I'm GOIN' TO BOSTON to hang out with my old suitemates K, K and J. Seeeee you suckas on the flip-side.

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No foreign war or can feign refine
The blank dispassion I had as mine
As to the local store I took myself
To purchase murder from off the shelf

My face a dull and hardened mask
I set upon my given task
It was not a question of morality
Just another lesson in mortality

Hands so steady, mind so clear
Lacking disgust, lacking fear
Of petty conscience, there was no sign
Where soft lips would be, a thin straight line

If could but lure my victim here
By promising there was naught to fear
There would be no passion in this crime
Just a SNAP and then a breaking spine

Sickened by only the thought 'he runs free'
Knowing time will bring my victim to me
Such wretched item, loatheful louse
Contained within escap-ed MOUSE!


....

So still she lies with waiting ear
For footsteps of her foe to hear
With naught but Death mirror'd in her eyes
For Chance to offer sweet reprise

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THE MOUSE IS IN MY ROOM... CHEWING ON MY FLOOR IN THE NIGHT.......

I've been keeping my door religiously shut since I found out about the mouse... and we haven't seen evidence of the mouse since I started doing that.... turns out I've been shutting the mouse IN.... a bit on a Phenomenon moment there... I'll have to update this later and tell you what happened last night but I'm late and I didn't sleep a wink!

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This may be very meaningful to some of you.

I know it is for me.

It represents my first steps into the vast world of C++. Which I must learn in the next 15 days, or die trying.

And you have NO IDEA how long it took me to get only this far. gd compilers!!

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My friend wrote me an email... I enjoyed it so much I had to reproduce it in whole here. I swear, some of these letters I get from Auggie make me think of the letters I read in Romantic Poetry between all of the poets and their brothers and friends. I imagine people calling my house in future years requesting her letters to bind into a book about her, because people won't be content with just her published work.

---

As the French have realized that old chateaux, manor houses, and barns
are cold and draughty, with ceilings so high and doors so low that
their residents can never get them clean and suffer from escalating
brain damage, and walls that only crumble away into more dirt at the
slightest touch of a dust rag, the British have arrived in droves to
buy them up, generally turning them into BnBs and gites. This also
allows other British people to vacation in France without having to
interact with the French.

The resulting "holiday" networks warrant further study and a series of
obscurely weighted charts. Throughout the year, foolish British 11th
century building owners who would never normally associate, regularly
socialize, rejoicing in their ability to brew a proper cup of tea and
trim a climbing rose. Holiday goers frequent the same chateau summer
after summer, for two of three weeks at a go, and their children
remain loyal as they mature. As that dirty old man in The Quiet
American said, I am British and therefore I have habits.

Which brings me to the main subject of this report, which is my theory
that the British suffer from an overabundance of meals, such that
they've forgotten which ones are supposed to be the important ones and
intead select which ones to hang their days on according to personal
preference.

I meant to go on from here with a long report on tea time, breakfast,
coffee time, elevenses, lunch which may be called dinner and begun at
four in the afternoon, tea time, and dinner which may be called
supper, and wind down by bemoaning the result that the people I'm
staying with generally eat nothing after 2:30 lunch, filling the
evening instead with an extended cocktail hour (it generally being
acceptable to begin drinking once David has begun cooking lunch), but
I've been handed an overfull glass of red and shan't be writing much
longer.

So here's the quick report: I'm wwoofing at a chateau in Normandy
with a British couple, but will within a week be moving down to the
Pyrenees, where I shan't have internet or phone access, to chase goats
in the mountains. In May I'll be making sheep's milk cheese in a
French commune, but should be communicado once more.

For now, these people wish their names were Fletch and Muffy. I was
greatly relieved when it occurred to me my first week here that they
love to hate each other, and the French, and probably me. Perhaps, as
with our sheep, it is simply in their nature not to outwardly manifest
fondness for those humans to whom they are closest.

Your adoring,
Auggie

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Yesterday Chris and I tried to catch the flying mouse. At least, we tried to see if there was really a mouse by moving the refrigerator (where he believed it to be hiding) very quickly and see if anything ran out. I already knew there was a mouse, so I was just along for the ride.

We blocked off the entrance to the kitchen and the bathroom and I put a large paper sack on the floor, just in case, to see if we might catch it.

Chris: Do you think you are capable of killing the mouse?
Me: Yes.
Chris: You're such a Republican!

Chris: Are you going to jump up on the table like a little blond girl?
Me: Well, maybe. It better not try and run across my shoes, that's all I'm saying.

Chris: Don't you think mice are cute?
Me: No.

Chris: How on earth could the mouse jump up all those stairs?
Me: Have you ever seen how high a gerbil can jump?
Chris: Oh. Yeah.

Chris: If we catch it, do you think we should throw it out the window?
Me: No, of course not. If we go to the trouble of catching it alive, I'm going to take it down the stairs and put it outside.
Chris, nervously: You don't think we should just throw it out the window? I think it would be fine.
Me: It would break its little legs!
Chris: I think it would be fine.
Me: Let's just move the refrigerator.

So we moved it, and what should come out?!?! Nothing, of course. There were a million other nicer places for the mouse to hide. But we did find enough mouse droppings to convince Chris that it existed and that it was disgusting. Then I worked the broom and he worked the dustpan til the kitchen floor was clean again while we discussed the relative merits of cheetahs and tigers (since he'd lent me both Two Brothers and Duma one after the other).

Chris: You know that faggot? What was that faggot?
Me, aside: Already heard this one.
Chris: You know, the faggots, with the tigers?
Me: Sigfried and Roy
Chris: YEAH! Sigfried and Roy. And he got attacked by the tiger and it ripped off his face. That's the worst thing that can happen to a faggot, you know, when somebody rips off his face.
Me: ...
You may wonder that I did not speak up here against both his stereotyping and his diction. However, I know him well enough to know that had I said something about it, he would have launched into another story, much longer than the current one, about how he loves gays so much that one time he saved these two total fags from the certain death they were going to experience because they were being pushed around by big, thug-like mob irish guys from South Boston and he intervened, and so the thugs beat him and his friend up instead, while the fags ran away in a fag-like manner. That's the other reason that his hand towel has blood on it, you see, because they bashed his teeth against the concrete and he hasn't had the proper surgery to make them better again. So I changed the subject by pouring myself a bowl of Rice Krispies.

As I was washing the strawberries for the cereal, Chris came over and told me that I really couldn't wash them like that. I gave them to him and he put them in a bowl and then filled the bowl up with water and swished the strawberries around and poured out the water. "People really have no idea what terrible pesticides are on these strawberries," he said. "You could really get cancer. I'm really glad you're listening to me about this." He said that like a man whose girlfriend never took his advice on anything, which is exactly the case. He started filling up the bowl again, interjecting that some people only do it once but he always does it twice so that he's sure that he's got all the pesticides. "Really," he continued, "People have no idea. And I'm not some kind of wacko, either..." he paused, and then started laughing. "Well, I guess that's debatable" I started laughing too, and he said maybe that was something that could be decided at some other time, and we were laughing and straining the strawberries in our kitchen with the refrigerator in the middle of the room so the mouse couldn't climb up the back of it to get to the counter, and a row of rubbermaid containers and milk jugs and paper sacks walling us in, and it was a moment, you know.

One of those moments that make roommates closer.

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