Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

I finally captured the Mouse Houdini. For awhile now, I would set the live trap that I have with a peanut butter cracker. I'd check it in the morning, and the cracker would be completely gone, with no mouse in sight.

One morning, the mouse hadn't been quite so sneaky: the cracker was sitting outside the trap, with nibbles out of it. I suppose I scared it away before it finished its prize.

But today when I checked the trap, the Mouse Houdini was inside, looking chagrined. I attribute this to setting the cracker further back in the trap so he had to walk on the part that would spring the door.

He had eaten the entire cracker and was hopping around, trying to figure out how to foil the trap once more. I released him this morning in the same place I've released the other mice I've trapped.

While he may not realize it, he's lucky. My upstairs neighbor told me he's put out rat poison. Since then, I've found one dried up dead mouse in my apartment, apparently a poisoning victim. By capturing the Mouse Houdini, I've given him a much better chance of survival than if he stayed in the mouse.

According to my upstairs neighbor, this has been a problem every winter. And yet, he's never apparently said anything to the landlord about it. I haven't either, but that was just because I feared he'd come in and place rat poison.

Somebody needs to take a look at the foundation and figure out how the mice are entering, then plug the holes. The best thing to do, it would seem, is prevention.

But I don't know how much longer I'll even be living here. The Gryphon and I are planning to move in together in the spring, and we'll need a larger place. I'm hoping we can find something not far from where I'm currently living. I like this neighborhood.

Everyone around me seemed to have the music, but instead of sharing, I walked down front to these stacks of papers the choir director had set out, figuring one of those stacks must be the music.

I looked in all the stacks, and the music wasn't in them. The director told me I'd have to get it at some bookstore downtown. Apparently, she didn't believe in photocopying music.

So I returned to my seat and one of my fellow chorus members gave me her music to borrow. But at that point, everybody stopped singing.

Then I went to another class in some sort of a brick building which was kind of familiar from previous dreams. It's my archetypal school and has been used to represent both high school and college.

I was in a class my belly dancing instructor was teaching. It was a fun class, though I don't remember what it was about. Since it was a two-hour class, there was a break halfway through.

My instructor came up to me and said she was glad to see me. In the dream, she was not only my belly dancing instructor but had also once been my counselor. So I told her what's been going on in my life right now.

She said she also needed someone to talk to and started telling me about her life. I interrupted her, because I'd forgotten to mention that I was in now in a chorus. She grew really silent. Though she still had a smile on her face, I could tell she was hurt I'd cut her off. Then the bell rang and she had to go back to class.

But I didn't go back to her class. Instead, I sat in on a class next door. The teacher was a substitute, and she was talking about the regular professor, making fun of him for eating French fries and being messy. The class was laughing.

At this point, I realized I was in grad school and not college. I was also a teaching assistant, and told somebody about how the first time I'd taught a class in that building, I'd been late because I got lost. (Easy to do in this building: the floors are always changing.)

When the class was over, somebody mentioned that we should go up front and put our weights on a chart. It was like those cardboard charts that teachers used to make in elementary school to publicly chart everyone's progress.

Apparently, some blonde girl in the class had convinced everyone that if they wanted to lose weight, they had to eat some rare form of marigold. They were keeping track of the weight they'd lost.

I looked at the numbers, and most of them seemed to be losing weight. Instead of one cardboard sheet, there were several large pages fastened at the top. The back two pages had been written by the professor, who said it was a bad idea to take the supplement. He listed all the reasons why, and then on the last page, he drew a color picture of the flower in detail.

The blonde girl seemed oblivious to what he'd written, and she pointed to the picture and said this was the flower you were supposed to eat.

That was pretty much when a voice in my head said it was 8 a.m. and I had to get up, or something to that effect. So I woke up and started my day.

I don't know what to make of the dream, except for obvious lessons like listen when people are talking to you, don't take strange diet supplements, and come prepared to class.

Copyright 2004 by Alyce Wilson

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