TOM & JERRY

Last week I was in the kitchen making dinner. I left the pantry open for a 'hot second' and Chai (our cat) got inside. He managed to get (nearly) his whole 13 pound self onto the bottom shelf, surrounded by boxes of granola bars and Italian icees. I gave him a little kick on the butt to get him to move, but it was to no avail. He was staying in the pantry. Not sure how to get him to move, I called upstairs to David and asked him to come downstairs to give me a hand. David came downstairs a couple of minutes later and, obviously, the cat had left the pantry on his own.

David says to me, "I know why Chai was in the pantry. He's in the living room playing with a mouse that he probably chased out of the pantry." I asked David if Chai had killed the mouse and he told me, "No. He's simply playing with it." And that's exactly what was going on... Chai was juggling the mouse as well as hitting it back and forth on the wood floors like a hockey puck on ice. He'd even let the mouse 'get away' only to scare him out of hiding so he could bat him around again. The only thing the stupid cat wasn't doing was killing the mouse (read: getting rid of my problem). This whole Tom and Jerry game between Chai and the mouse went on for about ten minutes before David got sick of it and also just wanted the mouse to be out of our house. David's solution was to play the game with Chai. So he got out an old shoe and some trash bags and started scaring and hitting the mouse around, in hopes that Chai would kill the little sucker. About five minutes after David started playing, Chai started to think he was in trouble and David was yelling at him for playing with the mouse. So the stupid cat ran into the sunroom and sulked in the corner.

David and I were on our own to kill the mouse.

We chased the mouse out of the living room and into the dining room, where we successfully sucked the mouse up with our dustbuster. David, being the nice guy that he is, released the traumatized mouse in our backyard. I suggested that we throw the mouse into our trash can and let the DC government deal with him, but since David was responsible for actually catching the mouse he got to make the final decision. And the mouse was released alive.

This is our second mouse in three months, which doesn't sit well with me (especially since our cat appears to be afraid to use his claws). Here's hoping it was our second and last...

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Spring break: I'm enjoying my time and have been sleeping a lot. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to sleep in this morning because the city is repaving our street. The jack-hammering began at 8am this morning.

Afternoon plans: I'm going to walk over to the new DC USA mall in Columbia Heights; the grand opening of Marshall's is today!

Thoughts and prayers: are with David's co-worker, Steve, who was jumped/beat up at the Fort Totten metro station at 5:30pm on Tuesday. Steve appears to have a broken jaw and possibly a broken eye socket. He's probably going to have surgery today or tomorrow and will likely have his jaw wired shut. He's in good spirits all things considered, but it is awful.