Green Glasses in the District: To Catch a Predator...er- Mouse.

At the beginning of the summer, I picked up some beautiful hand-spun yarn at Crafty Bastards Silver Spring. It was a bamboo blend, with pinks, browns, creams, and some tints of eggplant and sage. The texture was equally as eclectic, with areas of fuzz, satin, and thread. The yarn was (grossly) appropriately named gristle.

I decided to make a scarf in my stitch - simple and straightforward to show off the yarn. I forgot how quickly scarves in bulkier yarns knit up!

The bands of Gustav last weekend on Pine Island served as my reintroduction to tropical weather. Well I guess I brought it back up with me, as we're now getting the beginning bands of Tropical Storm Hanna. Having experienced dozens of tropical storms and hurricanes in far more vulnerable places, I'm sitting quite cozy and looking forward to seeing what Hanna has to offer. But then this morning I realized that our apartment is horribly unprepared in case we actually did lose power or water, (no bottled water or beverages of any sort, no food, one flashlight with no extra batteries...I should be embarrassed.) So I made a feeble attempt at preparing and at least filled up some containers with water and made some ice.

The real point of this post is to proudly report that I caught our elusive mouse. He's been trapped in the bathroom for the last few days, but had some hiding spot that still remains a mystery. So I rigged up a trap. I took a piece of balsa wood and balanced it as a ramp leading to the top of a trash can. On the end of it, I put a little piece of cardstock (junk mail). It was balance precariously, so that it would fall if any weight was on it. Then I put a trail of cheese up the wood, on the paper, and a pile in the trash can:

So the mouse tracks the cheese and walks up the ramp:

He makes his way towards the cardstock, munching away:

But then when he walks onto the paper, it falls under his weight and he's trapped in the trash can. Mice can jump pretty high, so you have to use a relatively tall trashcan. But from his cameo Wednesday night, I knew he was a little baby mouse, so this IKEA trashcan was tall enough.

Unfortunately I was already gone to work by the time Vara was awake and found him in the trashcan in her bathroom, so Emily took him outside. Hopefully she got a picture of our captive, because this is all I got (the aftermath):