Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Friday, 26 December 2003

# 2:20 AM

hunting mice

We've got a mouse in our kitchen. Has been there for a good two months, has ignored the traps I set out, continues to raid various stores of people food. Which then has to be thrown away. Feh.

A bit of strategic rethinking suggests that maybe I should move the traps to a location where the mouse has found food before. Maybe I should bait them with the raisins that used to be there, I know it liked, and I have to throw away now, rather than the peanut butter schmear it has evinced no interest in. Certainly we don't need a trap in the living room, where the mouse has never gone to my knowledge (no food out there!). And that reminds me that the traps came with instructions saying set these out in pairs facing 180° away from each other, which I did not do. (They're live traps, little plastic tubes with one open end, which has a gate that's supposed to fall down when the mouse enters. But it works by gravity, so if the mouse bumps into the wrong end it's liable to close on nothing.)

Let's see how well that works.

Tuesday, 16 December 2003

# 2:25 PM

reflections after having untwisted twenty-five feet of phone cord

I want a nanotechnological phone cord that automatically stretches to whatever length is required, shrinks back down when it doesn't need to be that long anymore, and never ever twists.

Or maybe I just want a cordless phone.