the net and you are lucky if it even gives the mouse pause. Inevitably, you wind up draging yourself up and out of the net, reaching for the blunted stick you keep over the door for mouse pumeling, stomping angerly to the area of noise and beating, scrapeing and stabing at the gap over the wall. The mouse scampers away, presumably unharmed, its nest disturbed, You find your keys and go back to bed. The room is quiet untill the mouse calls your blugg, finds a plastic bottle cap and goes back to his fun. Rince and repeat.
+Mice have other enemies here besides you. The former volunteer had a few cats. At the mention or sight of the cats, your family will lament 'he should have taken them to America.' Your family, in fact, seems to generally despise them. They do have some advocates. When she was cleaning up leftovers from a lunch bowl, you asked your aunt what she would do with the remaining fish bones and scraps of vegetables (who eats eggplant anyway?). She said she was throwing them to the cats and they sat nearby, eagerly awaiting their turn. Other than leftovers, it is unclear what they eat on a daily basis. They are all quite thin yet have defined taught muscles and seem constantly on the prowl. You once saw one pounce on something near your hut one day. Trying to stay casual, you snuck a look at what the cat was playing with between its paws, letting go briefly and pouncing again. You hoped so much it was a mouse, your mouse, give the other mice something to think about. It was a lizard. A stupid, bug eating, sleeps all night quietly lizard. Stupid cat. There are also snakes out and about. From your amateur estimation, most are the non-threatening kind in and around the compound. While other types have been seen in the fields, nearby you have only seen thin brown and yellow ones, usually two or three feet long. The perfect size for eating a mouse. One even probed through your thatch one day but only found you eating lunch. Confused or bored it went back from wherever it came. Of the dozen or so that you have seen, they seem to generally only be interested in frogs. Perhaps now that the rains have been long over and 'frog season' is closing, their appitites will adjust.
+On this night the mouse is doing his darndest to keep you up. Your hand is sore from beating the stick against cement, your knuckles are red and irritated from repeatedly tucking and retucking the mosquito net. Around 4am you hear a leap to the floor. Note: his first mistake. The plastic floor covering on cement makes a sound one would expect from, say, a stampeding racoon or perhaps a very excited and rather confused baby sealion that found its way into your room and is desperately looking for a glass of water or a sardine. This is not the most amusing sound.
+When down from the roof, under my bed is an obvious hudung place: away from my flashlight, it is close but then out of your easy reach. Not much down there, but some cardboard and paper are always fun to play with. Behind the dresser is always a good base, with a few crawls and leaps one can scale to the top and be out over the thatch in no time. You have been keeping your trunks pushed up against the wall and the side of the dresser to discourage further hiding places and avenues of escape. This night though, when you got your sweater out, you left the trunks about an inch from the wall. You concider pushing them back on one of your trips in the night to the bathroom or to play tag with the mouse, but part of a plan forms in your head instead.
+The water in the cup of poison had evaporated, actually it had nearly evaporated twice. You figure the potent chemical part probably should still be in there so you refilled it again with water, twice. You place it in various high traffic areas, on the corner of the dresser and above the doors. You have seen no sign that it has ever done anything, hopefully it did not aerate and imbed in your lungs.
+At 5am, the judgement hour. The mouse is playing with the edge of the tin can with the candy wrappers. You slowly sit up, not sure between him and the malaria meds if you had closed your eyes for more than ten seconds that night. You flip on the flashlight and in the time it takes for your eyes to adjust, he scurries a little and is out of sight. You sit and wait, the wind-up flashlight getting dimmer by the second, your eye lids heavy and you are fed up. You stare out, still and quiet. Then, the mouse makes his second mistake. His nose pops out from behind the trunk, then his whole head as he peaks at you, then back to his nose again. Your cue.
+You had texted your friend, another volunteer in Mbour, about taking care of such things in the week before your dad bought the poison. She listed many avaliable options: poisons, glues, traps for both live capture or the traditional kind, all avaliable in various styles, colors and (for the posisons) various killing intensities. As you prefer not to deal with bodies, live or dead... or stuck, you thought poison would be best. While you do swing the stick with intention of bodily harm in the dark of night, in the light of day you like to think of yourself as not one who would smash the life out of something in cold blood. After innumerable sleepless nights, you think you are allowed a little licence.
+With all the stealth that you can muster at 5am, you pull up the net and step out onto the floor in one motion. In one stride you are out across the room and in a crouch before the trunks. You left the flashlight on lying on the bed. Light through the net gives you an odd large shadow against the wall. All that is left is mistake number three.
+Rodents you have had in my hut come in a variety of fun flavors. The legendary Scampers came into your room at least once, through the back door you had left open because of the heat that suffocated even at night. He is likely too big to come in otherwise. Scampers, in fact, has his own exciting and dramatic story you meant to have posted here months ago. To give an idea of his size, when you first caught a glipse of him, your mind jumped to opposomn or maybe a fat housecat. You have also had a bats in your hut on a few occasions, the small, bug catching kind, probably mid-size when it comes to the bat population on the whole. Most of the time though, your hut is occupied with mice of the tiny kind, fieldmice, like brown furry ping-pong balls. How it is possible for things so small to make so much noise, you will never understand.
+At this point, all the mouse has to do is move. It can either dart to the trash, not a great move, but it could hide temporarily behind the other empty cans there or the bricks holding up my water filter; Or, its safest bet, it can run the few feet across the back of the trunk and behind the dresser. You hope it is too smug to do either and place your hands low on either side of the front of the clothes trunk. And shove, hard. Remember to breath.
+Stand up, verify that it is flush with the wall on both sides with a few prods and a kick. Lay back down in bed, fairly sure you have accomplished nothing.
+Did I mention the mephloquine? For nearly nine months now you have been on a once a week malaria prophylaxis. The most noteworthy complaint is that it causes some insomnia, just what you need, and also vivid dreams, that while often facinating, lead to rather unrestful sleep. It is often worse on the night after taking the pill, which, as it happens, is tonight, and now thirteen or fourteen hours later you know further sleep is out of the question. While you think you are spared any other symptoms, for the record, they include mild hallucinations, anxiety and feeling generally like you are flipping out.
+When you lie down you dont even bother with the mosquito net, you know you are getting back up, you just want a little air. Seconds go by and you begin to hear irregular scratches against the floor and side of the tin box. It is possible, you think, if this mouse is small enough, it could be squeezing into the centemeter of space under the trunk. You stand again, slowly winding your flashlight, crossing the room. You click it on, quickly drag one corner of the trunk a few inches from the wall. Mouse. Slam it back again against the wall. You stand for a moment, then examine the trunk, both back corners are indeed nearly flush with the wall. You straighten up again awkwardly in the middle of the room. You concider attempting to capture it somehow, in a can or under a bucket to deal with it in the morning, but you realize it is probably fairly stuck where it is. Together the trunks surely weigh mroe than 30kg. Then you notice that he frantic scratching has stopped. For a moment your feet forget which way they should go, the bed is so close but now you are curious. You slide the trunk forward again a few inches. The mouse is slightly longer than your palm, not including the tail, larger than the usual mice. It is flat up against the wall, sideways, legs stretched out. Gravity slowly peals its back off the wall. You think, something better saved for the morning.
+The room is unusually quiet as you lie down again. Even the crickets seem to be taking a refrain. Quiet, but then, of course, you still cant sleep. You try reading but come to realize that the paragraph you are reading over and over is the same paragraph you read over and over last night. The wind is stirring up a surprising number of large dead leaves outside and the horse has an itch or else is repeatedly dozing off and sliping against the stick fence outside your back door.
+Morning does come and you do feel as rested as you ever are here. You show off the dead mouse to your younger brother who says yes, it is very nice, now kindly throw it away. You should have taken a picture, but thinking clearly is not one of your finest morning qualities.
+The next night is beautifully silent, as is the night after that. The third night, some other mice in the neighborhood noticed the vacancy and couldnt stand that such good real estate go to waste. Perhaps you can refine and build off this method... or just get yourself a real mousetrap from Mbour. You hope your friends can forgive you for haveing gone completely crazy...
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